Lise Meitner has fought for her entire life to be seen as a scientist, slowly building a career as a nuclear physicist in Berlin. When Adolf Hitler rises to power, the small gains she’s made are snatched away. As a Jewish woman, Lise has a critical decision to make: is her passion for science worth her life?
An earlier version of this podcast mistakenly gave the wrong date for the bombing of Hiroshima. Sorry for the error.
Further reading
This episode was based on The Woman Who Split the Atom by Marissa Moss.
Other sources include
Ruth Lewin Sime – Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics
David Bodanis – E=MC2 The biography of an equation
Patricia Rife – Lise Meitner and the Dawn of the Nuclear Age
Richard Rhodes – The Making of the Atomic Bomb
John Cornwell – Hitler’s Scientists
Ruth Lewin Sime “An Inconvenient History: The Nuclear-Fission Display in the Deutsches Museum”. Physics in Perspective. 12 (2): 190–218 (15 June 2010)
Katrina Miller “Why the ‘Mother of the Atomic Bomb’ Never Won a Nobel Prize” The New York Times 2 October 2023