Lise Meitner and the Dawn of the Nuclear Age

In this captivating biography, Patricia Rife interprets both the life and times of Lise Meitner (1878-1968), the female physicist at the heart of the discovery of nuclear fission. She was a colleague and friend of many of the giants of 20th century physics: M. Planck, her Berlin mentor, A. Einstein, M. von Laue, Madame M. Curie, J. Chadwick, W. Pauli, and N. Bohr. Meitner was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in physics at the University of Vienna, a pioneer in the research of radioactive processes and, together with her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, an interpreter of the process of nuclear fission in 1938. Yet at the end of World War II, her colleague of thirty years, radiochemist Otto Hahn alone was awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the "discovery" of nuclear fission -- a discovery based on years of research in which Meitner was directly involved before her secret escape from Nazi Germany.