Question 1

True or false: Meitner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1944 alongside Otto Hahn.

Accepted Answer

False. Only Hahn received the 1944 Nobel in Chemistry. Meitner was nominated multiple times but never won.

Question 2

True or false: Lise Meitner was denied the Nobel Prize despite being crucial to discovering nuclear fission.

Accepted Answer

True. Meitner co-discovered fission with Otto Hahn, but Hahn alone got the 1944 Nobel. Many historians call it a major oversight.

Question 3

True or false: After fleeing Germany, Meitner continued her fission research from Sweden by mail.

Accepted Answer

True. Unable to work in Hahn's lab, she corresponded with him from Stockholm and co-authored the key 1939 fission paper remotely.

Question 4

True or false: Meitner was a close friend and collaborator of Albert Einstein.

Accepted Answer

False. They knew each other and exchanged letters, but were not close collaborators. Einstein praised her work but they rarely worked together.

Question 5

True or false: Meitner was offered a position on the Manhattan Project but refused on moral grounds.

Accepted Answer

True. She rejected the invitation in 1943, saying 'I will have nothing to do with a bomb.' She opposed nuclear weapons.

Question 6

True or false: Meitner was the first woman to earn a physics doctorate in Germany.

Accepted Answer

False. Lise Meitner earned her physics doctorate at the University of Vienna (Austria) in 1906, not in Germany. She was the second woman to earn a physics doctorate at Vienna.

Question 7

True or false: Lise Meitner practiced Judaism when she fled Nazi Germany.

Accepted Answer

False. Meitner converted to Protestantism in 1908, thirty years before she fled in 1938. The Nazis persecuted her due to her Jewish ancestry, not her religious practice.

Question 8

True or false: Meitner discovered the element protactinium in 1917 with Otto Hahn.

Accepted Answer

True. She and Hahn identified protactinium in 1917, but credit often goes to Hahn alone or to earlier discoverers.

Lise Meitner Trivia Questions