Physics is still dominated by men. These three undergraduates — in town for a premier of a scientific drama — are on a career vector they hope will change all that.
Can a biographical drama about a brilliant Austrian Jewish woman who explained nuclear fission in 1938, but was denied the Nobel Prize she deserved, help to accelerate young female physicists’ progress today?
Rememering Miss Meitner, an hour-long one-act by Robert Marc Friedman, received its U.S. premiere Saturday, and seems to suggest the answer is yes.
In the audience at the New Theater on Chapel Street were (pictured above, left to right) Athena Pan, Heba Elnaiem, and Oluchi Ofoha, and 127 other aspiring women physics-majoring undergraduates (along with 13 lucky physics guys). They were in town for the weekend-long Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics, organized by Yale’s physics department.
These young women are not facing the gender prejudice that prevailed in physics for the first half of the 20th century, or the virulent anti-Semitism that infected scientific circles in 1930s Germany and targeted scientists from Einstein to Meitner Still they face daunting challenges.
Nationally some 5,000 young people receive undergraduate degrees in physics annually. Of these, 80 percent are men, only 5 percent are black and 2 percent Hispanic. Would a drama set in the heady early days of the smashing of uranium and the race to understand and unlock nuclear power still speak to them?
In fact, what comes across in this cleverly constructed hour-long time-traveling one-act is that Lise Meitner’s brilliance was torpedoed less by the Nazis or deep gender bias, and far more by the selfish careerism and pursuit of prizes by her colleagues.
Is careerism a constant or a variable in human affairs? The young physicists would have to decide.
As the lights go down, we see a throaty, chain-smoking Meitner dramatically igniting a cigarette in the darkness. “They’re making movies and plays about me now,” she directly addresses Pan, Elnaiem, and Ofoha. “I hope they don’t make me a martyr of male oppression.”
Now that she’s dead and gone 40 years, she’s finally going to set the record straight: While her colleague Otto Hahn discovered the chemistry of nuclear fission, namely that lighter elements such as barium are created when uranium is smashed, it was Meitner who explained the physics. Namely, the process of energy release, arguably, for good or ill, the discovery that launched the nuclear age.
Or, as she puts it: “How could a neutron break up a mighty atom! It would be like an apple knocking down a large building.”
As the Nazis encroached, Hahn conveniently “saved” his colleague Meitner, who was Jewish, spiriting her off to Sweden. Shortly afterwards he published his findings, not mentioning her. The 1944 Nobel Prize in chemistry was given to him, and no mention was made of Meitner. “You always called me your assistant,” Meitner tells him, “but it was I who figured it out.”
In Sweden, instead of being treated like a brilliant refugee colleague, that country’s leading researcher, jealous of her deep knowledge, gives her barely a closet in his growing institute. No instruments, no colleagueship. Likewise, he thought she had no place in consideration of the Nobel Prize, on whose committee he sat. It didn’t make her bitter. “What could one sole woman do to stop them?” she asks.
Playwright Friedman said what motivated him was to tell a story about how idealistic institutions such as science and the Nobel cliques don’t always live up to their ideals. “Meitner broke all the barriers, she was at the top of physics in Germany in 1933, and then everything was denied her.”
It’s a universal story too,” he added, “of the pain felt when you work hard and others take credit.”
Meitner went on to be vindicated over the years, with schools, awards, and now even the 109th element Meitnerium being named after her. She was also distinguished in refusing to work on the Manhattan Project and being an apostle for explaining the danger of what nuclear fission has unleashed.
What did the young women physicists make of this? Ofoha, who just graduated in physics from the University of Maryland, said her struggles were not specifically Meitner’s but that the story was still inspirational. She loved the subject of physics, but the math was a challenge, she said. Some questioned her ability to continue in the field. But she fought back and with the help of her advisor was able to get through. She’s now planning on graduate school.
Heba Elnaiem, who’s a freshman at Howard University, said of the play that it was infuriating to watch Otto Hahn simply not admit that Meitner was his full partner, when he obviously knew the truth. Elnaiem’s struggles are with people also close to her, uncles, parents, family. “They keep telling me physics is not for me. It’s too demanding. I should aim for pharmacy school or dentistry. You know, so I won’t have to put in so many hours and get grants and so forth. But I love it and I’m sticking to it.”
The play does not consistently overcome the inherent competition in biodramas with complex subjects between the temptations of exposition and the demands for dramatic conflict. In this regard it is as successful as Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, which is clearly one of its influences.
Science, said the playwright, should be about the joy of discovery and colleagueship, not the pursuit of prizes and money. His aim was to use drama to inspire young women with Lise Meitner’s story. “My fear,” he said, “was that the play might be seen not as inspiration but as warning to young women to stay away from the field.”
He needn’t have worried. Remembering Miss Meitner was performed by the Goteborg Theater Company, from Gothenburg, Sweden, with Inger Hayman (pictured) as Meitner, and Ingemar Carlehed and Johan Karlberg. It was directed by Christel Korner.
Friedman says his next project is a full length about Meitner and her best friend, Eva von Bahr, a physicist even more brilliant than she; she left the field in 1914 and became a spiritualist.