Scientific characters： Berzelius and Meitner

Welcome to The Wild Side. This is your host Caitlin Kite and that was Alt-J with Tessalate. And on this week's show I want to talk about a couple of scientists that I think are really fascinating people and have really interesting life stories as well as really interesting career stories. And these are both people that I had kind of heard about really vaguely in the past during my scientific education, but I hadn't really ever heard that much. And so when I recently read about them again, kind of in more detail, and actually the same book that I was talking about on last week's show, the book that I was reading about the history of the periodic table and the importance of elements to people and culture worldwide, I thought maybe it would be a good time to revisit these guys and read a bit more about their own personal histories in more detail and kind of just think a little bit about what makes a good scientist and what are the things that that kind of pushes a person towards science and helps someone not just be an average scientist but one that really sees things that no one has seen before and to make discoveries and to make connections that no one else is making. So the first person on my list is a Swede known as, well I'm just going to make the anglicized version of the name because it would be much much better pronounced, and this is John Jacob Brasilius. And Brasilius was born in 1779 and he died in 1848. This is kind of an exciting period in science because, you know, this is kind of just after the Enlightenment, so you had lots of people finally moving into, you know, moving out of the Dark Ages and realizing that we need to think and we need to move just beyond the church and think about things in a more scientific, experimental sort of manner. So you did have a lot of things like this happening in this time, and of course you've got the Industrial Revolution going on, we're kind of, you know, gearing up towards the Industrial Revolution, so there are lots of experimental things that are made possible by all of the electronic and technological sorts of gadgetry. And Brasilius was a person who really was able to take advantage of this exciting time. And what's kind of interesting is that actually even though this was a really nice time in history in terms of science, it also came after one that was even more incredible in many ways. And certainly in Sweden, by the time that Brasilius was born, many of the most accomplished and influential Swedish scientists that we know of today had already come and gone. So people like Scheele and Brandt and Gahn and Linnaeus, you may not recognize too many of those names, but Linnaeus you probably know for coming up with the system of naming species using Latin binomials. So people didn't really expect too much out of that country at that point. It was kind of being eclipsed by places like France and Germany and the UK. But Brasilius had an extremely productive career, and he's considered one of the founders of modern chemistry, along with people like Robert Boyle and John Dalton and Antoine Lavoisier. And despite this, he's actually not extremely well known to the average person. Again, in that list of names that I just mentioned, you might not know all of those people, but you probably have heard of Lavoisier, because he was quite a famous scientist. But Brasilius certainly doesn't rank up quite that high for the average person, and he's done a huge amount of things that affect us on a daily basis. And as you'll see, he really made some incredibly important moves forward in his field, and also in science in general. And what's kind of funny about this is actually, even though he's not very well known to the average person, he was better known than many of his contemporaries at the time. And that's because he actively involved himself with a wider scientific community, much more so than they did. Many of his compatriots had a tendency to be quite reticent, to keep their achievements to themselves, to just kind of do things for fun, and then not to big themselves up a whole lot by advertising that. But he was a bit better at doing these sorts of things. So one of the first key steps is that he published his findings as soon as they, you know, came out of his lab. So he had over 250 papers over the course of his career, and he also wrote a textbook that was put into multiple different languages. So he was good at getting the word out. He also corresponded with international colleagues who were in various institutions and groups that he kind of participated in from afar. He hosted a lot of researchers at his laboratory, and so he had a lot of collaborators as well. And so all of these things meant that he was a bit more out there. He was a bit more active of a scientist than some of his contemporaries. And one of the key things about science is having collaborations and sharing the results. So it's quite fundamental that he did this. And all of this is kind of especially impressive. All of these achievements of Brasilius were really impressive given the fact that he was orphaned at a very early age, and he struggled financially early on in his academic career as he was trying to finish his studies. And he didn't go directly into a chemistry career that he wound up in eventually. So he overcame quite a lot of hurdles. He originally trained as a physician rather than a chemist, and then he learned chemistry at Uppsala University while he was studying with someone that you probably don't know, Anders Ekeberg. But he is the discoverer of one of the elements, so the tantalum is the element that he discovered. And this meant that he was someone who was kind of well known in his day and certainly accomplished enough to be able to do such a thing. So this was a really important