The Age of Radiance

by Craig Nelson

  Nothing worked. After five years, Szilard’s chain-reaction experiment, which he was so certain of, had crashed into a dead end. But almost immediately after, when all hope had evaporated, in the lobby of the King’s Crown Hotel, Leo Szilard met Enrico Fermi. The gravid hand of fate and coincidence set the course of their entwined lives for better, and for worse. Enrico and Leo would jointly work a miracle, and like all its predecessors, theirs would be decidedly two-faced.

  On January 16, 1939, Laura and Enrico returned to the West Fifty-Seventh Street piers to welcome Niels Bohr, arriving on the SS Drottningholm to lecture at Princeton, where Einstein was in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study. While Einstein was pursuing unified field theory—the calculation that would unite everything, from electrons to planets, but as of this writing has not yet come to fruition—Bohr was developing quantum mechanics, which became so difficult to comprehend, and such a mixture of wave, particle, mass, energy, spin, momentum, and angle, that it seemed to approach the supernatural, even among those who studied it. Instead of the beloved planetary model, Bohr’s atom was something that could not be visualized, a blur of matter and energy with electrons that could appear in one spot and then, instantly, in another. When, to take one example, Wolfgang Pauli—considered a genius on par with Einstein, with an acid wit that earned him the nickname Wrath of God—described a theory in a letter, Bohr replied with the view of his team from Copenhagen: “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question, which divides us, is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.”

  Bohr carried with him to America that January day an incredible secret—a signature theory of twentieth-century science—a secret he had promised not to divulge until the Austrian physicists who’d created it, working in exile, could polish and publish their work. But when he met with Einstein at Princeton, instead of quantum mechanics versus unified field theory, all they could talk about was this latest discovery. The Austrians had proved that part of what had earned Enrico his Nobel—the discovery of a new element—was entirely in error. Additionally, their theory’s far-ranging implications so terrified Leo Szilard that he would work with Fermi to create nuclear power, and with Einstein to inaugurate the Manhattan Project—the birth of the atomic bomb.

  This great revolution in physics that so captivated Bohr and Einstein began at the same time that the Fermis were crossing the Atlantic in December 1938, when chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin published an article in Naturwissenschaften revealing that, after they bombarded uranium with neutrons, instead of the next-larger element on the periodic table Fermi had claimed to find, all they ended up with was barium. When an element is irradiated and transforms into another element—as illustrated in the half-life chart of uranium devolving to lead—it moves one or two notches up the periodic table if it absorbs the neutrons, and one or two down if some of its own are knocked out. Iron, for example, moves one spot down to become manganese, but barium, at fifty-six, was dramatically far down the table from uranium, at ninety-two. It was strange, baffling, and annoying. Hahn and Strassmann were convinced something must be wrong, and so they recalibrated their instruments, asked for second opinions from others at KWI, repeated the experiment over and over, but still the results were the same: irradiated uranium produced lots of barium. Frustrated and not knowing what to do next, chemist Hahn turned to his ex-partner, the physicist Lise Meitner, who had recently escaped Nazi Germany and was living in Stockholm. He described the details and the results of their experiments in a letter and asked for her help.

  Has there been in the history of science a less likely personage to revolutionize her field and, with that, the fundamentals of human knowledge than the forgotten Lise Meitner? Striking as Curie, with jet-black hair, dark-ringed, deep-set eyes, and skin pale as a Klimt, Lise rarely weighed more than 105 pounds and was such a lady of her Victorian era that, in nearly every photograph, her neck is fully covered by a blouse’s collar. Meitner spent her first twenty-nine years in Vienna, then Europe’s most cosmopolitan city . . . yet, also the one with the highest rate of suicide. Born on Kaiser Franz Josefstrasse 27 in the Vienna suburb of Leopoldstadt, Lise was so Viennese that, after fleeing the Nazis, she refused to accept Swedish citizenship until she was allowed to retain her Austrian passport as well. Like the Hungarian Quartet, she was descended from Russian Jews, her mother, Hedwig, having emigrated to Slovakia to escape the pogroms, and like most of the Hungarians’ parents, the senior Meitners had nominally converted to Christianity, becoming Lutherans, though Lise herself was baptized as an Evangelical, and two of her sisters became Catholics. Just as all brainy boys and girls around the world have done since the dawn of time, the young Lise covered the crack at the bottom of her bedroom door so her parents wouldn’t catch her staying up all night, reading.

