Waubonsee Community College

The path to nuclear fission, by Rosemarie Reed

eng

videorecording

For College; Adult audiences

The path to nuclear fission

electronic resource

747797417

by Rosemarie Reed

56

This absorbing film details the story of a brilliant Jewish woman, Lise Meitner, who made scientific history when she and her collaborator, Otto Hahn, discovered nuclear fission in 1938. Yet her forced emigration from Nazi Germany meant that Otto Hahn would never credit her contribution when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1944. Lise Meitner, a shy young physics student from Vienna, and the worldly Otto Hahn, a chemist, became close friends and colleagues in 1907. At the time, the nature of atoms and elements was still poorly understood. Their collaboration benefited from their separate disciplines. Meitner and Hahn s first period of joint research culminated in their discovery of the "missing" radioactive element, protactinium, in 1918. Meitner was a pioneer in the field that became known as nuclear physics. She published the first theoretical interpretation of the fission process, calculated the enormous energy released and coined the name "fission" which was instantly accepted by the physics community. Lise Meitner became prominent within a circle of colleagues that included Einstein, Max Planck, and Niels Bohr. Although their names became household words, few people know of her contributions

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