A closer look
While her male colleague got the Nobel Prize, Lise Meitner actually cracked the math of splitting the atom on a piece of scrap paper during a winter stroll. In 1938, chemist Otto Hahn was bombarding uranium with neutrons and getting barium out, which made absolutely no sense to him. He mailed his baffling results to Meitner, a brilliant physicist who had recently fled Nazi Germany. While walking in the Swedish snow with her nephew, she sat down on a tree trunk, pulled out a scrap of paper, and used Einstein's E=mc² to calculate that the uranium nucleus was actually splitting in half, releasing massive amounts of energy. She was the first person to theoretically explain nuclear fission. Hahn published the chemical evidence, won the Nobel Prize alone, and Meitner was conveniently left out of the history books.