  At the age of four or five, Albert Einstein’s father gave him a compass as a present, and when the boy turned it this way and that and saw the needle returning to its magnetic truth, he got so excited that chills ran through his body, because now he understood that “something deeply hidden had to be behind things.” Lise had a similar epiphany as a child, becoming exuberant to understand “how a puddle with a bit of oil on it showed lovely colors.” Becoming amazed “that there were such things to find out about our world,” she pursued “more and more questions of that kind.” She was a fan of Mme. Curie in an era when science, especially X-rays, was a great fad in Vienna, nearly as popular as music.

  An Austrian girl’s schooling at the time was almost always finished by the age of fourteen, unless she was wealthy enough for a Swiss university. Then, beginning in the late 1890s, the empire allowed women to pursue higher education, and all five of the Meitner daughters went to college. To make up for missing the gymnasium that boys attended that trained them to pass the Matura (a test required for university entrance), the women hired private tutors to acquire eight years of knowledge—history, literature, religion, philosophy, Greek, Latin, math, mineralogy, botany, zoology—in two. Photographs of Lise from this period show her looking physically exhausted. In July 1901, she passed her Matura and began studying at the University of Vienna in a physics department close to Sigmund Freud’s office and so famous for its rotting stairs and decrepit ceiling beams that the Viennese joked about its students being would-be suicides. Within, however, were two great professors, Franz Exner, friend to Wilhelm Röntgen and the Curies, and the great atomist Ludwig Boltzmann. Until the end of her life, Meitner would remember Boltzmann’s teaching as “the most beautiful and stimulating that I have ever heard. . . . He himself was so enthusiastic about everything he taught us that one left every lecture with the feeling that a completely new and wonderful world had been revealed.”

  As a student, Lise uncovered an error in an Italian mathematician’s calculations. Her professor worked with her to trace the mistake and find the correct formula and told her that she should publish. Since he had helped her so much, though, she refused to take the full credit, which he thought foolish. This high-minded deprecation to the point of self-sabotage would be Meitner’s Achilles’ heel in her professional life. All the same, her achievements in a field where she was the only woman besides the Curies cannot be undervalued. In February 1906 at the age of twenty-seven, she received her PhD in physics, the second woman’s doctorate in the school’s five hundred years. Even with this remarkable achievement, during Meitner’s first months at Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm University, she was shy “bordering on fear of people.”

  She wanted to work with Heinrich Rubens, the Department of Experimental Physics chair, but instead, Rubens introduced her to Otto Hahn, a chemist working in radiation who needed to team up with an industrious physicist to reach the next level of his research. Fair-haired, chipmunk-cheeked, and always debonair with his hair carefully pomaded and his shirt collars crisp and celluloid, Hahn worked as Privatdozent at the university—a teaching post with
the salary paid directly by student fees—but had a lab with Emil Fischer’s institute where both Hahn and Meitner could work, and which included electroscopes for measuring alpha, beta, and gamma rays. Emil Fischer, however, did not allow women into his Chemistry Institute after fears that a Russian student’s “exotic” hair would catch fire (though he never developed the same fear about his luxuriant beard). Hahn and Meitner had to convince Fischer to let them turn a carpenter’s work area into a lab for themselves—a situation redolent of the Curies’ cadaver hut—and they would collaborate as physicist and chemist over the next thirty years. Otto was patient, thorough, detail-oriented; Lise was mathematically adept and brilliant at thinking in broad strokes beyond the pale. His salt-of-the-earth personality made it easier for her to overcome that paralyzing shyness; in time, she called him Hänchen, “little rooster,” and began all of her letters with “Dear Otto!” Meitner, however, was never allowed to put one foot into the institute itself. To use the bathroom, she was forced to walk to a nearby restaurant.

