Woman Who Split the Atom

Moss Marissa Moss

Description

Bestselling author-illustrator Marissa Moss tells the gripping story of Lise Meitner, the physicist who discovered nuclear fissionAs a female Jewish physicist in Berlin during the early 20th century, Lise Meitner had to fight for an education, a job, and equal treatment in her field, like having her name listed on her own research papers. Meitner made groundbreaking strides in the study of radiation, but when Hitler came to power in Germany, she suddenly had to face not only sexism, but also life-threatening anti-Semitism as well. Nevertheless, she persevered and one day made a discovery that rocked the world: the splitting of the atom. While her male lab partner was awarded a Nobel Prize for the achievement, the committee refused to give her any credit. Suddenly, the race to build the atomic bomb was on-although Meitner was horrified to be associated with such a weapon. "A physicist who never lost her humanity," Meitner wanted only to figure out how the world works, and advocated for pacifism while others called for war. The book includes an afterword, author's note, timeline, select terms of physics, glossary of scientists mentioned, endnotes, select bibliography, index, and Marissa Moss's celebrated drawings throughout. The Woman Who Split the Atom is a fascinating look at Meitner's fierce passion, integrity, and her lifelong struggle to have her contributions to physics recognized.

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 05 avril 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781683358275
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

The illustrations in this book were made with pen, ink, and watercolor wash.
See this page for photography credits.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for and may be obtained from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-1-4197-5853-9
eISBN 978-1-68335-827-5
Text and illustrations 2022 Marissa Moss
Edited by Howard W. Reeves
Book design by Heather Kelly
Published in 2022 by Abrams Books for Young Readers, an imprint of ABRAMS.
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
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TO WARREN HECKROTTE,
with deep gratitude for his help in understanding nuclear physics. Warren was a nuclear physicist who worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and was involved in nuclear weapons talks with the Soviets under five different presidents, starting with John F. Kennedy, ending with Bill Clinton. Warren knew personally many of the physicists mentioned in this book and gave me access to his personal library of books and documents about the history of nuclear fission. Sadly, Warren died before the manuscript was finished, but we spent many hours together at his dining room table, hashing through different aspects of Meitner s story and the science and personalities behind it .
CONTENTS
ONE: DREAMS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
TWO: EDUCATION AT LAST!
THREE: A PROFESSOR WITH NO PROFESSION
FOUR: A PARTNERSHIP BETTER THAN MARRIAGE
FIVE: THE NEW SCIENCE OF RADIOACTIVITY
SIX: OUT OF THE DARK
SEVEN: WAR AND SCIENCE
EIGHT: BACK IN THE LAB
NINE: AFTER THE WAR
TEN: A PROFESSOR AT LAST
ELEVEN: JEWISH PHYSICS VS ARYAN PHYSICS
TWELVE: HITLER TAKES POWER
THIRTEEN: BOYCOTT THE JEWS!
FOURTEEN: A TALK WITH HITLER ABOUT SCIENCE
FIFTEEN: TO GO OR TO STAY
SIXTEEN: THE NAZIFICATION OF SCIENCE
SEVENTEEN: CAN IT GET WORSE?
EIGHTEEN: THE NEW RADIOACTIVE PHYSICS
NINETEEN: THE JEWESS MUST GO
TWENTY: PASSPORT PROBLEMS
TWENTY-ONE: HOW TO SMUGGLE A SCIENTIST
TWENTY-TWO: SUCCESS OR FAILURE?
TWENTY-THREE: A NARROW ESCAPE
TWENTY-FOUR: A BRILLIANT ENOUGH PHYSICIST?
TWENTY-FIVE: AN ATOMIC MYSTERY
TWENTY-SIX: THE ATOM SPLITS!
TWENTY-SEVEN: THE IMPOSSIBLE IS POSSIBLE!
TWENTY-EIGHT: THE POWER OF NUCLEAR FISSION
TWENTY-NINE: A LETTER FROM EINSTEIN
THIRTY: THE RACE FOR THE BOMB
THIRTY-ONE: A LAB OF ONE S OWN
THIRTY-TWO: ANOTHER PHYSICIST ESCAPES
THIRTY-THREE: THE GERMAN NUCLEAR PROGRAM
THIRTY-FOUR: WHAT TO DO WITH NAZI SCIENTISTS?
THIRTY-FIVE: THE MOTHER OF THE BOMB
THIRTY-SIX: THE AMERICANS DID WHAT?!
THIRTY-SEVEN: MEITNER IN AMERICA
THIRTY-EIGHT: THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR NUCLEAR FISSION GOES TO
THIRTY-NINE: AFTER THE WAR: WORKING FOR NUCLEAR PEACE
FORTY: A PRIZE OF HER OWN
AFTERWORD
AUTHOR S NOTE
TIMELINE OF MEITNER S LIFE AND ACHIEVEMENTS
GLOSSARY OF SELECT TERMS IN PHYSICS
PROFILES OF SCIENTISTS MENTIONED
NOTES
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
IMAGE CREDITS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX OF SEARCHABLE TERMS
ONE
DREAMS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
Lise Meitner had thought of herself as a completely ordinary little girl, a girl who happened to sleep with a math book under her pillow, as if the equations would slip into her head overnight. Instead of reading novels or poetry like her sisters, she read about the quadratic formula, about figuring out the volume of a cone, about plotting a parabola on a grid. Her brain was full of questions, and she had to know the answers.
Her parents encouraged her curiosity. They wanted all eight of their children to think about the world and follow their interests. For them, the late 1800s were exciting years to be in Vienna. Meitner s mother had come from Russia, her father from Czechoslovakia. Both were places where Jews couldn t live, work, or study easily. In Austria, Jews may have lived in ghettos, but new doors were open to them. Meitner s father was one of the first Jews to become a lawyer in this more accepting world.
