An Essay for Ada Lovelace Day 2010
French noblewoman Emilie du Châtelet (1706-49) discovered the exponential contribution of speed (squared), when mass in motion created force, and then died after childbirth in an age when late pregnancies were sentences of death by hemorrhaging.
Say what? Wasn’t it Einstein who discovered the relation of mass, energy, and the speed of light (squared) in the very early 20th Century?
Well yes he did – Einstein also proved the existence of atoms by Brownian Motion in 1905. However he stood on the feminine shoulders of the Enlightenment’s du Châtelet and the contemporary Madame Curie, among others, to make his insights into both the tiny atom and wide-open universe.
Looking back, one fancies that new trends in a society can alter many aspects of the society beyond the trends themselves.
Several educated women contributed to the so-called Enlightenment. Mary Wollstonecraft wrote a still-moving manifesto exhorting half the human race to take their just place in society before she herself died in 1797, giving birth to Mary Shelly at the age of thirty-eight.
A so-called Great Awakening shadowed the Enlightenment, and John Wesley himself appointed women as lay preachers – however this practice ceased within a few generations, and the early Methodist church never appointed any females to their ministry.
Over the Nineteen Century, modern science developed under the leadership of men, but there were women in service roles too. Innumerable “computers,” often women, calculated actuarial tables and logarithms in longhand throughout Europe and America. Noble-born Ada Lovelace championed the work of Charles Babbage, and described a machine that could out-do human computers.
As the 19th Century was ending, Polish-born Marie Skłodowska became famous as Madame Curie – working alongside her husband Pierre in the discovery of the radioactive elements Polonium and Radium. She was honored by a full appointment to the Sorbonne – rare recognition by the “old boys” – who happened to be young men in those heady days of early particle physics.
This essay is centered on Austrian-born Lise Meitner (1878-1968).
Like du Châtelet, she was fortunate enough to have a supportive father who helped her buck a discriminatory education system and earn a Ph.D in Physics from the University of Vienna. She then went to Berlin and convinced Max Planck himself to allow her into his lectures, and to assist him in his work.
Over the next twenty years, Meitner made several important atomic discoveries while teamed up with Otto Hahn, and Leó Szilárd.
During that same time, hundreds and even thousands of women got cancer from painting Radium on watch dials, and running X-Ray machines without protection. Radiation is an equal-opportunity killer though, and the rush to monetize it and put it to immediate use without adequate study took many lives, of both sexes — even afflicting Madame Curie. I’m glad to say that her progeny, male and female, have distinguished themselves in several fields of science.
Scientists of many nations: Ernest Rutherford; Enrico Fermi; Irene Joliot-Curie, and Otto Hahn started experimenting with newly-discovered neutrons around 1930 in a kind of competition – Meitner, as Hahn’s partner, was at the forefront of this research, but the great ivory tower of International Academia cracked at its foundations when the Nazis took over Germany in 1933. Meitner’s own nephew Otto Frisch was forced to flee. Even Einstein had to leave his native land. Like Meitner, many outstanding German scientists were from Jewish lineages. She had personally converted to Protestantism before WWI, and tried to rely on the importance of her work to stay out of trouble – but in vain.
“It was not only stupid but also very wrong that I did not leave at once,” she said in 1946.
In 1938, after the Third Reich absorbed Austria, Meitner had to run for her very life – she didn’t have any easy routes either. She tried the Netherlands first, but could not secure a position at Groningen University. This was a luckier break than she could have known at the time. About ninety percent of Dutch people from Jewish descent perished when the Nazis later occupied the country.
Meitner found a post at Manne Siegbahn’s laboratory in Stockholm, Sweden before WWII began. (Despite his reported prejudice against women in science.) She established a working relationship with Niels Bohr, who frequently traveled from Copenhagen, and continued her scientific correspondence with Otto Hahn.
In examining the results of Hahn’s further experiments with uranium on the other side of the Baltic Sea, Meitner, and fellow exile Otto Frisch, wrote back to him, demonstrating that his uranium nuclei had actually split — forming barium and krypton, along with several loose neutrons and a huge amount of energy.
To top that off, she and her nephew discovered that the electrical repulsion between so many protons in the ultra-heavy uranium overcame the “strong” nuclear force, and that no stable elements beyond uranium were possible.
Her conversations with Bohr further established that Einstein’s equation E = m, mass, times c, the speed of light (squared), explained the tremendous releases of energy via mass-conversion when the atom split.
Emilie du Châtelet’s calculations were validated once more, two centuries after she first worked them out.
Hahn published the results without her or Frisch’s name in 1939. The possibility for a chain reaction of enormous explosive potential lay exposed to the world. We all know now that this discovery was used to make weapons of truly unthinkable destruction, and the first three blew up only six years later.
Like Neils Bohr, Lise Meitner had a chance to run away to the USA, but she declared: “I will have nothing to do with a bomb!”
Because he led the team which first split the atom, Hahn received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1944. Luckily for the world, Germany’s greatest remaining theoretical physicist, Walter Heisenberg, never managed to pull the nuclear trigger for Hitler.
After the war, her scientific peers abroad honored Ms. Meitner for her contributions to science — she died in Cambridge, England, after a long residence in Sweden, but her story was generally ignored by the public and gradually forgotten, except by a few historians.
In the 21st Century, women fill many more jobs as scientists than have ever done before – like schoolteachers, these jobs require high degrees of training, pay on the low end of salary schedules, take enormous sacrifices of time and energy, and suffer from capricious funding. Economic forces after WWII brought educated women into workforces throughout America and Europe, and even in Asia and India after awhile.
The old “Man’s World” institutions retreated here and there, but were never defeated. The days of one-in-a-hundred-million geniuses like Emilie du Châtelet, Madame Curie, or Lise Meitner standing in the back of the hall at the sufferance of mighty males — as if these women were radioactive — may be memories, but they are all-too-recent memories. Other instances of feminine marginalization are too numerous for anything less than an encyclopedia to list.
The problems that humankind and the world face are going to take the entire brainpower our species can muster to contend with, much less solve — but our so-called modern world is still plagued with male oligarchs who are literally making war on the very notion of educating women – half of humanity. Some of them are paying huge sums of oil money for atomic technology, starting with electrical generation. They say they are not interested in nuclear weapons, but they lie about other things too.
Whenever there are changes, there are possibilities of changing back, even if society loses. History warns the wary among us that folly is even more common than wisdom. This essay of mine cheers our mutual gains, but ends with a warning. I hope Ada Lovelace Day goes on and on — and continues to celebrate progress!
To Read My Contribution To Ada Lovelace Day 2009: Click HERE
I really enjoyed this one, Michael, and learned a thing or two as well. Since I know very little about physics I was unaware, for instance, of the contribution of Emilie du Châtelet. I must look that up and try to understand how she did it.
Thank you.