mentor for Brasilius. And one of the things that he was most interested in when he was studying was the effects of electric current, or galvanic currents as they were called at the time, on diseases and on living organisms in general. So people at this time thought that you could use this information to understand the secret of life. So you know this is the kind of era when Frankenstein was being written, because people were obsessed with using electricity to give things life. Maybe we were all living because we had some sort of electric spark within us. So people were trying to figure out if they could use these electrical techniques to kind of understand something fundamental about beings and the universe. And one of the things they wanted to do with this, one of the things that Brasilius was interested in doing, was discrediting the idea of vitalism, which was kind of this vague notion of what makes a person alive, or what makes any organism alive. And it would instead be replaced with something that was a more rational explanation of how and why animal physiology is what it is, and does what it does, and creates this living organism when all these different things are working together. And this was quite a popular area of research around this time. So Frankenstein, you know, is just kind of an example, a popular press example, of the obsession of people at this time. And what they called this field was animal chemistry. And Brasilius was an active member of a UK group that was involved in these sorts of studies. And not much scientific progress was really made in this field, and it was actually kind of quickly abandoned. But dabbling in these things allowed Brasilius to develop certain skills in analytical chemistry. And these are the things that he later ended up applying on a much broader scale for a long period of time in his career. And all this stuff was also important for helping him network, and become affiliated with people that would help him in his career. So for example, probably most important to these, is someone who was a mine owner locally, Wilhelm Hissinger. And this kind of spawned a really important collaboration in Brasilius' life. Because Hissinger had access to a bunch of ores. And Swedish mines are really important, because there are lots of ores that occur in Sweden that aren't found anywhere else, or only found elsewhere in very, very small quantities. So lots and lots of things were discovered for the first time in Sweden around these mines. And so being involved with this guy meant that Brasilius was going to get access to some really interesting materials that he could then examine chemically. And this is funny, because actually he was most interested in organic chemistry. So looking at stuff that involves carbon, and is associated with living beings, and living processes. But inorganic chemistry is what he really was transitioning into with studying of these ores. And he in fact was the first person to make the distinction between these two fields, organic and inorganic chemistry. Now Brasilius emphasized the importance of proceeding analytically, and empirically. So doing experiments in order to see something. Conducting observations in order to test out a hypothesis. Not just kind of reasoning things, or deducting things without any firm evidence and proof. And to facilitate and improve this process, he developed lots of equipment, and also lots of concepts and phrases that allowed him to express these ideas that he was then working on from these experiments. And all these things are now an essential part of chemistry and science in general. So for example he developed rubber tubing, and also filter paper, which are kind of you know fundamental things that are used in a laboratory. He originated a variety of chemical terms that are still used today. So the term catalysis, which is when a non-reactive or slowly reactive substance is added to a chemical reaction in order to speak it up. So you know when something catalyzes something else, that word is thanks to Brasilius. He also came up with the word protein, and this is a name that he applied to samples that had been sent to him and described by someone else, a Dutch colleague named Gerardus Johan Mulder. So Brasilius was sent these samples in 1838, and at that point, looking at these things, he was the first person to apply the word to them. And what's interesting is that they still didn't really have any idea what they were looking at at that time. So Mulder had isolated several common proteins that are found in animals, and found that they generally tended to have the same formula. So you're familiar with scientific formulas in the form of H2O for example. Well this one had the formula C400H620N100O120P1S1. And if you know anything about those, those numbers, each of those things indicates how many of those atoms are involved. So this is actually quite a large molecule because it involves at least 1,000 different atoms of these elements. And this was an interesting thing to them because they hadn't ever seen something this huge, and they were trying to figure out whether this was just one really large molecule, or whether it was something else that they hadn't really found previous to that time. And in fact, they later found out that they were proteins, which are these, you know, things that kind of basically do all the things that happen in our bodies. They're the fundamental biological molecules in many ways. So this was quite an important term for Brasilius to have come up with. He also coined the term isomerism, and isomerism is when you've got molecules with the same molecular formula, but different chemical structures. And when this happens, basically you've got the possibility of these same molecules having very, very different properties. And this is a result of