Stolen Science by Ella Schwartz

Author:Ella Schwartz [Schwartz, Ella]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781547602292
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2021-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Leaving Germany wasn’t that simple. She had an Austrian passport, which was worthless now that Austria was part of Germany. Austria didn’t exist anymore. She couldn’t apply for a German passport, because she was Jewish and that was forbidden. She couldn’t even get approval to leave Germany to visit another country, even for a short vacation. This is because the German government worried that scientists traveling to other countries would give away German discoveries and German secrets. Meitner was, by then, a fairly well-regarded scientist, and even though she was Jewish, the Germans did not want to lose what they considered to be their scientific superiority.

Meitner was desperate. The situation grew worse and worse for the Jewish people in Germany. She feared for her life. With encouragement from her friend and partner, Otto Hahn, she decided she had no choice but to run away in secret. This was an illegal act. She knew fleeing would be very dangerous, but the situation was dire. She packed only a few suitcases of clothes and left most of her other possessions behind. Under the cover of night and with the help of friends and kind border guards, she managed to sneak out of the country.

Meitner settled in Stockholm, Sweden. She missed Berlin and the research she had been working on in her lab, but at least she was finally safe. While in exile in Stockholm, she often exchanged letters with her friend, Otto Hahn, who stayed back in Germany. She encouraged Hahn to continue with the science experiments they had been working on together before she was forced to flee. They were performing tests on uranium, a chemical element, which was showing interesting properties. Meitner didn’t have the equipment to perform any experiments in Stockholm, but she coached Hahn from afar, sending letters back and forth.

With inspiration and support from Meitner, Hahn continued testing uranium. He was trying to prove that bombarding uranium with subatomic particles called neutrons would create a new, heavier element. But Hahn’s results were surprising. The resulting elements were actually lighter, not heavier. Hahn couldn’t make sense of this. How was it possible that adding neutrons to uranium made lighter elements instead of heavier ones?

Hahn, stumped by what he was seeing in the lab, wrote to Meitner in Stockholm. It was Meitner, in collaboration with her nephew Otto Frisch, who figured out what was happening. Bombarding uranium with neutrons actually causes the atom to split apart. Meitner then used her old friend Albert Einstein’s famous formula, E=MC2, to show that when the atom splits apart, it releases a lot of energy. They called this process fission.

Shortly thereafter, in 1939, Meitner and Frisch published their discovery of fission in a journal of science, Nature. They explained that fission happens when an atom separates and creates energy. When this paper was published, it caused many physicists to worry. They feared that the energy created as a result of fission could be very dangerous. Scientists feared, especially with the rise of Nazi

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