标题: 《Periodic Table Krypton》作者：- Michael Swanwick 【EPUB】 [打印本页] 作者: zaq 时间: 2013-8-19 10:05 标题: 《Periodic Table Krypton》作者：- Michael Swanwick 【EPUB】 Michael Swanwick's Periodic Table of Science Fiction 109 Mt Meitnerium (266) Lise Meitner, Physicist It's not easy making up a story about Lise Meitner, because the life she really did lead was so much more compelling than fiction could possibly be. Here are the facts, all true: Born in 1878, Lise Meitner was denied a Nobel Prize, historians today agree, simply because she was female. Indeed, as a woman she faced extraordinary obstacles to merely obtaining an education . Nevertheless, she managed to attend the University of Vienna and graduated in 1906 with a thesis on the conduction of heat in inhomogenous solids. Her first job was at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, where she had to work in a converted basement studio because only men were allowed into the laboratory. There she and Otto Hahn began research into the element transformations at the high end of the periodic table. Shortly after WWI (when she volunteered to work as a radiologist in an Austrian field hospital), she and Hahn discovered the element protactinium. Not long after that, she was appointed head of the physics department at Kaiser Wilhelm, an extraordinary accomplishment for somebody they had originally hidden away in the cellar. Through the 1920s and into the 30s, Meitner worked on the relationship between gamma and beta radiation. Then Enrico Fermi determined that when a heavy element was bombarded with neutrons, a heavier isotope of that element was formed. Meitner, Hahn, and Fritz Strassmen set out in search of an explanation for this baffling property of matter. Unfortunately, when Germany annexed Austria, Meitner, a non-practicing