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Lise Meitner Helped Discover Nuclear Fission—and Was Then Forgotten

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Lise Meitner’s co-discovery of nuclear fission in the 1940s led to nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. But the scientific establishment ignored her ground-breaking work.

When Lise Meitner was invited to Los Alamos in the early 1940s to work on the Manhattan Project, the code name for the secret program to develop the first nuclear weapons, she declined, saying, “I will have nothing to do with a bomb!”But her reluctance came too late. A few years earlier, she had turn physics on its head by discovering nuclear fission. She explained why and how you could split the atomic nucleus of uranium and create a huge explosion of energy.

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History remembers Mozart. But his sister was a genius, too

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I spent the last two years researching women geniuses for my new book. Along the way, I encountered a few people who didn’t think the category existed at all.

“Why have there been no women Mozarts?” one man asked me smugly.

It didn’t take long to discover the answer. Genius needs to be nurtured and recognized. Extraordinary women musicians have existed in every generation, but their potential was wasted because people were unwilling to see their talent.

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