Manhattan Project: Lise Meitner
Human Intelligence17 Mar 2025

Manhattan Project: Lise Meitner

Lise Meitner was a world-class physicist, who saw what others could not. She recognised nuclear fission – the splitting of the atom, the powerful energy released – before anyone else. Naomi Alderman finds out how.

Women weren't even allowed to attend lectures at the University of Berlin, when Meitner moved there in 1907. She began her career in a basement workshop, kept away from male students, and went on to build an unimpeachable reputation for scientific precision and brilliance. Her discovery of fission made the atom bomb possible, but she refused to have anything to do with the Manhattan Project.

Special thanks to Frank Close, Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford and author of Destroyer of Worlds: The Deep History of the Nuclear Age: 1895-1965 (Allen Lane, 2025).

Thanks also to Alex Wellerstein, historian of science at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Produced by BBC Studios Audio in partnership with The Open University.

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