What Really Happened the First Time We Split a Heavy Atom in Half
This episode was produced in collaboration with and sponsored by Emerson. Click here to learn more about their We Love STEM initiative: bit.ly/2fnBiHO
When scientists first split the atom, they didn’t realize what they’d done until physicist Lise Meitner figured out they had discovered what we now call nuclear fission.
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Sources:
www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/mei...
www.aps.org/publications/apsn...
www.chemheritage.org/historic...
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/...
bnrc.berkeley.edu/Famous-Women...
pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/e...
www.nature.com/physics/looking...
history.aip.org/exhibits/mod/...
www.nobelprize.org/nobel_priz...
www.iop.org/resources/topic/ar...
www.iaea.org/sites/default/fi...
Images:
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Пікірлер: 1 200
Thanks for pointing out that the original title for this episode could also apply to Rutherford! We've updated it to be more specific about the type of atom-splitting that led to Meitner's discovery of nuclear fission.
@VioletDeathRei
6 жыл бұрын
Appreciate the extra effort for better clarity and accuracy.
@karthikeyanswaminathan2380
6 жыл бұрын
Great video, can your next video be about biases? you have already briefly explained in an another video, but it would be great if you can explain in detail.
@richardlinter4111
6 жыл бұрын
Dear SciShow: Thanks. You could reasonably have justified your original title by pointing to Meitner & Frisch's 1938 paper coining the term "fission" for the process they observed. But that is now extended to include all nuclear "disintegration", the earlier term. The revised title is less problematic.
@Mondos2001
6 жыл бұрын
SciShow cewl
@pauljackson2409
6 жыл бұрын
Nice to see that you are responsive to comments by your viewers. Meitner was clearly a brilliant physicist but it's also clear that she received a great deal of recognition from the scientific community, both during her life-time and posthumously. Let's leave gender politics out of it. I'm sure that there were many male scientists and researchers over the years, who didn't get the recognition they deserved. Ignaz Semmelweis is a case in point.
I gotta say, having an element named after you is cooler than a nobel
@Keyboardje
6 жыл бұрын
The Nobel prize winner is (mostly) alive when receiving it, so (mostly) HE knows and has the advantage of it during his life time. Having an element named after you after your death... That's a bit useless, as the person itself never even gets to know about it. Not "cool" at all...
@jomertomale
5 жыл бұрын
Legacy is more than just the name, the glory, the fame, the money. Legacy is what the future have received from you and your fruit.
@kellyshea92
5 жыл бұрын
@@Keyboardje not being forgotten sounds cool
@Keyboardje
5 жыл бұрын
@@kellyshea92 Maybe not so much if you yourself would never know about it.
@ghostnoodle9721
5 жыл бұрын
@@Keyboardje I think theres something inherent to human psychology that makes us want to be thought of (perhaps the narcissist in all of us) and remembered. Im glad we do this so everyone (including narcissists) can give it their biggest try, furthering humanity's discoveries greatly
Both Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn split uranium by shooting it with neutrons, but... Hahn shot first!
@Master_Therion
6 жыл бұрын
5:00 Meitner should have also won the Nobel Prize, but it was awarded to Hahn, solo.
@lloydgush
6 жыл бұрын
My god, the puns, they don't stop!
@ANDELE3025
6 жыл бұрын
But Frisch shot second.
@jackiels
6 жыл бұрын
Master Therion I need this on a shirt 😂
@Kludgzenjammer
6 жыл бұрын
No words...
Meitner: Careful guys. This stuff could be used create a bomb. U.S.: We can make a bomb with it? Cool.
When will you guys hire a dude called Bob, so we can call him SciShow Bob?
@Ethorbit
5 жыл бұрын
And another dude named Vegana so we can say SciShow Bob and Vegana!
@allanrichardson1468
5 жыл бұрын
Does Kelsey Grammer even want the role of SciShow Bob? (Kelsey voices Krusty’s nemesis on “The Simpson’s.”)
5 жыл бұрын
Look man I dont mind but I'm not sitting back pretending that women are equal
@HelloHello-ki7pq
5 жыл бұрын
Bob Marley ?
@troyna77
5 жыл бұрын
They did but it kind of fell through because it was his uncle.
Yes, finally, a video about Lise Meitner! Not enough people know about her, which is too bad, because she has this /awesome/ life story and is seriously badass.
@akshtaarora9843
6 жыл бұрын
veeri92 IKR! I'm so glad. This was beautiful.
@mikekuppen6256
6 жыл бұрын
+1
@jwoodside68
5 жыл бұрын
I'll remember her now. It's always sad to hear things like this.
@everydaytomorrow
5 жыл бұрын
I genuinely hope shes suffering in hell ✌
@baruchben-david4196
5 жыл бұрын
@@everydaytomorrow WTF? That's seriously warped.
I had a question, "If I injure my birthmark will it grow back into normal skin or a birthmark again?"
