In this captivating biography Patricia Rife interprets both the life and timesof Lise Meitner 18781968 the female physicist at the heart of the discoveryof nucl... » 

In this captivating biography Patricia Rife interprets both the life and timesof Lise Meitner 18781968 the female physicist at the heart of the discoveryof nuclear fission. She was a colleague and friend of many of the giants of20th century physics M. Planck her Berlin mentor A. Einstein M. von LaueMadame M. Curie J. Chadwick W. Pauli and N. Bohr. Meitner was the firstwoman to earn a Ph.D. in physics at the University of Vienna a pioneer in theresearch of radioactive processes and together with her nephew Otto RobertFrisch an interpreter of the process of nuclear fission in 1938. Yet at theend of World War II her colleague of thirty years radiochemist Otto Hahnalone was awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery ofnuclear fission a discovery based on years of research in which Meitner wasdirectly involved before her secret escape from Nazi Germany. «