8 Ground-Breaking Discoveries You Didn't Know Were Made By Women

7. Lise Meitner: Splitting The Atom

Nuclear fission is a pretty big deal, you might have heard of it. Nuclear fission, not to be confused with nuclear fusion, is the process by which an atom splits. One of the results of this is a massive release of energy, which is why it's so super duper for making things like bombs and power sources. Back in 1938, Lise Meitner was keeping her head down in a then Nazi-ruled Germany and exchanged letters with her colleague, Otto Hahn. He had noticed that uranium atoms behaved very oddly when you bombarded them with neutrons (wouldn't you?) but he was baffled as to why. Meitner realised that the nucleus of the atom had split and developed her theory to tie in with Einstein's famous E=mc2 just to be sure. This was a massive discovery, so massive in fact that it won a Nobel Prize...for Otto. Meitner was super cool about the whole thing, saying, "Surely Hahn fully deserved the Nobel Prize for chemistry... But I believe that Otto Robert Frisch and I contributed something not insignificant to the clarification of the process of uranium fission". Very gracious, but her omission from the Nobel Prize is still considered to be one of the most glaring black marks against the prize. But she did eventually get an element named after her, meitnerium, so she got her just deserts in the end.