At a time when few women could obtain a higher education and even fewer entered the scientific professions, two exceptional women made groundbreaking discoveries in physics: Marie Curie in radioactivity and Lise Meitner in nuclear physics.
Ignore the fact I didn’t post it on time: November 7 marks both of their birthdays.
The process of nuclear fission was a huge discovery for the scientific world, and not everyone knows Lise Meitner was the first to hypothesize it.
She was part of the team with Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann that worked on “transuranium-elements” which led to the radiochemical discovery of the nuclear fission of uranium and thorium.
In 1938, Meitner was forced to flee Nazi Germany and the men continued to work on their experiments with Uranium while Meitner wrote to and guided them from Sweden.
Hahn and Strassmann went on to win a Nobel Prize for their discovery in 1944 with no mention of Meitner, which was later claimed to be a “mistake” by the Prize committee. While she didn’t receive the Nobel Prize or formal recognition for her discoveries, Meitner did have element number 109, meitnerium, named after her.
Marie Curie opened up the science of radioactivity and coined the term itself. Her achievements also include techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes, and the discovery of two elements, polonium and radium.
She founded the Curie Institutes in Paris and in Warsaw, which remain major centres of medical research today. Her work not only influenced the development of fundamental science but also ushered in a new era in medical research and treatment. Curie became the the first person and only woman to win twice a Nobel Prize.
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