Lise Meitner: A Battle for Ultimate Truth
I am a man. I like being a man. Courage is most often associated with men wearing armor and wielding shock and awe weapons. Those men with the biggest and best weapons are invariably proclaimed, by history’s victorious historians, the most courageous.
I believe courage is generally an unheralded virtue... unless in the history-writing hands of victorious warriors. In their hands, bombs dropping relatively safely from 30,000 feet hoping to find targets called enemies is a symbol of courage. As the victorious redefine moral courage, mistakes are sanitized as collateral damage. Innocent victims are called “casualties.” Friends, I find nothing “casual” about the killing of innocent civilians, intended or not.
The truly courageous face down many discomforts... including their own death in lieu of killing another.
This is pacifism. Few are truly pacifists. Most self-proclaimed pacifists make this claim as a matter of faith, having never had their faith tested. Self-preservation is, clearly, a strong and natural instinct. I claim to be a pacifist. I believe I would rather die than take another’s life. I hope the strength of my conviction is never tested. If tested and I, in human weakness, fail my conviction this should not negate the conviction of pacifism but, merely, the strength of my faith. As long as human failures are used to justify subsequent human failures, humans will wallow in their animal past. Why would any spiritual being or humanist want to justify human failure with human failure? Instinct is an animal manifestation in humanity.
As a spiritual person I share with other spiritualist and humanists a belief that while part animal, humanity is called to a higher plane of behavior. I find odd, the religious (anti-Darwinian) resistance to this call. Most humans think and proclaim themselves higher than the beasts. Yet we kill, not only in immediate instances of self-defense but in the highly abstract and foggy contexts of war. We humans will kill viciously, and with a clear conscious for a mere mortal leader, who repeats often enough, loud enough, and successfully enough that we should. It takes little evidence of threat to incite great reactions of fear.
A nation of citizens is quick to outsource or subcontract war. Corporate America has learned the efficient ease of shunting the guilt of injustice. Wealthy corporations often subcontract (farm out) the exploitation of legal and/or illegal immigrants. They outsource child labor. Their human heads sleep well at night convincing themselves their hands are clean... for they have not touched, seen, or smelled the stench of injustice. They use as “human shields“ other humans called subcontractors to absorb any sense of guilt that may arise in connection with unfair labor practices. Their sophisticated form of injustice is sterile... like the bombardiers who never see their victims.
Citizens back in the “Heartland,” like Corporate CEOs sleep well at night, convincing themselves war is maybe not a pleasant thing but it is acceptable. “My hands are clean, the cause is just, is their mantra.” Beneath the mantra is the man or woman. Their comfort is derived from much the same mental gymnastics used by the Corporate CEO. Never will the business, science, and sin of denial stop inventing ways to rationalize away injustice and outright murder.
The pacifist questions proclaimed threats and resists the fear these claims are intended to incite. The pacifist’s reward is social rejection... perhaps the greatest fear of all for many. Those who denounce war as a facade for mass killing often become the killed... if not literally, socially, professionally, politically, religiously, and in ways yet to be invented.
For the truly courageous, courage is its own reward. Courage faces down prejudice, political correctness, personal loss, fear, lies and violence. Courage faces down discomfort and lauds truth in spite of consequences, not in anticipation of them.
The courageous life of Lise Meitner sends chills of appreciation up and down my spine. Fear of dying in personal, professional, scientific, political, religious, and other forms of obscurity is a universal fear. One as accomplished as Lise Meitner naturally has much to lose if credit due is credit never awarded. Yet, she resisted the temptation to sell out her personal convictions to gain social acceptance, professional notoriety and certain fame.
I present you, Lise Meitner, a beacon of hope in a time of peril. Each of us, irrespective of social, economic, professional status are living a life not that far distant from the German citizens of the early 1900’s when Germany was becoming a world power. Busy busy busy, too busy to think, German citizens enjoyed the seemingly “entitled” luxury of simply being German. Amidst the mind-boggling business of the day an ideology of supremacy began to sprout from a fertile landscape of science, technology, and a citizenry saturated with contented apathy. Raining over Germany’s social landscape was an air of denial. Accepting an ever-intensifying nationalistic government as a political whim that would run its course eased minds too busy and too satisfied to think about the inevitable consequences of their apathy.
Lise Meitner was born in Vienna, Austria and later worked closely with German scientists to better understand the physics of atomic nuclei.