@Alr1ghtyThen
6 жыл бұрын
Sudarshan Lahoti actually a good question
@geefreck
6 жыл бұрын
If you injure it a lot, eventually it will become a highly detailed tattoo of Kevin Bacon's face.
@matthewmcewen9274
6 жыл бұрын
Depends on the damage you do to it. I'd assume if you were to cut off a birthmark it would be replaced by scar tissue.
@baruchben-david4196
5 жыл бұрын
Yes.
@farhan6057
4 жыл бұрын
It’ll grow back into a normal skin
It's one thing for Hahn to have got the award, but kind of of shitty that Hahn didn't acknowledge her as deserving in sharing in the award. ☹️
@TheParablade
6 жыл бұрын
The emoji you used at the end of your comment looks exactly like your profile picture
@Soldierboy54b
6 жыл бұрын
+Keith Gaughan....Look on the bright side: In older age, Hahn took a lightsabre to the gut.
@moviemaker1986
6 жыл бұрын
Yeah, though it's some kind of posthumous justice that in 1997, element 105, Hahnium, was officially renamed Dubnium after its the Russian city it was discovered in. Speaking of, if you haven't read "E=mc^2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation," I highly recommend it. It's a good read that delves much deeper into the history of the splitting of the atom. And since the book treats the equation as a metaphorical person, it focuses on the human aspects, not just science.
@FerretLance
6 жыл бұрын
Keith Gaughan Meinternium is named after her and she was awarded by other organizations. But yeah, it was common for women not to be acknowledged.
@talideon
6 жыл бұрын
Ferret Lance, yes, I know, and all that was mentioned in the video. However, I was _specifically_ talking about Hahn's behaviour, which was particularly objectionable because he knew her and worked with her all that time.
"After the war... Nobel prize in Chemistry for discovering Nuclear Fission to Otto Hahn..." (5:02) No no no! Read the Nobel citation: "for his discovery of the fission of HEAVY nuclei" (my emphasis). Light nuclei had already been split. What was new, and terrifying, was the chain reaction - only possible with heavy nuclei (or lithium, but that's a different process). Meitner deserves credit there. Also it wasn't "after" the war: this was the 1944 award, held over till 1945 but still.
Honestly so stoked to learn about another female scientist that has made such huge breakthroughs!! Hats off to Lisa, I can only imagine the excitement she felt when figuring out what was really going on =)
Not Dr. Meitner’s intention, but her discovery did make some craters on Earth, so naming craters on Luna and Venus in her honor is certainly appropriate.
@swunt10
6 жыл бұрын
no her discovery. she was only one person of a group.
@chaotixthefox
6 жыл бұрын
Mar She did figure out the mechsnism thouvh
@TheJayman213
6 жыл бұрын
oh Snap!
@sleepyearth
5 жыл бұрын
Well she and her nephew did the calculation out.... Hahn didn't bother to do so.
@lichking3711
4 жыл бұрын
a lot of craters, actually
I did a project on Meitner in high school physics. She's just really cool, and you guys did a great job giving her the recognition she deserves.
Hey Sci Show. How do Different animals create Venom. Like snakes and jellyfish. How is it actually created and why the effects are what they are, but why anti venom lessens the effects. Great video btw
@kalenkerby7445
6 жыл бұрын
Kevin Richey you do realize that that's why they do these videos, Correct? Or do you just enjoy being a troll?
@sirsanti8408
6 жыл бұрын
Kevin Richey you could use Google on litterally everything they talk about
@loismcdonald2400
6 жыл бұрын
Kalen Kerby
@loismcdonald2400
6 жыл бұрын
Kalen Kerby and me
@vincentshi4037
6 жыл бұрын
Anti venom is created by injecting venom into a animal and extracting it's antibodies. The antibodies fight the venom
What do nuclear scientists eat? Fission chips.
@sirkowski
6 жыл бұрын
*clap*
@Deadbond1
6 жыл бұрын
Zarko Roncevic hahahha
@ObjectsInMotion
6 жыл бұрын
Take that scientins!
@adrastos9464
6 жыл бұрын
What did the male stamen say to the female pistol?
@Chemeleon15
6 жыл бұрын
Zarko Roncevic British Physicists*
0:02 I was very confused because I go to Emerson college which is NOT at all a STEM school
@crust1na602
6 жыл бұрын
Gauge Wiley u live in boston
@jMcWill781
6 жыл бұрын
ANDELE3025 But.. But it's not. Did you not read my comment? Really stretching pretty far to argue about anything, aren't you?
@williamnash4799
6 жыл бұрын
Emerson Electric is a manufacturing company that Hank has done promotional material for in the past.
@allanrichardson1468
6 жыл бұрын
William Nash Emerson used to be a well known maker of consumer electronics, which was mostly radios, TV sets, and stereo systems.