maybe having different functional groups. Maybe one of them has an alcohol group on it, but something else has a different type of group. Or maybe it's because they have different spatial configurations, so one might be the mirror image of the other. So they look in many ways quite similar, and they do have the same formula, but one is just kind of the reverse of the other. So an example of this is that propanol, which is C3H8O, it can be found as n-propyl alcohol, as isopropyl alcohol, or as methyl ethyl ether. And of course, you probably don't know those very much. Those are kind of things that we don't encounter very much, except for maybe isopropyl alcohol. But certainly you can tell that these are three different things that are all different forms of one single entity, and it completely depends on the location of a particular oxygen or alcohol group within the same basic kind of molecular structure. And this really interesting kind of difference between one sort of molecule and another was first recognized by Brasilius, and he first understood that these were essentially, you know, the same bits and pieces being rearranged to make something completely different. And even though you did have those same building blocks, you could create very different buildings in the end, if you like. And finally, another word that he coined was allotrope. And this is something that I talked about last week on the show, where I talked about tin, and how tin has a few different allotropes, depending on the temperature. Well, allotrope, again just to remind you, is when you've got different forms of the same element. So in the case of tin, you've got the lighter version, the kind of silvery or white version, that occurs at temperatures above 13.2 degrees, and then you've got the gray one that occurs at temperatures below 13.2 degrees. And they're both still tin, but they just look different and they act different, depending on the environmental conditions. And again, Brasilius was the first person to put a name to this phenomenon, and to really understand what it meant, in terms of why these chemicals were acting the way that they were. And now, he also had several breakthroughs, kind of theoretical breakthroughs, that created the foundations of quantitative chemistry as we know it today. So for one thing, he was the first person to really do a good job measuring the atomic weights of various elements. So doing so very accurately and across a very large sample, so you could begin to understand patterns of these different elements, and to think about what that meant, about how the elements related to each other, and how their behaviors were associated with their atomic weight. He also looked at the proportions in which elements and compounds combine. And this is now known as stoichiometry, which is a branch of chemistry that investigates the relative quantities of reactants and products in chemical reactions. So the things that are kind of being active, and the things that are maybe kind of burning away, being consumed by that experiment, by that reaction. And all of this is founded on the law of conservation of mass, which says that the mass of the reactants will always equal the mass of the products, because nothing vanishes when changing from one form to another. So for example, if you think about, you know, an equation, you've got something plus something equals something else. And Brasilius was the one that realized that just as we can have this kind of thing in basic algebra, you can have that kind of thing governing the laws of chemistry as well. So if you've got a couple of nitrogen atoms and a couple of oxygen atoms on one side of the equation, if you've got those two things and then you apply some heat, and then get something on the other side that has both nitrogen and oxygen, well you know that you have to... Now kind of closely related to this quantitative stuff that Brasilius was doing was the fact that he was the first person to think up the process of using chemical symbols to abbreviate the names of the elements. And of course this makes sense, because if you're writing out these equations trying to get an idea of what's combining over here to make something over here, or what's being torn apart to make new things on as the output, you know, you're writing some equations and you've got your left-hand side and your right-hand side, and you want to be able to get from one to the other quite quickly. So it's much easier if you don't have to write out nitrogen, oxygen, tantalum, every single time you're writing down an equation. So he was the one that thought up the idea of using these abbreviations. And he would use a one or a two-letter code, which was often determined by the Greek or Latin root of the element's name. So for example iron is ferrous, so we have Fe. So he would come up with these things and then he would use little superscripts to indicate the number of atoms present. Now we use subscripts today, so in the molecule H2O for example, the 2 is a subscript rather than a superscript. But other than that, the same basic system that we use now is the one that Brazilians came up with in the 19th century. And of course this was a really important fundamental shift. And one of the things that was exciting about it was not just that it, you know, helped everyone prevent their hands from hurting because they were writing too much, but because it conveyed both qualitative and quantitative information simultaneously. And that had never really been done before. So it shows what ingredients are in a compound and also in what amounts. And this really helped people to see compounds and molecules completely differently. Because before they had isolated things from various different sources, and then they had tried to compare them and think about what is this, even