I call Meitner “a Beacon of Hope” because, in spite of globally powerful and prejudiced forces determined to dissolve her life’s work and her protests against war into total obscurity she lives on (beyond the grave).
The courageous peacemonger might die in obscurity... but so what? They often, resurrect. Although the victorious write the history of their choosing... truth is true history and true history is truth. White paint covers blood... but eventually the blood bleeds through. White washing a tree’s bark does not silence the bark of the tree. The truth of a tree is in its entirety. Beneath, above, and beyond the white-wash is the bark, a trunk, roots, branches, leaves, and perhaps most important of all, seeds that preserve the legacy of the tree.
In my mind, Lise Meitner was a mighty oak. Her seed lives on. Her courage produces new oaks even today, even though she was cut down years ago.
Lise Meitner: Her Crimes?
1) She was a Woman
2) She was a Jew
3) She became a scientist
4) She protested violence and war
Lise Meitner: Her Professional Plight
A Prejudiced Conspiracy of Lies and Obscurity
Lise Meitner: Her Legacy?
A Testament of Hope for Peace and Humanity
Meitner excoriates her old friend and research partner: "All of you lost your standards of justice and fairness. ... All of you also worked for Nazi Germany, and never even attempted passive resistance. Of course, to save your troubled conscience, you occasionally helped an oppressed person; still, you let millions of innocent people be murdered, and there was never a sound of protest."(p.249). “You had no sleepless nights... you suppressed the injustice of war.” Later she singles out Heisenberg, "They should force a man like Heisenberg, and millions of others with him, to see these camps and the tortured people."(p.250). Heisenberg had come to Bohr’s institute in Copenhagen in 1941 and had delivered a lecture full of propaganda for the regime that had infuriated Meitner.
Friends, these United States of America represent to the world the very threat Nazi Germany represented to the world of that day. Friends, will you wait for that knock on your front door from Homeland Security? I suggest you not wait to speak out loud and clear against this present assault on our civil liberties and our “inalienable rights.”
Do you know the next U.S. census will involve more than completing a mailed honorary/voluntary form to be returned to the U.S. Census Bureau? An new army of Census Bureau officials (armed with global positioning devices) will visit your home, inspect for hidden living quarters, investigate each room for evidence of unclaimed inhabitants and map rooms they consider candidates to have their own addresses.
The world has demonized Nazi Germany (including its citizens who like you and me are just taking care of our personal business). I have to ask... are we really justified in “minding our own business” as we, too, “accept an ever-intensifying nationalistic government as a political whim that will run its course and ease minds too busy and too satisfied to think about the inevitable consequences of our own apathy.”
One man claiming to be God directed led a nation of pathetic followers into one of the worst episodes of human tragedy in recorded history. Friends, we are under the leadership of one such man. Different day. Different man. Same basic premise. Only the methodology has changed. I call it, “The Inevitable Result of the Sophistication of Sin.”
To me, there is no greater sin than to claim, “God is on my (our) side.”
Stand up friends. Risk something. Comfort is a fleeting illusion of well-being. Discomfort is the price of true progress... personal, professional, scientific, social, cultural, spiritual, and universal progress.
Duane Short
August 21, 2006
----------------------
So, who was Lise Meitner?
Biography
A Battle for Ultimate Truth
Lise Meitner
Born: Vienna, Austria, November 7, 1878
Died: Cambridge, England, October 27, 1968
Meitner refused an offer to work on the project at Los Alamos, declaring "I will have nothing to do with a bomb!" (Sime, 305)
Lise Meitner
A Life in Physics
By Ruth Lewin Sime
Chapter One: Girlhood in Vienna
The Woman Behind the Bomb
A Review Essay on "Lise Meitner and the Dawn of the Nuclear Age" by Patricia Rife
Gary R. Goldstein
Department of Physics
Tufts University
Medford, MA 02155 USA
July 13, 2000
Published in Peace and Change: a Journal of Peace Research, vol.26, 95 (2001).
Abstract
The book "Lise Meitner and the Dawn of the Nuclear Age" by Patricia Rife (Boston: Birkhäuser, 1999) is reviewed in this essay for the lay audience. Meitner was a leading nuclear physicist at the time that the nucleus was the most exciting frontier of science. To establish her career, she had to overcome daunting prejudices against women in science and academia. Being of Jewish origin in Germany in the 1930's, she narrowly escaped certain disaster. Meitner was a crucial participant in the discovery of nuclear fission, yet did not share in the Nobel Prize that her collaborator, Otto Hahn, received in 1945. How these events came about, how they were intertwined with contemporary history and how they fit into the evolution of Meitner's social conscience and her abhorrence of war are some of the fascinating subjects discussed in the book and reviewed in this essay.
