Fritz Strassmann

And so there were some other scientists who were brilliant chemists working in Germany.

Fritz Hahn and, or Strassmann and Lietzmettner, Orofrisch, they were all like looking at what happened when you hit uranium with the neutrons.

And they were actually on Fermi's side.

They wanted to prove he was right.

So then in 1938, this is the crucial sort of step to what comes after.

In Berlin, two German scientists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, they discover that actually in the radioactive decay of uranium, you don't just get an alpha particle coming out here or there.

Sometimes what you can get is, as they decay, neutrons can be given off, and a neutron can sort of hit another nucleus and can split it apart.

And they found that this process seemed to be giving an entirely new chemical element that was much lighter than uranium.

Some of the complex results of bombarding uranium with neutrons formed an intriguing puzzle that kept various investigators busy for several years.

In 1939, the German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann and the physicists Lisa Meitner and Otto Frisch were able to announce a solution.

The absorption of a neutron by a certain uranium nucleus, later shown to be that of the relatively rare isotope uranium-235, can result in a splitting or fission of the nucleus into two parts with separate weights that place them somewhere near the middle of the periodic table.

The announcement of this discovery created quite a stir among physicists because a nuclear process of this nature must release a very large amount of energy.

These sabotage missions would become vital to the Allies winning the war.

Germany had been trying to build a nuclear bomb since Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann discovered fission in Berlin in December 1938.

But their efforts stalled.

When the war ended in May 1945, Germany hadn't even built a working nuclear reactor or made any fissile material or produced any meaningful amount of enriched uranium or plutonium.

And in Germany especially, there was little appetite to revisit a story that rejected so poorly how a brilliant scientist had, had been treated because of her religion, her gender, her gender, and her accent.

It took until 1966 for a, a measure of, of correction to arrive when Hahn, Meitner, and Strassmann were jointly awarded the US Enrico Fermi Award, formally recognized all three as co-discoverers.

And in 1997, scientists named a newly discovered chemical element meitnerium in her honor.

Meitnerium in her honor.

The person who, who worked towards it, the struggle, the hard work.

So what's, what the story teaches us, you know? Th- there, there are, uh, at least four lessons in, in the discovery of nuclear fission, you know.

Lesson one, evidence matters, right? Hahn and, uh, you know, Strassmann's chemical results were, uh, crucial because they gave scientists evidence that uranium had produced unexpected lighter element.

A theory cannot simply wish evidence into existence.

In November 1938, the two met in secret in Copenhagen where Meitner suggested further experiments.

Hahn and his colleague, Fritz Strassmann, should try out a uranium sample.

When Hahn and Strassmann ran those experiments back in Berlin, they found something baffling.

Uranium bombarded with neutrons seemed to be producing barium, a much lighter element.

The result didn't make sense under any physics anyone understood at that time.

Award was announced during the war and presented in 1945.

Meitner did not share the prize.

Neither did Fritz Strassmann, who had played a, a crucial role in the experimental work.