Nuclear fission
Uranium splits, and Lise Meitner works out what has happened while in exile.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 365 days
- Known to
- ± 1 year
- Era
- Industrial, Holocene
Hahn and Strassmann find barium among the products of neutron-bombarded uranium in December 1938 and cannot explain it. Meitner, who had worked with Hahn for thirty years and had fled Nazi Germany months earlier, works out with her nephew Frisch that the nucleus has split, and calculates the energy released. Hahn alone received the Nobel Prize. Within seven years the discovery becomes a weapon.