@culwin
6 жыл бұрын
Ralph Waldo Emerson was a nuclear scientist who drew the comic strip "Garfield".
History and science, both my favorite subjects.
Basically, Hahn was a chemist, and so barium showing up, uninvited as it were, in the middle of his uranium preparation was a complete mystery. Meitner was a nuclear physicist, and for her it was more a question of fitting the pieces together. SciShow should have emphasized that she not only recognized that the barium indicated fission, but also determined that krypton was the other part (a noble gas, it would have been very difficult to find the way the barium was), and further determined the loss of weight in the nuclei from the original U-235 nucleus, and found that it accounted, through Einstein's formula, for the huge amount of kinetic energy released. All done in her head, while on a skiing vacation over the Christmas holiday with her nephew when Hahn's communique arrived. Also, she communicated the discovery to Nils Bohr who went to the US in early January to attend a physics conference, in which he passed the news on to all the physicists, native and alien, in America. That including Ernest O. Lawrence, who carried it back to his lab in Berkeley, CA and reproduced the results there. In this way the news spread much faster than the journals would have been able to do it. Finally, Enrico Fermi witnessed the same results 6 months before in his lab in Rome, but he mis-guessed about the what was happening. After describing his results incorrectly at a conference, he moved his family to America, and was present there to hear Bohr's news. He could have been the discoverer of fission.
What an amazing human being. The definition of civilian. I wish there where more people today that viewed life as this amazing woman and human being. Salute to you Dr Meitner. You will forever be remembered.
Episodes like this are my favorite. Thanks for the knowledge
Thank you SciShow. The way you make your videos about the life events of the researchers is really great. Keep going :)
Thoroughly enjoyed the Meitner saga, but the title violates truth in advertising: no way was this the first time scientists split the atom. That happened quarter of a century earlier with helium/nitrogen collisions fracturing nuclei. There had already been a separate Chemistry Nobel, awarded in 1908 to Rutherford: "for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances" - and a decade later the man smashed nuclei together, transmuting elements on the way (helium to hydrogen, and nitrogen to oxygen).
So this episode is basically: "Great Minds in Physics: Lise Meitner" without saying her name in the title?
@SaltpeterTaffy
6 жыл бұрын
I was thinking the exact same thing. I was expecting something a bit less focused on a specific individual.
@Kaihlik
6 жыл бұрын
I was equally confused by that. Kept waiting for it to pivot to talking back to the topic more generally. It was a good video, just think they should have named her in the video title.
@kairos-049
6 жыл бұрын
Nyt Mare Yeah, keeping up with the precedent.
@pedror598
6 жыл бұрын
Actually this is a video about the first time we split an atom.
@alainischileno
6 жыл бұрын
they omitted her name to avoid her hair catching fire and burning the title
emmerson is the smartest sponsor i've ever seen on YT. had people advertise tunnelbear and audible. but since emmerson doesn't tell me what they do i have to google them.. and their add doesn't ruin the YT video by being way too long.
There are also at least three Lise Meitner Streets in Germany, often near universities' physics departments.
Lise Meitner has always been one of my all time favourite scientists, alongside James Maxwell
A woman I have never heard of that I am so happy to have learned about! Thank you for sharing another amazing scientist with us.
Awesome video! Just awesome! Love it!! Many things up!
Very nice and informative video. Thanks!
Good god watching this series has taught me that most major scientists get stiffed out of credit.
@patheddles4004
4 жыл бұрын
"What did Crick and Watson discover?" "Rosalind Franklin's notes."
@RandomPlayIist
3 жыл бұрын
A lot of women and and those with a less prestigious background have gotten shafted.
Meitner: Ok Roosevelt, we found a thing that can be used to make really dangerous bombs, so don't do it because it's too dangerous Roosevelt: *creates an atomic bomb*
@buckhorncortez
3 жыл бұрын
No. The scientists took the bomb to the government, not the other way around. In fact, the original Uranium Committee formed by Roosevelt to look into the "uranium problem" dedicated a whopping $6,000 the first year for research.
Great post! Thanks.
Thanks for your video. Thanks again from Panama city beach FL
One thing I realised when it turned out Lise Meitner was nearly 90 when she died (rare achievement for an early nuclear physicist!) was that therefore she was nearly 60 when she made her discovery! Go us oldies!
Hey I recognize this guy. He's the reason I passed biology lol
The moral of the story really is that awards like Nobel prizes (or Oscars, or Heismans, etc.) tend to be overrated.
thanks for this information! that was very interesting!
Fission was an idea with a ton of potential *ayy* i see what you did there
@boggless2771
6 жыл бұрын
Czar Ec - More like a Kiloton of potential. Buh dum Chhh
Wasn't Ernest Rutherford the first to split the atom?
