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Otto Hahn: Fission's Chemist
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16033 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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6 / 1997 |
2,250 Words |
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Kurt Stehling
Kurt Stehling is chief scientist emeritus for the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). |
Dear Lise, There is something about the "radium isotopes" that we are telling only you at this time.
We have isolated the "isotopes," and they can be chemically separated from all elements, EXCEPT BARIUM. Our "Radium isotopes" resemble Barium.
--Yours,
Otto
Berlin
December 12, 1938
In this letter (paraphrased here), a meticulous German chemist, Otto Hahn, was asking advice of the Austrian-born Jewish physicist Lise Meitner, with whom he had collaborated in Berlin for years before she fled to Sweden to escape Hitler's Germany. Hahn was stating his evidence of the unthinkable, that the uranium nucleus had been split into smaller fragments, one of which was barium.
The discovery of the fission (splitting) of the uranium nucleus was to lead to both the nuclear reactor and the atomic bomb. It came as the culmination of a period of intense study of radioactive materials, those that gave off the emanations known as alpha, beta, and gamma radiation.
The "we" in his letter referred to his direct German collaborator, Fritz Strassmann. Hahn, a specialist in the chemistry of radioactive substances, hoped that Meitner's knowledge of physics would permit her to explain the strange behavior of their
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