The war years were difficult for Meitner for many reasons. The news of horrendous destruction and turmoil was depressing. She helped friends fleeing Nazi persecution. She kept in touch with family and was able to communicate with some of her Berlin colleagues, but must have felt quite helpless in the sweep of events. Her nephew Frisch got a position in Birmingham, England and continued to experiment with fission. In collaboration with another German-Jewish émigré, Rudolph Peierls, he figured out how the fission of a rare isotope of uranium (U235) could be used to initiate a "chain reaction" and create a "super bomb" of enormous power. The secret Frisch-Peierls memorandum(5) became the impetus for the start of the Manhattan Project.
Unbeknownst to Lise, her nephew, Peierls and other physicists working in Britain (including Klaus Fuchs) were sent off to Los Alamos, New Mexico to contribute to the making of the bomb. Had she been given the opportunity to participate in that war work, there is little doubt that Meitner would have declined, as her previous history suggests. In a separate discussion, Rife makes the interesting point that the scale of scientific research would never be the same after the "big science" projects became the rule with the infusion of large government budgets into scientifically innovative weapons development. Siegbahn’s institute in Stockholm had become an example of big science that left Meitner out in the cold although it was not directed toward weapons work.
When the war in Europe ended, Meitner was horrified to learn about the deaths and deprivations of the millions of victims of the Nazi concentration camps. She could not forgive her German colleagues for their lack of active opposition to the regime. Rife quotes a remarkable letter to Hahn (that he never received) in which Meitner excoriates her old friend and research partner:
"All of you lost your standards of justice and fairness. ... All of you also worked for Nazi Germany, and never even attempted passive resistance. Of course, to save your troubled conscience, you occasionally helped an oppressed person; still, you let millions of innocent people be murdered, and there was never a sound of protest. You had no sleepless nights... you suppressed the injustice of war.Some will call me a bleeding-heart girly-man for my views. I smile and say, “it’s okay... one has a right to his or her opinion.” Opinions are not necessarily fact, whether my own or anyone else’s.
I believe courage is generally an unheralded virtue... unless in the history-writing hands of victorious warriors. In their hands, bombs dropping relatively safely from 30,000 feet hoping to find targets called enemies is a symbol of courage. As the victorious redefine moral courage, mistakes are sanitized as collateral damage. Innocent victims are called “casualties.” Friends, I find nothing “casual” about the killing of innocent civilians, intended or not.
The truly courageous face down many discomforts... including their own death in lieu of killing another.
This is pacifism. Few are truly pacifists. Most self-proclaimed pacifists make this claim as a matter of faith, having never had their faith tested. Self-preservation is, clearly, a strong and natural instinct. I claim to be a pacifist. I believe I would rather die than take another’s life. I hope the strength of my conviction is never tested. If tested and I, in human weakness, fail my conviction this should not negate the conviction of pacifism but, merely, the strength of my faith. As long as human failures are used to justify subsequent human failures, humans will wallow in their animal past. Why would any spiritual being or humanist want to justify human failure with human failure? Instinct is an animal manifestation in humanity.
As a spiritual person I share with other spiritualist and humanists a belief that while part animal, humanity is called to a higher plane of behavior. I find odd, the religious (anti-Darwinian) resistance to this call. Most humans think and proclaim themselves higher than the beasts. Yet we kill, not only in immediate instances of self-defense but in the highly abstract and foggy contexts of war. We humans will kill viciously, and with a clear conscious for a mere mortal leader, who repeats often enough, loud enough, and successfully enough that we should. It takes little evidence of threat to incite great reactions of fear.
A nation of citizens is quick to outsource or subcontract war. Corporate America has learned the efficient ease of shunting the guilt of injustice. Wealthy corporations often subcontract (farm out) the exploitation of legal and/or illegal immigrants. They outsource child labor. Their human heads sleep well at night convincing themselves their hands are clean... for they have not touched, seen, or smelled the stench of injustice. They use as “human shields“ other humans called subcontractors to absorb any sense of guilt that may arise in connection with unfair labor practices. Their sophisticated form of injustice is sterile... like the bombardiers who never see their victims.