  “For many years I never had a meal with Lise Meitner except on official occasions. Nor did we ever go for a walk together,” Otto Hahn remembered. “Apart from the physics colloquia held at the university that we attended together, we met only at the carpenter’s shop. There we generally worked until nearly eight in the evening, so that one or the other would have to go out to buy salami or cheese before the shops closed at that hour. We never ate our cold supper together there. Lise Meitner went home alone, and so did I. And yet we were really very close friends.”

  “My strongest and dearest remembrances are of Hahn’s almost indestructible cheerfulness and serene disposition, his constant helpfulness and his joy in music,” Meitner recalled. “We would frequently sing Brahms duets, particularly when the work went well.” She also remembered, though, that when they walked the streets together, a majority of the other scientists at the institute would pointedly say, “Good day, Herr Hahn!”—and say nothing to her. Hahn’s courage in working with a woman at this stage in history deserves commendation, especially as balance to his future ill treatment of this historic colleague.

  Otto Hahn had worked under Ernest Rutherford at Canada’s McGill University, where the New Zealander who’d split the atom had said the Frankfurter had “a nose for discovering new elements,” and in 1908, Hahn and Meitner began their historic breakthroughs as a team by finding a short-lived radioelement, actinium C, using a leaf electroscope. Before the time of Geiger and his counters, a leaf of gold or aluminum was attached to a rod and sealed in a glass orb. When charged by electricity, the leaf was repelled from the rod and stiffened. When radioactive materials were placed nearby, their radiance ionized the air inside the orb and the leaf relaxed back to its original position. The rate of relaxation revealed the quantity of radiation.

  One day the postman arrived with a package, and Meitner decided to play a little joke. From the other side of the lab, she announced how happy she was to get something from Rutherford. The clerk looked at the address label and was flabbergasted to see that she was right. He had no idea that the leaves of her electroscopes were flailing in response to the radioactive materials throbbing within the box in his hands. Eventually, Meitner developed a reputation with the locals as a psychic, and when she and Rutherford finally met in person, he was shocked: “But I thought you were a man!”

  At the university, though, in time she was fully accepted, because the school’s most powerful man took her on as his protégé. European schools at this time did not directly oversee a curriculum or course of study; students could take classes (and pay for them) in any order or on any topic they wished, meaning a Privatdozent’s salary, such as Hahn’s, was somewhat precarious. The success of an education depended on a student disciple’s finding a professor mentor, and these were almost unheard of for women. But Lise Meitner would have a mentor, and he would be the wondrous Max Planck.

  When heated, objects radiate heat and light, beginning with various reds, then orange-yellow, and finally white-blue. The math explaining the relationship of heat and color should be simple. But it eluded physicists for decades. On October 19, 1900, Max Planck conceived of a formula developed from stringent lab results . . . a formula that violated the fundamental laws of both electromagnetism and thermodynamics. Planck realized in going over a graph comparing temperature to color spectra that the numbers did not rise evenly, like a smooth graph, but in steps, like a staircase. He called the base unit of these energy steps h, the quantum. But at the time, no one including Planck thought this discovery would change the future of science—everyone imagined that h would eventually be explained and integrated into the classical physics of electromagnetism and thermodynamics. Then Albert Einstein read Planck’s article, and “it was as if the ground had been pulled out from under one, with no firm foundation to see anywhere, upon which one could have built.” Einstein used quanta to explain light, Bohr used Planck’s quanta to explain atoms, and Erwin Schrödinger theorized that these particles were not “corpuscles,” as Einstein had described them, but condensed packets of waves, creating the illusion of a discrete object—a subatomic whitecap—reuniting quantum mechanics with classical physics.