@richardlinter4111
6 жыл бұрын
Yes. He was. And yes, that is nuclear fission. He did it with helium into hydrogen, then (much later) beryllium into alphas. But those are light metals. What was new was the fission of heavy elements. This was important because of the mechanism - chain reaction.
@swunt10
6 жыл бұрын
no he didn't. the atoms split by themselves because of radioactive decay just like in nature. the discovery is in doing it on purpose and being able to explain it. if you put a chunk of uranium on you table you wouldn't say you discovered fission would you?
@richardlinter4111
6 жыл бұрын
Mar: Rutherford most certainly did split the atom first 'on purpose'. Helium does not naturally decay into hydrogen. It required collision with a heavier nucleus (nitrogen) to break up the helium nucleus, and it was Rutherford who arranged for that.
@Unethical.Dodgson
6 жыл бұрын
I thought Helium was some massively unstable radioactive element that splits into hydrogen all the time... Oh wait, no I didn't. Apparently some people do.
@Druicidal
6 жыл бұрын
Cao Cao helium IS alpha radiation. Rutherford discovered transmutation, not fission.
Fantastic episode!
Such a fantastic history. Connecting science and history, it's great!
This might be a dumb comment but I thought Ernest Rutherford was the first to split the atom in 1917?
@Antiganos
6 жыл бұрын
Jacinta Hopkins There's a grey area around it, they didn't split the nucleus* in 1917, although it was the first time they intentionally broke an atom, but it's really like cutting an apple in half vs cutting a slice of it. Which counts as splitting the apple? I don't know, and neither do most people.
@richardlinter4111
6 жыл бұрын
Dear Ms Hopkins: Yes, you are correct. Mr Orr: there is no grey area. 1917 marks the first deliberate breaking of an atom. Rutherford began splitting light elements from 1917 onwards, and that means he did split their nuclei.
@Druicidal
6 жыл бұрын
Richard that was transmutation, arguably not as important as fission.
@richardlinter4111
6 жыл бұрын
Andrew: transmutation is changing the atomic mass, and usually atomic number, of an atom in either direction, whether up (fusion) or down (fission), and fission is thus a subset of transmutation, which is therefore more important than fission. Rutherford in fact achieved both, and before anyone else.
@Druicidal
6 жыл бұрын
Richard Linter plenty of people performed experiments where fission occurred before it was correctly identified, by Mietner. Rutherford identified the neutron, transmutation, as well as the correct cross section of the atom.
How many of those who worked with nuclear physics at the beginning wished they knew to wear hairnets and lead vests?
@melissabautz2346
6 жыл бұрын
I know I did! No, really. Call 911. My phone is in the car, I'm the last person in the lab, and my hair is OMIGOSH MY HEADISBURNING
Thank you for this. I watched this 2 hours ago and between now and then I have written a whole paper on her, what an inspiring woman, thank you for making this video!! Also, thanks for including sources in the bio Scishow: saving students lifes since 2012
Thus is one of my favorite episodes!
Thanks Hank. This was a particularly good video.
@mylesbishop1240
6 жыл бұрын
Skeazix where duh homie Muscle Hank @ doe
What do you do with a dead chemist? Barium
Thanks. Always enjoy your videos...rr
fantastic video
"Relative is space and time and ours is infinitesimal, we're just at the 3 in the string of Pi, not even at the decimal."
@neutralnarwhal8184
6 жыл бұрын
Is this from anything?
@microbuilder
6 жыл бұрын
Its a line from a nerdy song I wrote years ago lol
@med8615
6 жыл бұрын
I like it. Share the whole song please.
@akshtaarora9843
6 жыл бұрын
microbuilder Yes Please, share it! We'd love to hear it. That's a beautiful line.
@kavishshah5233
6 жыл бұрын
SHARE IT!
Why was there no mention of Ernest Rutherford in this video? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Rutherford
Love this channel
Thank you for this
Lol, a woman in my pharma class has her hair got caught on fire!
@andresmartinezramos7513
6 жыл бұрын
impalabeeper oh the irony
@TheEgg185
6 жыл бұрын
impalabeeper. See? The men back then were right! They were only looking out for her safety!
@MrFro89
6 жыл бұрын
Chemistry labs tend to have open fires in more than one place... I'm not surprised.
@Vysair
6 жыл бұрын
MrFro89 Yeah but when a woman's hair got caught on fire, they will running wild on instinct and that will spread the fire even further and it could possibly spread to hear head in a second.
@twilight3272
5 жыл бұрын
Seen a girl do it over a cooking fire and not even realize it lol
What about Rutherford though
@richardlinter4111
6 жыл бұрын
Rutherford did split the atom very early on. That is, he is credited with discovery of fission. The Nobel prize awarded to Hahn was for a subset - heavy elements.
