The Forgotten Mother of Nuclear Physics

Everybody thinks Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize,

but they're completely wrong. Lise Meitner actually discovered nuclear fission in 1938,

the breakthrough that changed physics forever. She figured out how uranium atoms could split.

Her colleague Otto Hahn published it under his name. He won the Nobel Prize in

1944. She got nothing. Einstein called her the most intelligent woman.

She refused to build weapons for the Manhattan Project. She died in 1968,

still without her prize.