Citizens back in the “Heartland,” like Corporate CEOs sleep well at night, convincing themselves war is maybe not a pleasant thing but it is acceptable. “My hands are clean, the cause is just, is their mantra.” Beneath the mantra is the man or woman. Their comfort is derived from much the same mental gymnastics used by the Corporate CEO. Never will the business, science, and sin of denial stop inventing ways to rationalize away injustice and outright murder.
The pacifist questions proclaimed threats and resists the fear these claims are intended to incite. The pacifist’s reward is social rejection... perhaps the greatest fear of all for many. Those who denounce war as a facade for mass killing often become the killed... if not literally, socially, professionally, politically, religiously, and in ways yet to be invented.
For the truly courageous, courage is its own reward. Courage faces down prejudice, political correctness, personal loss, fear, lies and violence. Courage faces down discomfort and lauds truth in spite of consequences, not in anticipation of them.
The courageous life of Lise Meitner sends chills of appreciation up and down my spine. Fear of dying in personal, professional, scientific, political, religious, and other forms of obscurity is a universal fear. One as accomplished as Lise Meitner naturally has much to lose if credit due is credit never awarded. Yet, she resisted the temptation to sell out her personal convictions to gain social acceptance, professional notoriety and certain fame.
I present you, Lise Meitner, a beacon of hope in a time of peril. Each of us, irrespective of social, economic, professional status are living a life not that far distant from the German citizens of the early 1900’s when Germany was becoming a world power. Busy busy busy, too busy to think, German citizens enjoyed the seemingly “entitled” luxury of simply being German. Amidst the mind-boggling business of the day an ideology of supremacy began to sprout from a fertile landscape of science, technology, and a citizenry saturated with contented apathy. Raining over Germany’s social landscape was an air of denial. Accepting an ever-intensifying nationalistic government as a political whim that would run its course eased minds too busy and too satisfied to think about the inevitable consequences of their apathy.
Lise Meitner was born in Vienna, Austria and later worked closely with German scientists to better understand the physics of atomic nuclei.
I call Meitner “a Beacon of Hope” because, in spite of globally powerful and prejudiced forces determined to dissolve her life’s work and her protests against war into total obscurity she lives on (beyond the grave).
The courageous peacemonger might die in obscurity... but so what? They often, resurrect. Although the victorious write the history of their choosing... truth is true history and true history is truth. White paint covers blood... but eventually the blood bleeds through. White washing a tree’s bark does not silence the bark of the tree. The truth of a tree is in its entirety. Beneath, above, and beyond the white-wash is the bark, a trunk, roots, branches, leaves, and perhaps most important of all, seeds that preserve the legacy of the tree.
In my mind, Lise Meitner was a mighty oak. Her seed lives on. Her courage produces new oaks even today, even though she was cut down years ago.
Lise Meitner: Her Crimes?
1) She was a Woman
2) She was a Jew
3) She became a scientist
4) She protested violence and war
Lise Meitner: Her Professional Plight
A Prejudiced Conspiracy of Lies and Obscurity
Lise Meitner: Her Legacy?
A Testament of Hope for Peace and Humanity
Meitner excoriates her old friend and research partner: "All of you lost your standards of justice and fairness. ... All of you also worked for Nazi Germany, and never even attempted passive resistance. Of course, to save your troubled conscience, you occasionally helped an oppressed person; still, you let millions of innocent people be murdered, and there was never a sound of protest."(p.249). “You had no sleepless nights... you suppressed the injustice of war.” Later she singles out Heisenberg, "They should force a man like Heisenberg, and millions of others with him, to see these camps and the tortured people."(p.250). Heisenberg had come to Bohr’s institute in Copenhagen in 1941 and had delivered a lecture full of propaganda for the regime that had infuriated Meitner.
Friends, these United States of America represent to the world the very threat Nazi Germany represented to the world of that day. Friends, will you wait for that knock on your front door from Homeland Security? I suggest you not wait to speak out loud and clear against this present assault on our civil liberties and our “inalienable rights.”
Do you know the next U.S. census will involve more than completing a mailed honorary/voluntary form to be returned to the U.S. Census Bureau? An new army of Census Bureau officials (armed with global positioning devices) will visit your home, inspect for hidden living quarters, investigate each room for evidence of unclaimed inhabitants and map rooms they consider candidates to have their own addresses.