though it's, you know, it might smell kind of the same but is it the same because it's from something completely different. But once they were able to look at the fundamental, what, makeup of it in terms of how many atoms and what types of atoms, they could actually see that something could be exactly the same even if it was isolated from two completely separate things. So menthol for example is a compound that we're familiar with that has that kind of minty smell and minty flavor. And menthol can be isolated from different types of plants, not all just from the very same plant. So for example you've got different species of mint. You've got peppermint and spearmint. So if they had isolated menthol from both of those two different things, they might have thought that it was completely separate even though it was very similar. But once they were able to use these equations to write down a formula for menthol, for example, they could see that it was fundamentally the very same thing no matter where it had come from. They knew that atoms were atoms were atoms and it didn't matter what the source of the atoms were or, you know, where they'd been before they combined to make these new compounds. Once you had something with the chemical structure and something else with the same chemical structure, those two things were comparable. And this amazingly was something that they had never realized until this time. Now Brasilius also was very fundamentally involved in discovering four different elements. Some of these were ones that he did personally. Some of them were in collaboration with the owner of the mine where he was working. So cerium, thorium, selenium, and silicon were all thanks to Brasilius personally. But also lithium and vanadium were discovered by students working in his laboratory using things that he had taught them and under his supervision. So he was quite important for expanding our knowledge of the periodic table. Now a lot of these things that he found you might not have heard a whole lot about or know where they are but they do feature in things that we use every day. So these were important discoveries. Silicon he found thanks to the silicate materials that were quite common in Sweden's bedrock. Selenium came from the sediment of a sulfuric acid plant that he had an investment in. Thorium and cerium were both isolated from specimens that he'd been sent from elsewhere, which just goes to show the importance of collaboration in science. Cerium was discovered after he systematically electrolyzed salts from an abandoned mine. And this kind of is a great example of how his biological and chemical skills came together. And in fact he was the first person who demonstrated that an electrochemical cell, which we might refer to today more commonly as a battery, could decompose chemicals into pairs of electrically opposite constituents. And he did this quite early on in his career in 1803. So for example, water can be decomposed into the electropositive hydrogen and the electronegative oxygen. And this is the kind of thing that helped him realize that he should revisit Lavoisier's ideas about acids and bases. And he realized that these things could be found in pretty much all compounds. So you've got both negative or acidic bits and also positive or basic bits within each compound. And this again is kind of a fundamental idea that he helped to share with other chemists and get people thinking in a different way. So having this kind of chemical knowledge that he was able to combine with his biological knowledge, where he first looked at that electroactive sorts of techniques that he would use in trying to understand the purpose of the body's physiology and how these potential electrical processes could give rise to life. All of that biological investigation that he started off his career with, that really came into play here when combined with chemicals and allowed him to make some progress in the field of chemistry. So it just goes to show that even if you have kind of a dead end with your career, it actually can be quite important later on. You never know when those skills are going to come back and come in handy. He did however, I have to say, have a few mistakes and missteps. So for many years for example, he argued that chlorine contained oxygen, which obviously it doesn't because these are two completely different elements. And elements are about as fundamental as you get. They don't contain other elements. He also never accepted Amadeo Avogadro's hypothesis about molecular weights. And if you've been in a chemistry class, even if it was a long time ago, you probably kind of recognize even dimly the name Avogadro. And basically the idea here is that you've got two samples of an ideal gas of the same volume and at the same temperature and pressure. They should contain the same number of molecules. And this is probably not something that most of us use in our daily business, but this is quite an important idea in chemistry because it helps chemists make a lot of approximations. We know this is not precisely true, but it more or less is true. So when people are estimating things and kind of predicting certain behaviors and certain conditions, they use this theory quite a lot. And Avogadro was later proven to be quite right about this. And he was later honored by having a standard unit of measurement in chemistry named after him. So it was unfortunate that Brasilius didn't agree with him because Brasilius was, in this case, very much in the wrong. He also can't quite take all of the credit for discovering cerium in the sense that even though he was the one that found it, this was anticipated by another researcher who kind of had looked at properties of other chemicals and knew that there should be something in the periodic table where cerium is. And