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On 15 November 1945 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that Hahn had been awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of nuclear fission.[34] Surely Hahn fully deserved the Nobel Prize for chemistry. There is really no doubt about it. But I believe that Otto Robert Frisch and I contributed something not insignificant to the clarification of the process of uranium fission - how it originates and that it produces so much energy and that was something very remote to Hahn. wrote Lise Meitner to her friend Eva von Bahr-Bergius in November 1945.[35] And Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Lise Meitner's former assistant, later added: He certainly did deserve this Nobel Prize. He would have deserved it even if he had not made this discovery. But everyone recognized that the splitting of the atomic nucleus merited a Nobel Prize.[35] Some historians who have documented their view of the discovery of nuclear fission believe Meitner should have been awarded the Nobel Prize with Hahn.[36][37][38] On a visit to the USA in 1946, she received the honour of "Woman of the Year" by the National Press Club and had dinner with President Harry Truman and others at the Women's National Press Club. She lectured at Princeton, Harvard and other US universities, and was awarded a number of honorary doctorates. Meitner refused to move back to Germany, and enjoyed retirement and research in Stockholm until her relocation to Cambridge, England in 1960. She received the Max Planck Medal of the German Physics Society in 1949, and in 1955 she was awarded the first Otto Hahn Prize of the German Chemical Society. In 1957 the German President Theodor Heuss awarded her the highest German order for scientists, the peace class of the Pour le mérite. For both honours she was proposed by Otto Hahn. Meitner was nominated to receive the Nobel Prize three times. An even rarer honour was given to her in 1997 when element 109 was named meitnerium in her honour.[7][39][40] Named after Meitner were the Hahn–Meitner-Institut in Berlin, craters on the Moon and on Venus, and a main-belt asteroid. Meitner was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1945, and had her status changed to that of a Swedish member in 1951. Four years later she became a foreign member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in London.[16] In 1966 Hahn, Fritz Strassmann and Meitner were jointly awarded the Enrico Fermi Award. Meitner received 21 scientific honours and awards for her work (including 5 honorary doctorates and membership of many academies). In 1947 she received the Award of the City of Vienna for science. She was the first female member of the scientific class of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. In 2008, the NBC defence school of the Austrian Armed Forces established the "Lise Meitner" award. In 1960, Meitner was awarded the Wilhelm Exner Medal and in 1967, the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art. Public facilities such as schools and streets were named after her in many cities in Austria and Germany. Later years After the war, Meitner, while acknowledging her own moral failing in staying in Germany from 1933 to 1938, was bitterly critical of Hahn and other German scientists who had collaborated with the Nazis and done nothing to protest against the crimes of Hitler's regime. Referring to the leading German scientist Werner Heisenberg, she said: "Heisenberg and many millions with him should be forced to see these camps and the martyred people." She wrote to Hahn: Meitner's grave in Bramley You all worked for Nazi Germany. And you tried to offer only a passive resistance. Certainly, to buy off your conscience you helped here and there a persecuted person, but millions of innocent human beings were allowed to be murdered without any kind of protest being uttered ... [it is said that] first you betrayed your friends, then your children in that you let them stake their lives on a criminal war – and finally that you betrayed Germany itself, because when the war was already quite hopeless, you did not once arm yourselves against the senseless destruction of Germany. —[41] Hahn wrote in his memoirs that he and Lise Meitner had been lifelong friends.[42] Meitner became a Swedish citizen in 1949. She retired in 1960 and moved to the UK where most of her relatives were, although she continued working part-time and giving lectures. A strenuous trip to the United States in 1964 led to Meitner having a heart attack, from which she spent several months recovering. Her physical and mental condition weakened by atherosclerosis, she was unable to travel to the US to receive the Enrico Fermi prize and relatives had to present it to her. After breaking her hip in a fall and suffering several small strokes in 1967, Meitner made a partial recovery, but eventually was weakened to the point where she moved into a Cambridge nursing home. She died on 27 October 1968 at the age of 89. Meitner was not informed of the deaths of Otto Hahn (d. July 1968) and his wife Edith, as her family believed it would be too much for someone so frail.[3] As was her wish, she was buried in the village of Bramley in Hampshire, at St. James parish church, close to her younger brother Walter, who had died in 1964. Her nephew Otto Frisch composed the inscription on her headstone. It reads "Lise Meitner: a physicist who never lost her humanity". A short residential street in the village is named "Meitner Close". |
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