By bombarding uranium with neutron particles, Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn encountered a nightmarish jumble of radioactive spices that could not be easily identified. For four long years, Hahn, the expert chemist, carefully separated and processed the radioactive materials; Meitner's job was to explain the nuclear processes going on. She was a shy, introverted girl who blossomed into an aggressive researcher. Physics was her life; I found no evidence that she was ever involved in a romantic relationship.
Throughout these years, Hitler was casting his long, dark shadow upon Europe. So, it was easy for so-called "good" Germans to rationalize their compromises and look the other way. Dismissed from teaching, her name suppressed, Meitner hung on without protest, nervously hoping that the unpleasantness would be temporary. But as restrictions on "non-Aryan" academics tightened, she at last slipped across the border. She was 59. Her mind as vigorous as ever, she continued to advise Hahn through letters from Sweden, which became her new home.
Hahn published the chemical evidence for fission without listing Meitner as a co-author, a move she understood given the tinderbox that was Nazi Germany. In The Making Of The Atomic Bomb, Rhodes wrote that Hahn had always hoped to add Meitner's name to this historic paper; some tells a different story. She builds a strong case that Hahn was distancing himself from his longtime collaborator even before Meitner escaped. More tragic was Hahn's conduct the important experiment after the war; he maintained the fiction (or convinced himself) that his chemical experiments verifying fission had never been inspired or guided by Meitner.
With her name missing from the key experimental paper on nuclear fission, Hahn alone received the 1944 prize for chemistry. It is surprising to discover that she remained loyal to Hahn throughout this turmoil. In fact, horrified by the bomb, fission's offspring, she had mixed feeling about being linked to its creation.
However, there is a happy ending. Though denied the Nobel, Meitner will be rewarded with far more durable fame. In 1994 an international commission agreed that element 109, artificially created by slamming bismuth with irons, will be named "meitnerium".
How did Meitner feel when only Hahn received the prize?
Indifferent at all
Sad and disappointed
Very confused and unhappy
Very surprised and shocked