Woooah. How trippy. I just read a book on the history of Plutonium, and learned all this. Good read, highly recommend
There's also a Liese Meitner auditorium at the physic's institute at the university of vienna, I had some lectures there. (I'm a chemistry student, but we're right next door and we do have to take physics classes)
@MT-ur5dp
3 жыл бұрын
Also the Lise Meinter Haus (Institute for physics) in Berlin. There is also the non-profit organization, called the Lise Meitner Society, "committed to work towards equal opportunities in the natural sciences and mathematics inside and outside of academia".
Actually the manhattan project started when the austrian physicist Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls calculated that an airbourne atomic bomb was plausible. they sent a memo as such to Winston Churchill which essentially started the british version before the americans commandeered the project.
@richardlinter4111
6 жыл бұрын
Mr Boswell: To be exact, the MAUD committee and the Tube Alloys project. The empire personnel went to the Manhattan Project eventually, but Tube Alloys was part of the much larger DSIR and the British resurrected it under a different name when the USA, in a dramatically pointless exercise, cut them out after the war ended.
"Hey, I was pressing some buttons and stuff, and now we have nuclear weapons. Ooops."
Very inspiring !
This is awesome!
That shirt makes your neck look long
@3StripesVon
6 жыл бұрын
I’m dead
@avadae9126
6 жыл бұрын
I'm alive
@gastonjaillet9512
6 жыл бұрын
So what ?
@leumens7708
4 жыл бұрын
I’m unconscious
@mrxanthios7045
4 жыл бұрын
I am a quantum being and I am both alive and dead
I was all excited to hear a story about New Zealanders being awesome at science. But a story about women being awesome at science is also good.
I'm not a physicist but I love this history and science. Fascinating stuff.
Love it when you do biogs on notable scientists. Any chance of one on John "Jack" Parsons and the formation of the JPL?
What really happened was that they got two halves of an atom
#GoneFission🎣
@melissabautz2346
6 жыл бұрын
#HairCaughtOnFireWhileFission #Whoops #Call991LOL
@chocolateex1907
6 жыл бұрын
Mark Susskind haha yes
@richardlinter4111
6 жыл бұрын
Hm. Susskind. Any relation? #TrulyGoneFishing #StringsAttached
I got an idea for Great Minds: Temple Grandin and her work on animal husbandry and animal psychology. Personal favorite of mine.
@b.lonewolf417
4 жыл бұрын
YES!!!
Giving scishow a thumbs up for listening to viewers and updating the title.
Terrible title.. the first time we split the atom was actually 1917. The title should be something like: "How nuclear fission was discovered".
@richardlinter4111
6 жыл бұрын
Well no. Nuclear fission is splitting atoms, already. But yes, in 1917 Rutherford did split helium into hydrogen, even if the word "fission" wasn't used (he said "disintegration"). People will tell you that in 1932 he and his students split the atom artificially, using a particle accelerator, but that's not quite right. What Cockroft and Walton did, as reported by Rutherford, was fuse hydrogen nuclei (protons) on to lithium, to make beryllium which decays quite quickly into alphas (helium). That's not splitting, that's fusion followed by naturally occurring decay, but which happens so fast that it was thought unreasonable to nitpick about the intermediate step between hydrogen-lithium collision, and alphas resulting.
@akshtaarora9843
6 жыл бұрын
So I guess the thumbnail made more justice
@richardlinter4111
6 жыл бұрын
Yes, inasmuch as it shows a heavy nucleus splitting in two not so heavy parts.
@NaneuxPeeBrane
6 жыл бұрын
I wasnt aware of the 1917 date - i was gonna make a correction and say it was the 1920's - but are now corrected.
@richardlinter4111
6 жыл бұрын
There was a war going on. He wasn't free to report it till 1919, and didn't give a complete report till 1926.
I really wish this came out a week ago when I had to write an essay 😢😢
... what a hero. I cant believe I havent heard of her before. Shes amazing.
She is buried in Bramley a small village in Hampshire UK. I heard that she was buried there recently and went to look for the grave. The grave is very understated, a real shame. The setting is very peaceful though.
The title is misleading. It's more of a story about Meitner, and not just about the discovery. And honestly - I don't like the tone of the video that suggest that it was all her, and her coworkers had nothing to do with it but got all the glory...
