Abstract
MANY readers of NATURE will wish to join with her friends in offering their congratulations to Miss Lise Meitner on the occasion of her sixtieth birthday, which she celebrated in Stockholm on November 7. It is now more than thirty years since Miss Meitner left Vienna for Berlin to begin work on radioactivity with Prof. Hahn, and throughout the whole of that period, both alone and in collaboration, she has contributed as much almost as any one person to the subject to which she devoted all her energies. During the years 1908-10, in collaboration with Hahn, she studied in detail the radiations from the active deposits of radium, thorium and actinium, obtaining the first indications of the existence of the C bodies and of the radiations from radium D. Between 1911 and 1915, with v. Baeyer and Hahn, she studied the groups of -particles by the direct deviation method, showing that a-ray as well as χ-ray bodies give rise to such groups. After the Great War, Miss Meitner turned to the semicircular focusing method for the further study of the -ray groups, regarding them now as secondary radiations associated with X-ray emission, and was the first to maintain that in the process of disintegration the emission of radiation follows, rather than precedes, the emission of the particle. Experiments on the long range a-particles, with Freitag, on the heating effect of the X-particles of radium E, with Orthmann, and on the scattering of hard X-rays, in collaboration with Hupfeld, occupied the years 1926-32. Since 1932 Miss Meitner has devoted her attention more and more to studies of nuclear transmutation and artificial radioactivity. With Hahn and Strassmann she has investigated particularly the complicated series of bodies obtained by bombarding uranium and thorium with neutrons.
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Miss Lise Meitner. Nature 142, 865–866 (1938). https://doi.org/10.1038/142865d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/142865d0