he kind of knew what sorts of properties it should have and maybe even in what sort of setting it might be found. So this was all anticipated by this other researcher who unfortunately didn't actually find it himself. So Brasilius is the one that gets the credit for doing the legwork on that one. Unfortunately, one of the big missteps that he made was kind of holding back organic chemistry from about 1835 onwards because he had this extremely firm belief in something called the dualistic theory. And this basically is the idea of, you know, you either have an acid or you have a base and that's about it. And this was a bit rigid in many ways. So you do often have these positive and negative things. But that is a very black-and-white way of looking at chemistry. And so without kind of expanding that and thinking about other conditions, without looking in the gray area, you can't always account for all the things that you see. And unfortunately, Brasilius was completely wedded to this idea. So even though these things were being discovered from 1835 onwards, that pointed to something else going on. He was unwilling to revise his theories. But, you know, despite these things, he did obviously make a lot of contributions to the field and to science in general. And so for all these achievements, he has gained lots of honors. So for example, he's known as the father of Swedish chemistry. He was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences actually quite early in his career, in 1808. And he was very active until his death in 1848. And over this period, in fact, he revitalized the group and is credited with bringing it into a second golden era. So he was quite important in kind of rounding up all the other scientists in Sweden and helping them stay motivated, stay on the international map, and stay really active in their fields. And he's also honored with the celebration of Brasilius Day on August 20th. I'm sure you will all want to mark that on your calendars, so you too can celebrate it this year. He is remembered by the name of a school next to his alma mater. So he has, he lives on forever in the name of Brasilius Kålen, so Brasilius School, basically in Swedish. And in 1939, his portrait was once on a series of post stamps that commemorated the founding of the Swedish Academy of Sciences. So all of these things kind of show that even though we maybe don't know of him on a first-name basis and know of him kind of, you know, from one household to the other, he still is a really important person that made some amazing contributions and is definitely worth knowing about. And thanking now, when we use all of these different elements that he found, all of these words that he came up with in our everyday lives. Welcome back to The Wild Side. This is your host, Caitlin Kite, and that was Claire McGuire with Your Electric, followed by Beck with The Information. And on today's show, I am talking about a couple of scientists that I think are really fascinating people and also made really noteworthy contributions to their fields of chemistry and chemistry slash physics, respectively. So before the break, I was talking about Brasilius, who was a chemist and also a bit of a biologist. And now, after the break, I want to talk about someone who is quite a role model for any ladies who are interested in science and also for everyone else, of course. And her name is Lisa Meitner. And I'm actually, I've been so intrigued about Lisa that I have bought a book about her so I could read more about her life in greater detail. So I first found out about her in this book that I recently read, that I mentioned on last week's show as well, that is a history of the periodic table and of the elements. And so they mentioned her and her contributions to physics in terms of finding out about the process of nuclear fission. And all of this made me a bit intrigued about her and this woman who was working in this field that's not really common for women at that time. And so I looked up her life history in a bit more detail and even that, what I could find online, was just not as detailed as I would have liked because she is a really fascinating person. And so I'm currently in the middle of reading her full autobiography, which is a wonderful thing published by an academic from California who was able to talk to all of Meitner's relatives and friends and colleagues and to get all the original paperwork and photos from her career. So it's a really amazing detailed thing. And maybe if I find out some more good facts about her I'll do a whole show devoted to the history of her career. But for now I just want to summarize who this amazing woman was and what she did for both the scientific world but also the world in general. So Lisa was born in Vienna, Austria but eventually relocated to Sweden just before the Second World War. And what's amazing to me about her is the fact that she was a female scientist who was working at a time when there weren't many women in science in general and most definitely not in the field of physics, which has never really been that welcoming to females. And in fact she was the only, she was only the second woman to obtain a doctoral degree in physics from the University of Vienna and she did this in 1905. And what's incredibly amazing about that is that it was during an era when women really couldn't attend public institutions of higher education. So when she finished school at the age of 14 she had nowhere to go. But luckily by the time she was about 21 she kind of acted as a teacher in the interim. They finally did start opening the doors to universities. But she had this huge gap relative to the male students in terms of, you know, what she knew because the males would have gone on past age 14 and done some more schooling before then going to university. Misa