@puncheex2
6 жыл бұрын
From wikipedia (and if you have a better source, please submit): "The many honors that Meitner received in her lifetime have long been overshadowed by the fact that she did not share the Nobel Prize for nuclear fission awarded to Otto Hahn. On 15 November 1945, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that Hahn had been awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "his discovery of the fission of heavy atomic nuclei."[38] At the time Meitner herself wrote in a letter, "Surely Hahn fully deserved the Nobel Prize for chemistry. There is really no doubt about it. But I believe that Otto Robert Frisch and I contributed something not insignificant to the clarification of the process of uranium fission-how it originates and that it produces so much energy and that was something very remote to Hahn."[39] In a similar vein, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Lise Meitner's former assistant, later added that Hahn "certainly did deserve this Nobel Prize. He would have deserved it even if he had not made this discovery. But everyone recognized that the splitting of the atomic nucleus merited a Nobel Prize."[40] Frisch wrote similarly in a 1955 letter.[41] Hahn's receipt of a Nobel Prize was long expected. Both he and Meitner had been nominated for both the chemistry and the physics prizes several times even before the discovery of nuclear fission.[42][43] In 1945 the Committee in Sweden that selected the Nobel Prize in Chemistry decided to award that prize solely to Hahn. In the 1990s, the long-sealed records of the Nobel Committee's proceedings became public, and the comprehensive biography of Meitner published in 1996 by Ruth Lewin Sime took advantage of this unsealing to reconsider Meitner's exclusion.[44] In a 1997 article in the American Physical Society journal Physics Today, Sime and her colleagues Elisabeth Crawford and Mark Walker wrote: "It appears that Lise Meitner did not share the 1944 prize because the structure of the Nobel committees was ill-suited to assess interdisciplinary work [i.e., physics AND chemistry]; because the members of the chemistry committee were unable or unwilling to judge her contribution fairly; and because during the war the Swedish scientists relied on their own limited expertise. Meitner's exclusion from the chemistry award may well be summarized as a mixture of disciplinary bias, political obtuseness, ignorance, and haste."[7]
@rubbers3
6 жыл бұрын
So it had nothing to do with her being a woman. And she, Hahn and Frisch were just parts of the same puzzle. Still - the video focuses mainly on her, and how bad the world is, how sexist that she did not get the Nobel prize.
@richardlinter4111
6 жыл бұрын
Hahn deserved the Nobel for Chemistry not for splitting the atom - that had already been done - but for isolation of the reaction products (Kr & Ba), a chemical tour de force. Meitner's contribution, besides the very word 'fission', was even greater, from a scientific point of view: it set those results in a theoretical framework. But neither the coining of "fission" to replace the earlier "disintegration", nor her liquid-drop surface tension mechanism for fission, nor her demonstration that of neutron multiplication, was chemistry. It was Physics.
I am austrian. I am really proud to share a nationality with Lise Meitner, even though there is no reason for it, because I have done nothing to share in her accomplishments. BUT we did have a Star Trek pen&paper role playing adventure that took place on a ship called the 'Lise Meitner' once ^^
Well done.
I'm glad someone finally gave Lise some credit
You are shortchanging Hahn. He got the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, because the discovery of uranium fission depended on very difficult and precise chemistry, chemistry that Hahn pioneered. If Hahn had not been an outstanding, pioneering chemist, the discovery would not have happened, well not then and not by them. In hindsight, we strongly tend to think of everything having to do with nuclear fission, and nuclear reactions in general, as the realm of physics, but that is both bad history and a bad description of the current state of nuclear technology. Chemists and chemical engineers have always played central roles. The current prejudice against Hahn is also due to another relatively recent prejudice in favor of theoretical over experimental science. This is particularly true of theoretical physics. It goes back to Einstein's celebrity. These days, most any journeyman theoretical physicist can get him or herself on TV or KZread or write popular books, but experimentalists, whether physicist, chemist, biologist or whatever, rarely get any popular attention at all. That seems to go back to Einstein. Before Albert, the most popularly famous scientist was probably Marie Curie, not only a woman, but also a chemist and also an experimentalist, that is a laboratory chemist, not a theoretician. And, M. Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win two Nobels and still the only person to have won a Nobel Prize in two different science categories. A third prejudice involves the modern tendency to look for women in science whose work has not received the credit they deserve. There are some quite obvious examples. Cecilia Payne-Gaposhkin deserves (and today usually gets) credit for determining the correct, hydrogen - helium dominated composition of stars, a discovery for which Henry Norris Russell used to get more credit than he deserved. Rosalind Franklin had the bad fortune to die before her work could be acknowledged with a Nobel. Jocelyn Bell-Burnell really did discover the first pulsar signal. Part of the problem has been the peculiar rules of the Nobel prizes: no more than three persons per category per year, no dead people. Saying that someone did not receive due credit just because they did not receive a Nobel citation is a bit narrow minded. As you point out, Meitner has an element named after her, a signal honor, and her contribution certainly is not forgotten or minimized.
@richardlinter4111
6 жыл бұрын
Mr Holm: Your potted histories are more fact-based than most but still somewhat wanting. Most tellingly, Rosalind (not Roselyn) Franklin's lack of credit for the double-helix arose from what amounted to scientific theft by Wilkins, as has subsequently been made clear by many sources. Cecilia (not Cecelia) Payne received a Harvard chair and was eventually, ironically, awarded the Henry Norris Russell lectureship - worth a little money, and a lot of prestige. Ms Bell is on record as saying that in her view the lack of credit was entirely to be expected as a normal consequence of being just a student, and the supervisor should get the credit. To your list of the Nobel restrictions I would add one more: the discovery must further the cause of peace. Meitner's chain reaction contributions did not obviously do that.
