In Our Time: Lise Meitner

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the decisive role of Austrian-Jewish physicist Lise Meitner in solving the question of nuclear fission. It is said that Meitner made this breakthrough over Christmas 1938 while she was sitting on a log in Sweden during a snowy walk with her nephew Otto Frisch. She, with Frisch, deduced the nucleus really was splitting like a drop of water into a dumbbell shape, with the electrical charges at each end forcing the divide, something previously thought impossible, and they named this fission. This was a crucial breakthrough, for which Meitner was eventually widely recognised