Editing Lise Meitner (section)

==Nobel Prize==
Despite the many honours that Meitner received in her lifetime, she did not receive the Nobel Prize while it was awarded to Otto Hahn for the discovery of nuclear fission. She was nominated 49 times for Physics and Chemistry Nobel Prizes but never won.<ref>{{Cite web|title=The Nobel prize – Nomination archive – Lise Meitner|url=https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/archive/show_people.php?id=6097/|access-date=30 August 2022 |publisher=Nobel Foundation |date=April 2020 |archive-date=6 March 2023|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230306004948/https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/archive/show_people.php?id=6097/|url-status=live}}</ref> On 15 November 1945, the [[Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences]] announced that Hahn had been awarded the 1944 [[Nobel Prize in Chemistry]] for "his discovery of the fission of heavy atomic nuclei".<ref>{{cite web |title=The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1944 |publisher=Nobel Foundation |url=http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1944/index.html |access-date=26 August 2011 |archive-date=25 December 2008 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20081225083657/http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1944/index.html |url-status=live }}</ref>{{efn|The Nobel Committee had decided to defer the 1944 award for one year due to the war.{{sfn|Crawford|Sime|Walker|1997|pp=26–32}} }} Meitner was the one who told Hahn and Strassman to test their radium in more detail, and it was she who told Hahn that it was possible for the nucleus of uranium to disintegrate. Without these contributions of Meitner, Hahn would not have found that the uranium nucleus can split in half.{{sfn|Sime|1989|pp=373–376}}

In 1945 the [[Nobel Committee for Chemistry]] in Sweden that selected the Nobel Prize in Chemistry decided to award that prize solely to Hahn, who found out from a newspaper while detained in [[Farm Hall]] in England. In the 1990s, the long-sealed records of the Nobel Committee's proceedings became public, and the comprehensive biography of Meitner published in 1996 by [[Ruth Lewin Sime]] took advantage of this unsealing to reconsider Meitner's exclusion.{{sfn|Crawford|Sime|Walker|1997|pp=26–32}} In a 1997 article in the [[American Physical Society]] journal ''[[Physics Today]]'', Sime and her colleagues Elisabeth Crawford and Mark Walker wrote: {{blockquote|It appears that Lise Meitner did not share the 1944 prize because the structure of the Nobel committees was ill-suited to assess interdisciplinary work; because the members of the chemistry committee were unable or unwilling to judge her contribution fairly; and because during the war the Swedish scientists relied on their own limited expertise. Meitner's exclusion from the chemistry award may well be summarized as a mixture of disciplinary bias, political obtuseness, ignorance, and haste.{{sfn|Crawford|Sime|Walker|1997|pp=26–32}}}}

[[Max Perutz]], the 1962 Nobel Prize for chemistry winner reached a similar conclusion: {{blockquote|Having been locked up in the Nobel Committee's files these fifty years, the documents leading to this unjust award now reveal that the protracted deliberations by the Nobel jury were hampered by lack of appreciation both of the joint work that had preceded the discovery and of Meitner's written and verbal contributions after her flight from Berlin.{{sfn|Perutz|2002|p=27}}<ref>{{cite news |last=Perutz |first=Max |title=A Passion for Science |newspaper=[[The New York Review of Books]] |date=20 February 1997 |url=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/02/20/a-passion-for-science/ |url-access=subscription |access-date=11 July 2020 |archive-date=26 February 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200226124222/https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/02/20/a-passion-for-science/ |url-status=live }}</ref>}}

The five-member physics committee included Manne Siegbahn; his former student Erik Hulthén, the professor of experimental physics at [[Uppsala University]]; and Axel Lindh, who eventually succeeded Hulthén. All three were part of the Siegbahn school of X-ray spectroscopy. The poor relationship between Siegbahn and Meitner was a factor here, as was the bias towards experimental rather than theoretical physics.{{sfn|Crawford|Sime|Walker|1997|pp=26–32}}<ref>{{cite news | url=https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/02/science/lise-meitner-fission-nobel.html | title=Why the 'Mother of the Atomic Bomb' Never Won a Nobel Prize | newspaper=The New York Times | date=2 October 2023 | last1=Miller | first1=Katrina | access-date=8 August 2024 | archive-date=2 October 2023 | archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20231002171026/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/02/science/lise-meitner-fission-nobel.html | url-status=live }}</ref> In his report on the work of Meitner and Frisch, Hulthén relied on pre-war papers. He did not think that their work was groundbreaking and argued that the prize for physics was given for experimental rather than theoretical work, which had not been the case for many years.{{sfn|Crawford|Sime|Walker|1997|pp=26–32}} At the time Meitner herself wrote in a letter: "Surely Hahn fully deserved the Nobel Prize for chemistry. There is really no doubt about it. But I believe that Frisch and I contributed something not insignificant to the clarification of the process of uranium fission—how it originates and that it produces so much energy and that was something very remote to Hahn."{{sfn|Sexl|Hardy|2002|p=119}}{{sfn|Sime|1996|p=327}} Hahn's Nobel Prize was long expected; both he and Meitner had been nominated for both the chemistry and the physics prizes several times even before the discovery of nuclear fission. According to the Nobel Prize archive, she was nominated 19 times for Nobel Prize in Chemistry between 1924 and 1948, and 30 times for Nobel Prize in Physics between 1937 and 1967. Her nominators included [[Arthur Compton]], Dirk Coster, Kasimir Fajans, James Franck, Otto Hahn, [[Oskar Klein]], Niels Bohr, Max Planck and [[Max Born]].<ref name="Hahn nominations">{{cite web |title=Nomination Database: Otto Hahn |url=https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/archive/show_people.php?id=3787 |publisher=Nobel Media AB |date=9 June 2020 |access-date=14 June 2017 |archive-date=20 June 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200620174922/https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/archive/show_people.php?id=3787 |url-status=live }}</ref><ref name="Meitner nominations">{{cite web |title=Nomination Database: Lise Meitner |url=https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/archive/show_people.php?id=6097 |publisher=Nobel Media AB |date=9 June 2020 |access-date=14 June 2017 |archive-date=12 June 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200612011202/https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/archive/show_people.php?id=6097 |url-status=live }}</ref> Despite not having been awarded the Nobel Prize, Meitner was invited to attend the [[Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting]] in 1962.<ref>{{cite web |title=Lise Meitner – Fame without a Nobel Prize |date=5 November 2015 |first=Stephanie |last=Hanel |publisher=The Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings |url=https://www.lindau-nobel.org/lise-meitner-fame-without-a-nobel-prize/ |access-date=11 July 2020 |archive-date=3 August 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200803121433/https://www.lindau-nobel.org/lise-meitner-fame-without-a-nobel-prize/ |url-status=live }}</ref>