More accepting for Jewish men, at least. Going to college, following a profession, that was for sons, not daughters.
Still, Meitner learned however she could. She studied the colors in a drop of oil. She noticed the reflections in puddles. She couldn t stop herself from asking questions about how the world worked. What made the film on the top of the puddle? How did light reflect off it? How could a drop of water be divided? What kept the drop together in the first place? She was excited that there were such things to find out about in our world, she wrote later when thinking about her childhood.
To get the answers, Meitner wanted to go to high school. This was something girls simply didn t do in most of Europe in the late nineteenth century. Why bother to teach girls anything when they only needed to know how to raise children and run a household? In Vienna, not only were girls considered incapable of learning, but their presence would be a distraction for the boys. The University of Vienna declared that the character of the university would be lost and the institution endangered by their [women s] presence.
Meitner didn t think she would distract anyone. Nobody would ever call her pretty. Not that she cared about that, since she didn t want a husband anyway. She just wanted to learn the way her brothers did.
Meitner s parents encouraged her. Her mother urged her to study on her own, saying, Listen to your father and me, but think for yourself. Her father used himself as an example for his daughter, saying that if he could become a lawyer, then she could learn whatever she wanted. And like her father, she was lucky. In 1897, when Meitner was nineteen, the law in Austria changed and women were allowed to go to universities. But first they had to pass the difficult high school exit exam-without having actually gone to high school.
Her older sister Gisela started preparing for the test first, but Meitner quickly joined her. They studied Greek, Latin, math, physics, botany, zoology, mineralogy, psychology, logic, literature, and history. They read constantly, from as soon as they opened their eyes in the morning until they closed them, exhausted, at night. Meitner s younger brothers and sisters teased her that she would fail because you ve just walked across the room without picking up a book. Meitner was obsessive. This was her chance, and she wasn t going to miss it.
Gisela passed the difficult exam first and started medical school. As Meitner finished her studies, her father discouraged his younger daughter from following the same path-having two daughters in the impossibly male field of medicine was too much. Medicine wasn t Meitner s passion anyway. Physics was. She wanted to figure out how the world worked, but she didn t think physics had any practical applications. Medicine seemed the more noble, useful thing to do.
So it was a relief when Meitner s father urged her to follow her real interest. He knew any profession would be difficult for a young woman. To face the many obstacles, you had to care deeply about your subject, be willing to fight constantly for your right to be in that field. The tough high school exit exam was only the first hurdle.
TWO
EDUCATION AT LAST!
Meitner called Boltzmann s lectures the most beautiful and stimulating that I have ever heard . . . He himself was so enthusiastic about everything he taught us that one left every lecture with the feeling that a completely new and wonderful world had been revealed. Boltzmann s big bushy beard shook as he spoke, his thundering voice commanding his students attention. And what he taught was fascinating. Boltzmann was an early believer in atoms, which many established physicists mocked. Could you see an atom? How could you believe in something that was invisible? The controversy Boltzmann described made clear to Meitner that science pretended to be objective but was often shaped by human bias. Meitner wanted to follow Boltzmann s path-she was hungry to discover what she didn t know, not look for confirmation of how she wanted things to be.
Boltzmann recognized Meitner s talent. Her mind was quick, her work thorough and careful. She had an uncanny ability to see both the forest and the trees. Boltzmann advised her to go to graduate school. As her nephew later observed, Boltzmann gave her the vision of physics as a battle for ultimate truth. Meitner wanted to fight that battle.
THREE
A PROFESSOR WITH NO PROFESSION
Working by herself, Meitner figured out a way to measure the scattering of alpha particles. Her results were important enough to publish in a scientific journal in 1907, when she was just twenty-eight. But even with that boost to her reputation, there was no future for a woman physicist in Vienna. Everyone told her the same thing: Go to Berlin. That was where all the important work in physics was happening. In Berlin, she d get to know some of the greatest physicists of the time.
She had already met a professor from Berlin, Max Planck, when he d come to lecture in Vienna. Like her, he was working on radioactivity. Planck wasn t an inspiring speaker, but his work was fascinating. He focused on quantum physics, a new field with exciting implications. That was enough for Meitner to decide to go to Berlin as everyone suggested. Her father, as always, supported her: I admire your courage. He offered a small allowance until she could find a paid position. She also earned money writing and translating articles for science magazines u