@markholm7050
6 жыл бұрын
In the Hahn - Meitner Nobel Prize controversy, there is another, very significant, factor that is omitted from current, popular discussions, including this video. The Chemistry prize to Hahn was awarded in 1944, during the height of World War Two. The Swedish Academy members were rather isolated and communications of all sorts were very severely disrupted. One can understand that the Academy did not wish to suspend awarding prizes altogether, but, when putting their work in historical perspective, we really should acknowledge that this was a very difficult time.
@markholm7050
6 жыл бұрын
Richard Linter Thank you for correcting my misspellings. I have edited my post to correct them.
What do Nuclear Physicists do when they need more money? They go to a bank, and preform a radon it.
@cloroxbleach2079
6 жыл бұрын
Get out😑👉
The power of accidents. They gave us chocolate chip cookies, penicillin, plastic, and even nuclear power!
@puncheex2
6 жыл бұрын
Uhh, I think the point was that nuclear fission was no such accident.
I'm glad she will not be forgotten.
Hello, SciShow! Do you think you could make a video explaining the current knowledge of cerebral aneurysms? I had one rupture at 19 and after learning so much about them, I would love for a bigger audience to learn of them!
@wickersticks
6 жыл бұрын
I would also like to know this
@caroljomartin3051
6 жыл бұрын
phantasm1234 Good suggestion. That's how my sister-in-law died.
@Oi-cm6sw
6 жыл бұрын
Too bad they won't do thisn
@krashd
6 жыл бұрын
I don't think there's enough content for a video. I mean blood vessel weakens and a bubble develops, the end. Unless it bursts and tries to kill you. My dad died from an abdominal aortic aneurysm.
I f****** love science
@basseldahdouh8736
6 жыл бұрын
Is math related to science ?
@placido593
6 жыл бұрын
Math is science
@jonathanowo7584
6 жыл бұрын
There is a song hank made with that exact title
@benschofield1361
6 жыл бұрын
TheBlockyBird other way around
@cheaterman49
6 жыл бұрын
HFS :-)
emerson please someone teach me why ads are good for creators even when they are being manipulated for money not the benefit
Very cool
"Sir, there seems to be an error on this Nobel Prize application." "In what way?" "Someone seems to have written 'woman' on it." "Aaah, typos happen to the best of us. Just cross the line out and I'll get my secretary to rewrite it, as soon as she gets back from spraying her perm with flame retardant."
@ariaden
4 жыл бұрын
"Thanks for the double-check. Remember when we did not realize that Curie person is a woman, and awarded her a Nobel Prize, twice?"
So they split Uranium...not an atom...the word _atom_ means "uncuttable" therefore you cannot cut or split that which cannot be cut or split.
@klepto7207
3 жыл бұрын
A uranium atom not just uranium
@jeremycastro5401
3 жыл бұрын
@@klepto7207 You do understand what this means don't you? It means that our traditional "atom" was never the true atom to begin with. For according to the philosophy of Democritus you will get to a point where you can no longer cut the _atomos_ in half.
So... warning everybody about the danger actually put everyone into danger. "Hey we found this thing that gives up energy" "Yea, great for you" "Just be careful, we don't want to blow up everything" "Wait a second..."
Thanks for English transcript.
Can you make a video about Mileva Maric Einstein and explain why probably a lot of Albert Einstein's work was partially from her? It would be awesome to shed light on some of the brilliant women the world doesn't know about just because they were born at a time where women weren't respected in science :)
@richardlinter4111
6 жыл бұрын
While I would tend to agree that Ms Marič certainly was a gifted mathematician, thoroughly up to date with mathematical physics of the day, she was out of his life by the time General Relativity became a thing and the attempts to prove otherwise by feminists with an agenda have been shown up as mendacious, misleading, and self-serving. That said, Marič was beyond doubt Einstein's sounding board contributing much - perhaps decisively - to special relativity; Einstein himself said so, and wrote it down in surviving letters. I'm quite prepared to believe that credit for this has unreasonably been denied, but the necessary disinterested investigation has yet to happen.
