In Sime's book, Meitner’s escape from Germany reads like a spy novel, except that it is completely based in fact. This is because in July 1938, my grandfather, Dirk Coster, was the person who escorted her out of Germany. Sime started writing my father for details about Lise Meitner's escape from Germany. I became familiar with Lise Meitner and her story when, in 1972, Dr. In 1944, Otto Hahn alone received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his discovery of the fission of heavy nuclei." On February 11, 1939, Meitner and Frisch published in Nature the physical interpretation of the process they named fission. The facts are that on January 6, 1939, Hahn and Strassmann reported in Naturwissenschaften their chemical findings for fission. The chronology of the discovery of fission is considerably more complex than the facts, and clouded by events beyond the world of science. With the publication of the book by Ruth Lewin Sime, "Lise Meitner, A life in physics," to some extent her name has resurfaced. Yet by the 1970's, her name was nearly forgotten. Albert Einstein once called her, "the most significant woman scientist of the 20th century". Abstract: Lise Meitner was one of the pioneers of nuclear physics and co-discoverer, with Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, of nuclear fission.
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