Volume 44, Number 3 · February 20, 1997
A Passion for Science
By M.F. Perutz
Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics
by Ruth Lewin Sime
University of California Press, 526 pp., $34.95
Lise Meitner's career as a scientist spanned most of the heroic age of atomic physics, from the discovery of radioactivity in 1896 to the discovery of atomic fission in 1938. Born in Vienna in 1878, she spent her working life in Berlin, where Einstein called her 'our Marie Curie.' Her life became tragic when the Nazis drove her from all she had lived for; and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima made her realize that her passionate devotion to atomic physics had prepared the way for a weapon of unimagined destructiveness.
Review, 5473 words
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