  With his Prussian heritage, his isosceles bush of a mustache, his enormous forehead, and his critical role in modern physics, Max Planck would seem born to intimidate humdrum mortals. Instead, he was as sweet as two Fermis, one of the most generous of scientists or academic leaders, even helping an obscure Swiss patent clerk by approving Einstein’s “miracle year” papers for publication in Annalen der Physik . . . and the magnificent Planck did this even though he didn’t believe in the signature article, which was Einstein’s application of Planck’s quantum theory to photons . . . the article that would years later win Einstein his Nobel. “As soon as we were in [Planck’s] home he played tag at least as eagerly as we young students: he tried to catch us while we ran, really he did,” Lise happily recalled. “In the summer we ran races in the garden, and Planck joined us with an almost childlike eagerness and pleasure. Planck once told us that [one colleague] was such a wonderful man that when he went into a room, the air in the room became better. Exactly the same could be said of Planck.”

  In 1912, when Planck asked Meitner to succeed Max von Laue as his assistant, it would mean her first paycheck since arriving in Berlin six years before. Until this salaried position, the thirty-four-year-old Meitner had been getting an allowance from her parents for a dozen years, though she did make a few pfennig translating English papers into German and contributing articles to Naturwissenschaftliche Rundschau, the most important science journal in Germany, which published articles by the world’s greatest scientists. She said of Planck’s gift, “It was the passport to scientific activity in the eyes of most scientists and a great help in overcoming many current prejudices against academic women.”

  But even the great Planck’s support could only do so much. When Meitner moved with Hahn from Fischer’s to the new Kaiser Wilhelm Institute chemistry department, built as one of the first true ivory towers in the forested suburb of Dahlem—a sylvan glade far from urban life, where scientists could think and dream without distraction, and which distance from reality would nearly cost Meitner her life—Hahn was made chief of the radioactivity lab, given the title of professor, and paid five thousand marks. Lise’s title was “guest,” and her salary was 0. The lab, however, was unusual in that Hahn and Meitner insisted their staff make strenuous efforts to keep the environment as clean as possible to reduce background radiation and achieve a purity of experiment. A side effect of this rigor was that Meitner and Hahn would be two of the few nuclear pioneers to die of old age . . . both at eighty-nine. The city of Hamburg meanwhile erected a monument to martyrs of nuclear science. By 1959, it would be inscribed with 360 names.

  Nothing seems to be known of Meitner’s romantic or sexual life. When asked why she never married, she said she never had the time. One of Lise’s close friends in the 1910s was physicist Ja
mes Franck. Together they played Brahms lieder, he on the violin, she on the piano, and when they were both in their eighties, he confessed that he had fallen in love with her. She said, “Late!”

  Meitner was in fact all too busy breaking ground—truly, as Einstein had said, the Marie Curie of Germany. In 1913, she was promoted to a salaried slot, the Hahn-Meitner Laboratorium opened, and she received royalties for mesothorium, the isotope she and Hahn had discovered, which became so commonly used in medicine that it was known as “German radium.” In the autumn of 1914, she worked as an X-ray technician for the Austrian army—efforts nearly identical to Marie Curie’s on the other side—but Lise’s fifteen hundred colleagues at KWI chemistry spent their war years researching poison gas, chemical weapons, and explosives under Fritz Haber. While Otto Hahn worked on phosgene, mustard gas, and chlorine—he would be applauded as a “Gas Pioneer”—Hans Geiger designed a gas mask. Watching the horrors of the Great War, Einstein believed that science and technology had become “like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.” He was shocked by how eagerly German scientists helped with the killing and considered Haber one of those pathological criminals. Haber then personally went to field-test KWI’s efforts. German soldiers at the front waited for the wind to turn, then opened cylinders of chlorine gas. Even though they then ran away as quickly as possible, during the war it was realized that poison gas killed as many on the offensive side as it did on the defense. Besides being impractical, gas was thought immoral, and its use was stopped—a thoroughly fine analogy in every way to what would happen, another world war later, with nuclear weapons.