didn't have that. So what she had to do was study really intensely for two years to fit in about eight extra years of study and then she could go on to university after that. And her parents helped her do this by hiring a private tutor for her that helped teach her about all sorts of fields, but in particular he was quite good, very dynamic at chemistry and physics. And that's one of the reasons why she was so in love with this is because she already had that kind of interest and he really helped put her on that path and get her even more excited about those things. Now she got her degree but then again she didn't really have much to do with it because women weren't really encouraged to go into the laboratory and to work at universities and they certainly weren't given lectureships. So eventually she took her degree and went off to Berlin where she was hoping she might get a bit warmer of a welcome. And that is where she met Max Planck who she previously had encountered at university because he'd come to give a talk there. And he was quite respected. And now he didn't normally allow women to come into his lectures but after she introduced herself he did agree to allow her to come. And I've read some of his specific and direct comments about this issue of women in the class and he wasn't as misogynistic as the worst but he also wasn't extremely welcoming and obviously didn't think that women could quite perform up to the same level as men. But luckily Meitner was able to kind of hang in there and work through this and actually she was able to work in his laboratory. And what was great about this was that she was able to work with someone else that was in his laboratory with her. So she didn't have to worry about feeling kind of scared of Planck. She was able to kind of adjust to university little by little and kind of gain her footing and get used to working in this world where they were basically only men and then her. And one of the people that she worked with was or sorry one of the people that she was not able to work with that she wanted to was someone named Emile Fisher who was the winner of the 1902 Nobel Prize in chemistry. And the reason that she wasn't able to work with him is that he completely forbid her and all women from entering laboratories in which he had male workers. So you can see the kind of atmosphere in which Meitner found herself. But luckily she worked with someone named Otto Hahn and they became not only colleagues but also very very close friends. And he was quite good at explaining things and answering questions to help her kind of get up to the same level as the rest of them. Because again even though she was quite bright she'd been excluded from education for quite a while. So he was really helpful in kind of making her feel more comfortable in this world. And the two of them together discovered several new isotopes and made a progress with chemistry. And I guess and the kind of the stuff that they were looking at was kind of the crossover between chemistry and physics. And she was particularly enthralled with physics. Now one of the isotopes that they discovered was the first long-lived isotope of the element protactinium sorry which was an achievement that prompted her to be awarded with the Leibniz Medal from the Berlin Academy of Sciences. And also to be given her own physics section at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry. So she was able to show that she was in fact quite competent even though she was a lowly female. And she was able to slowly kind of rise little by little in the ranks. And this of course was helped by the fact that women were getting a bit more kind of respect and independence as the years went on. Despite all this you know these kind of minute steps that I'm talking about moving toward liberation as a woman. She was still the first woman in Germany to assume a post of full professor in physics and that happened at the University of Berlin in 1926. So again that's you know great for her but not to the greatest sign for the universities and for the country that it took them that long to allow such a thing to happen. Now what's really scary is that her life took a turn for the worse in the 30s because that is when there was a lot of anti-semitic opinion going on in Germany of course. And that's when you have kind of everything gearing up for World War II. And she barely escaped Germany for the Netherlands after the Anschluss. And she traveled undercover and was helped by physics colleagues to escape the country. She was successful despite the fact that one of her colleagues who was a Nazi chemist he had informed the authorities of her departure. So her life really was in danger and she kind of later regretted this in her life because she said that she just tried to ignore the political situation and just bury her head in work so she wouldn't have to face the truth. And she put herself in danger and she also felt that she had kind of unwittingly condoned what the German authorities were doing at that period of time. You know when they were carting off fellow Jews and sending them into concentration camps. And I say fellow Jews but it's kind of interesting that even though she was persecuted for being Jewish and also a female she actually didn't really identify with the Jewish religion. She never was really a practicing Jew and in fact she later converted to Protestantism. So she was attacked at this time by her colleagues you know for being something that she wasn't really in any sense. She was only born that way. But part of it I think was the fact that she was female and obvious and doing things in a place where a lot of people didn't want her. So they kind of doubly attacked the fact that she was both a woman and someone who's supposedly following a religion that they didn't believe