Lise Meitner
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the decisive role of one of the great 20th Century physicists in solving the question of nuclear fission. It is said that Meitner (1878-1968) made this breakthrough over Christmas 1938 while she was sitting on a log in Sweden during a snowy walk with her nephew Otto Frisch (1904-79). Both were Jewish-Austrian refugees who had only recently escaped from Nazi Germany. Others had already broken uranium into the smaller atom barium, but could not explain what they found; was the larger atom bursting, or the smaller atom being chipped off or was something else happening? They turned to Meitner. She, with Frisch, deduced the nucleus really was splitting like a drop of water into a dumbbell shape, with the electrical charges at each end forcing the divide, something previously thought impossible, and they named this ‘fission’. This was a crucial breakthrough for which Meitner was eventually widely recognised if not at first.
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Guests
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Jess Wade No other episodes
A Royal Society University Research Fellow and Lecturer in Functional Materials at Imperial College, London - Professor Frank Close
16 episodes
Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics and Fellow Emeritus at Exeter College, University of Oxford - Professor Steven Bramwell
3 episodes
Director of the London Centre for Nanotechnology and Professor of Physics at University College London
Reading list
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Destroyer of Worlds: The Deep History of the Nuclear Age, 1895-1965
Frank Close (Allen Lane, 2025) -
Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics
Ruth Lewin Sime (University of California Press, 1996) Google Books → -
The Woman Who Split the Atom: The Life of Lise Meitner
Marissa Moss (Abrams Books, 2022) Google Books → -
Lise Meitner and the Dawn of the Nuclear Age
Patricia Rife (Birkhauser Verlag, 1999) Google Books →
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Programme ID: m002bt7s
Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002bt7s
Auto-category: 539.7 (Nuclear physics)