He wrote to his longtime friend and collaborator Lise Meitner, an Austrian Jew who had just fled Germany for Scandinavia. She suggested that the uranium nucleus had been broken up by the neutrons; Hahn thought this a ridiculous idea. "Try to think of some other possible explanation," he begged.

Nevertheless, as Sherlock Holmes said, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." Hahn and Meitner both published papers on Hahn's results in 1939, and Meitner named the process "fission."

Hahn (but not Meitner) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1944 for this work. In spite of the seeming snub, Meitner and Hahn remained close friends until they both died in 1968. It is probable that Meitner, a lifelong pacifist who refused to work on the atomic bomb, preferred not to be recognized for her contribution to the eternal tendency to make war as hellish as possible.

A good deal of information on Hahn and Meitner is available on the Web:

• Figures in Radiation History maintains pages on Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn.
• The online Hutchinson Encyclopedia maintains excellent articles on both Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner.
• The Atomic Archive maintains information on all aspects of the development and use of the atomic bomb.
• The Lise Meitner page at the Super Scientists Page contains links to three good articles.
• The Contributions of Women to Physics project at UCLA maintains a page on Lise Meitner which includes literature citations.