But the '30s were to put an end to the collaboration, with the ever-increasing persecution of Jews (conversion did not count). In time, Meitner would gain the position and salary commensurate with her brilliance, as well as the recognition of Rutherford, Bohr, Einstein, Planck-anyone who was anybody in the pantheon of nuclear physics. For the technically minded, Sime provides the details of the painstaking experiments in which radioactive elements were bombarded with neutrons. Here began her close but curiously formal partnership with chemist Otto Hahn, later joined by Fritz Strassmann. She moved to Berlin and began doing research with the sufferance of the director of the chemistry institute: She could enter only through a side door to a basement room and was forced to use the toilet facilities of a restaurant down the street. As an adult Meitner converted from Judaism to Protestantism. Born in 1878, Meitner was a native of Vienna, enjoying the support of a loving family as she pursued not only a university education but a career in physics. Now Sime (Chemistry/Sacramento City College) tells the absorbing story of her life. On the eve of WW II the physicist Lise Meitner, then living in Sweden, realized that the puzzling results reported to her by her colleagues in Berlin meant they had split the atom.
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