The world has demonized Nazi Germany (including its citizens who like you and me are just taking care of our personal business). I have to ask... are we really justified in “minding our own business” as we, too, “accept an ever-intensifying nationalistic government as a political whim that will run its course and ease minds too busy and too satisfied to think about the inevitable consequences of our own apathy.”
One man claiming to be God directed led a nation of pathetic followers into one of the worst episodes of human tragedy in recorded history. Friends, we are under the leadership of one such man. Different day. Different man. Same basic premise. Only the methodology has changed. I call it, “The Inevitable Result of the Sophistication of Sin.”
To me, there is no greater sin than to claim, “God is on my (our) side.”
Stand up friends. Risk something. Comfort is a fleeting illusion of well-being. Discomfort is the price of true progress... personal, professional, scientific, social, cultural, spiritual, and universal progress.
Duane Short
August 21, 2006
----------------------
So, who was Lise Meitner?
Biography
A Battle for Ultimate Truth
Lise Meitner
Born: Vienna, Austria, November 7, 1878
Died: Cambridge, England, October 27, 1968
Meitner refused an offer to work on the project at Los Alamos, declaring "I will have nothing to do with a bomb!" (Sime, 305)
Lise Meitner
A Life in Physics
By Ruth Lewin Sime
Chapter One: Girlhood in Vienna
The Woman Behind the Bomb
A Review Essay on "Lise Meitner and the Dawn of the Nuclear Age" by Patricia Rife
Gary R. Goldstein
Department of Physics
Tufts University
Medford, MA 02155 USA
July 13, 2000
Published in Peace and Change: a Journal of Peace Research, vol.26, 95 (2001).
Abstract
The book "Lise Meitner and the Dawn of the Nuclear Age" by Patricia Rife (Boston: Birkhäuser, 1999) is reviewed in this essay for the lay audience. Meitner was a leading nuclear physicist at the time that the nucleus was the most exciting frontier of science. To establish her career, she had to overcome daunting prejudices against women in science and academia. Being of Jewish origin in Germany in the 1930's, she narrowly escaped certain disaster. Meitner was a crucial participant in the discovery of nuclear fission, yet did not share in the Nobel Prize that her collaborator, Otto Hahn, received in 1945. How these events came about, how they were intertwined with contemporary history and how they fit into the evolution of Meitner's social conscience and her abhorrence of war are some of the fascinating subjects discussed in the book and reviewed in this essay.
The war years were difficult for Meitner for many reasons. The news of horrendous destruction and turmoil was depressing. She helped friends fleeing Nazi persecution. She kept in touch with family and was able to communicate with some of her Berlin colleagues, but must have felt quite helpless in the sweep of events. Her nephew Frisch got a position in Birmingham, England and continued to experiment with fission. In collaboration with another German-Jewish émigré, Rudolph Peierls, he figured out how the fission of a rare isotope of uranium (U235) could be used to initiate a "chain reaction" and create a "super bomb" of enormous power. The secret Frisch-Peierls memorandum(5) became the impetus for the start of the Manhattan Project.
Unbeknownst to Lise, her nephew, Peierls and other physicists working in Britain (including Klaus Fuchs) were sent off to Los Alamos, New Mexico to contribute to the making of the bomb. Had she been given the opportunity to participate in that war work, there is little doubt that Meitner would have declined, as her previous history suggests. In a separate discussion, Rife makes the interesting point that the scale of scientific research would never be the same after the "big science" projects became the rule with the infusion of large government budgets into scientifically innovative weapons development. Siegbahn’s institute in Stockholm had become an example of big science that left Meitner out in the cold although it was not directed toward weapons work.
When the war in Europe ended, Meitner was horrified to learn about the deaths and deprivations of the millions of victims of the Nazi concentration camps. She could not forgive her German colleagues for their lack of active opposition to the regime. Rife quotes a remarkable letter to Hahn (that he never received) in which Meitner excoriates her old friend and research partner:
"All of you lost your standards of justice and fairness. ... All of you also worked for Nazi Germany, and never even attempted passive resistance. Of course, to save your troubled conscience, you occasionally helped an oppressed person; still, you let millions of innocent people be murdered, and there was never a sound of protest."(p.249).Later she singles out Heisenberg:
"They should force a man like Heisenberg, and millions of others with him, to see these camps and the tortured people."(p.250).Heisenberg had come to Bohr’s institute in Copenhagen in 1941 and had delivered a lecture full of propaganda for the regime that had infuriated Meitner.
posted by Duane Short | 8/21/2006 06:30:00 AM
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