in. So through all of this she was able to kind of relocate and reestablish herself in Sweden but she basically left behind absolutely everything. Her equipment, her notes. She later recounted that she only had you know a few marks in her purse and that was it. And so she had to start from scratch and she actually lost a lot of her reputation because she wasn't able to then resume everything that she had been doing because she had lost so many of her notes. And it was quite hard to rebuild and gain face back again after everything was destroyed in her old laboratory. And as you'll see there are also some other things that happened later on that were directly caused by this move from one country to another that really caused her career to suffer a serious blow. So after she relocated to Sweden she worked with someone named Mon Sigbon despite the fact that again this is another person who didn't feel that women should be working in science. So on a daily basis she had to deal with these sorts of people but obviously she proved them wrong and showed them that a woman could work in science and so they were able somehow to tolerate her presence. Which I think really goes to show what a personality and what a mind she must have had. Now in her new location Meitner was introduced to Niels Bohr who is of course one of the most famous physicists of all time. So she began to correspond with him on a regular basis and was getting lots of good ideas that she was able to share with him. She also continued to correspond with Otto Hahn back in Germany and she secretly met him in Copenhagen at one point so they could plan further experiments that two of them could use to expand their research in the field of nuclear physics. And what's really important about this is that by this time they had begun to do these experiments that were going to help them discover the process of nuclear fission. But Meitner didn't have the experimental setup that she needed to do this and she couldn't go back to Germany and work with Otto and so she basically had to rely on him to do the legwork but she would correspond and help give interpretations and guide what he was doing. So Hahn and another scientist called Fritz Strassmann performed the experiments and they were racing against Ernest Rutherford in the UK, Irène Joliot-Curie who's Marie Curie's daughter in France and also Enrico Fermi in Italy. And all of these guys were trying to be the first person or the first group to see whether it was possible to synthesize elements that were heavier than uranium. This was their major goal they just wanted to get a Nobel Prize for doing something that no one really thought was possible. And at the time the researchers probably didn't really have any idea that this work that they were doing was going to facilitate the later creation of nuclear weapons. Although Meitner did know that there was going to be a whole lot of energy and so she maybe had some of the earliest gleamings of what this would eventually lead to. So what they observed all these people in this race was that when you split a uranium nucleus into barium and krypton and a handful of neutrons you would also get a little bit of energy coming off in the end. And this they were trying to explain all these little different bits that were coming from uranium. They're trying to explain why this was such an energetically interesting process. And actually what's quite interesting is that quite early on another female scientist had proposed this very thing. She proposed the idea that you could in fact split uranium into multiple components and that there would be some energy involved if you did that. And this this idea was first proposed by another German named Ida Nodick in 1934. And this is you know again quite interesting because here's another female in science and she also was quite accomplished. She discovered an element for example. So she kind of in some ways is the mother of fission even though that's now a title that's more what's knowingly given to Meitner because of the fact that she is actually the one who did finally interpret what these patterns meant. So basically the team finally figured out that there are no naturally occurring elements beyond uranium because of the fact that all the electrical repulsion of the protons in the atom would overcome strong nuclear forces that normally keep them in proximity to each other in the atom's nucleus. And you can do that up to the point of uranium. But once you get to 92 and beyond there's just too many things you're trying to push into that little tiny space and they have too much energy and just explode away from each other. And that of course is radioactivity. And Meitner was also the first to realize that Einstein's equation E equals mc squared explained all of the energy that they were seeing as they were splitting uranium apart because it's converting mass into energy. But unfortunately even though she had these phenomenal insights because of the political atmosphere she couldn't publish with Hahn. You know she was a woman, she was a Jew, she'd fled the country, she was trying to hide and start a new life. And so Hahn couldn't publish with her because he would get in trouble from the government and she couldn't publish with him because she was trying to make sure that she was safe and wasn't going to be attacked. And so unfortunately this meant that Hahn and Rossmann sent a report to one journal that kind of described the observations from their experiments and then Meitner published in another journal interpreting what all of that meant and explaining the process of nuclear fission. And Meitner published this paper with her nephew Otto Frisch who was also a physicist with whom she worked quite closely for many years. And actually kind of interestingly the paper that Meitner published