@starblomma
6 жыл бұрын
Where did I refer to General Relativity? I just spoke about his work in general and there is certainly evidence that she had an impact on this. But it's interesting to see that simply mentioning her involvement seems to threaten you slightly. Why else would you bring up "feminists with an agenda" instead of just acknowledging that there might be contributions from her the world doesn't know a lot about?! It is true that for a very long time there hasn't been much of an investigation, simply because there wasn't a lot of material. Although I think that for example the fact that he gave her the money from his nobel price kind of speaks for itself. I don't want to downplay Albert Einstein's achievements, I'm just saying it would be nice to also shed some light on the second person that was heavily involved in it and is often forgotten. There are more than enough videos about Albert, what's so bad about asking for one about Mileva? ;-)
@richardlinter4111
6 жыл бұрын
Dear ParticleFairy: You referred to Einstein's General Relativity implicitly when you "spoke of his work in general". You will find my observation elsewhere on this thread to the effect that of 174 Chemistry laureates and 203 Physics laureates, only four and two respectively were women. I do not feel the slightest bit threatened by mentioning Einstein's wife's involvement and thought I had made clear that in my view her contribution to Special Relativity, at least, could not reasonably be impugned. I'm happy to stipulate that feminists have many good arguments to the effect that women are systematically under-represented in the sciences and fail to get credit for what they do achieve. That is not presently my concern, however. Marič's contribution to General Relativity is far more problematic than the early special case of un-accelerated reference frames because first, the sources are lacking, and second, there are those with a political agenda - including feminists, whether you like it or not - who muddy the waters in attempting to have their views accepted as gospel. I'm happy to agree however that even her work on special relativity is under-appreciated, and systematically by older men. I particularly blame Peierls for that state of affairs. Preconceptions of that magnitude, on either side of the question, should be anathema to science history, never mind science proper. Such prejudices are not research, still less science. It is not even reasonable discussion. It has in many respects been shown fraudulent. This makes establishing the truth next to impossible, for the foreseeable future.
Yaaasss more stories about women in STEM pls ❤️
@654Crossman
6 жыл бұрын
SleepDeprived95 so you obviously dont care about innovation and discovery if it isnt done with the help of a woman, right? I trust you will stop driving, using your phone, using computers, using paper, using toilets, and pretty much stop breathing, right? You feminists are all the same. I enjoy learning. Not virtue signaling...
I love Lise Meitner! I did a school project about her. Her life was so interesting.
God bless the women of science and thank you SciShow for schooling us on their contributions! ❤☺
46 views and 84 likes.lay down KZread,You are drunk again.
@melissabautz2346
6 жыл бұрын
When is it not?
Hair catching fire was a BS reason.
@erikawanner7355
6 жыл бұрын
Yep. But at least they EVENTUALLY let her participate
@NyanCatHerder
6 жыл бұрын
Pretty much. The video kind of calls this out by pointing out that a secondary entrance somehow solved the problem. "Unrelated" reasons given for excluding minorities or marginalized groups are usually very obvious as smoke screens.
@erikawanner7355
6 жыл бұрын
C.S. B. Of course it doesn’t completely “solve” the problem but back then women weren’t allowed to do ANYTHING science/math related. I’d say by them eventually letting her was at some progress...
@melissabautz2346
6 жыл бұрын
It's a problem in the lab. I know it was a BS reason, but my hair has caught on fire 60 times today. Then again, I do work at a gasoline, maych, and oven shop.
@erikawanner7355
6 жыл бұрын
Melissa Bautz: hehe. In all seriousness, be careful
Huge respect to this woman!
Best episode of scishow of all time. Course of history would be infinitely different if this discovery didn’t happen.
Makes you wonder how many women in science we don't even know about due to them not be included in official documents or scientific papers.
@jacobstar2631
6 жыл бұрын
snowdudelester Well, if we know about her then obviously there was documentation about her contributions which means not many woman have been ostracized. Makes you also wonder in today’s day and age if we will just prop woman up just because they are woman and not because they actually did anything. Too much feminization can make me doubt certain stories. Just celebrate the person and not the gender otherwise question will always arise.
@parallel4
6 жыл бұрын
+Jacob Star In English, please? (And obviously if we know about her then it''s through documentation. But when they are documented, they're credited far less than men so it suggests that a lot of women wouldn't have been credited for their work most of the time. That's not the meaning of the word "feminisation". That refers to the act of making something more feminine... But anyway, what does that have to do with anything? Nobody congratulates a specific woman for just being a woman.)
@Antiganos
6 жыл бұрын
Jacob Star His point is that not many women were credited with stuff they did historically, and if they were working with a male, only one name made it into the history books. Obviously we know of the cases where somebody else deserves credit, but there's probably waaaaaay more that we do not know of.
@swunt10
6 жыл бұрын
not many since not many worked in science. besides the PC gestapo would have dragged every story out already. just look at this video. a man doing the experiment, a man doing the measurements, a man writing the paper and a man together with the only woman of the group doing the math. and look what this video is all about, who gets all the credit and gets mentioned more often then all the other people of the group together. that's what the PC do-gooders are all about. pure ideologists.
@richardlinter4111
6 жыл бұрын
The classic example in my opinion would not be Meitner but Rosalind Franklin.
I would love to see an award named after her. Thumbs up for "The Meitner Award"?
@Antiganos
6 жыл бұрын
darrick steele perhaps for peaceful tech advancements?
@Inertia888
6 жыл бұрын
Yes, I like that, Dillon
Lise is a great scientist, what she did touched me.
Someone should make a movie about this!!!