was in a much more highly appreciated journal than the one that Hahn and Strassman published. But she is the one who was not given a Nobel Prize for all of this and I'll get into that a bit later. So the process that Meitner and her nephew were describing in that paper was later experimentally confirmed by her nephew in 1939. And at that point everyone finally kind of realized that this process could lead to a bomb. And Meitner from then on refused to work on any projects that were interested in turning that knowledge into a weapon. And that is quite admirable you know considering the fact that there was of course a lot of courting of her to do this sort of thing. But she completely stayed away from that because she knew that it was a horrible thing that that that technology could turn into. And so she wanted to pursue other stuff that was you know maybe not as cutting-edge in some ways but was definitely a lot safer and was a lot more kind of fundamentally interesting to physics and not so much in an applied setting. Now for all of these sorts of discoveries that she made and for all of the stuff that she was able to show the world about physics and about women in science, she received lots of awards and honors. So for example she had a position specifically created for her at the University College of Stockholm. She was awarded the prize of Woman of the Year by the National Press Club in the US in 1946. She was awarded the Enrico Fermi Award alongside her two colleagues from Germany. She received the Max Planck Medal of the German Physics Society. When element number 109 was discovered in 1997 it was named after her so it's named Meitnerium. She also has several astronomical features named after her. But as I said earlier she did not receive the Nobel Prize and this is really unfortunate because the person who did get it was Otto Hahn and he received it in 1944. And neither Strassman nor Meitner were mentioned in this and most people feel that it's an oversight for both of them because Strassman did help Hahn with the work but especially for Meitner because she was probably overlooked for the fact that she was both female and Jewish and people at the time knew of the role that she had played but had personal problems against who and what she was and so they neglected to give her this award. And a lot of people say this is actually one of the worst oversights in the history of the Nobel Prize. And one of the things I like about Meitner is that there are lots of other impressive things that she did as well. So for example during the first part of World War I she served as a nurse and she used her knowledge of physics to help her help soldiers by using x-ray equipment. She presented two papers on beta radiation when she was still a very young scientist and this must have been terrifying as I guess she was a really really tiny person so she's this little tiny lady that would walk into this massive room full of men male scientists who were looking down on her both literally and figuratively but she was brave enough to stand up and do that and push the field forward because of these ideas. She discovered something called the Auger effect which is named after a French scientist who discovered it later the following year but the process the effect does not bear her name even though she found it first. And this is a physical phenomenon in which when you fill the inner shell vacancy of an atom there is an emission of an electron from that same atom and it has to do with the transfer or ejection of energy so she observed this and then described and named the process. She also contributed to work on Sweden's first nuclear reactor so again kind of using that knowledge of what she found about nuclear fission but in a much safer much happier kind of way. And she was also the first female member of the scientific class of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. So all of this I think shows you know this was really an incredible mind she had quite an illustrious career and was extremely happy doing physics just because she liked to know about things and she was always looking for the truth. And you might not know this but when she was quite old she finally did leave Sweden and move to the UK because this is where most of her family was and she's buried right here in the UK she's buried in Bramley and the epitaph on her grave was written by her nephew Otto Frisch and he wrote that she was a physicist who never lost her humanity which I think is a really nice way to be described that she you know she held the line so even after she found out about fission she didn't use it to hurt people but to try to help people and she tried to always find out more things about the universe and about nature so that she could kind of figure out the role of humans in the universe which is I think really what a lot of scientists are trying to go after but sometimes people lose track of that a little bit and go for glory or go for money or whatever but she was really true to that kind of fundamental desire of many scientists. And I think that she is a fantastic lady and I think that Brasilius is also equally interesting but in very different ways and I hope that you found their life stories compelling as well because they are interesting people but they are also people that have contributed to some really interesting scientific ideas and to help move their fields forward a bit and kind of pioneer new things so hopefully you understand a little bit more about that process and why those things are interesting and I will leave you now with a couple of songs depending on how much time I have since I've talked quite a lot about these exciting people so I will start off with You Cheated Me by Martha Wainwright and if there's a bit of time you'll also hear Imogen Heap with Half-Life.