MEITNER · The Missing Mass — Oversized Drop-Shoulder T-Shirt

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TEE-SCI-CN-MEI-02-M-BK T-Shirt

Piece

MEITNER · The Missing Mass Oversized Drop-Shoulder T-Shirt

$ 2,345.00

Description

Meitner calculated in 1938 that the mass missing after fission is the energy released, and did not share the Nobel that Hahn received. Printed here are the two masses, before and after.

A Author

Lise Meitner

B Subject

Nuclear Physics

C Aesthetic

Diagram · Typographic

Exploration

The sum is a subtraction. The fragments left after splitting a uranium nucleus weigh, added together, somewhat less than the whole nucleus. That difference, multiplied by the square of the speed of light, is the energy that comes out.

Meitner did it in the snow, at Kungälv, at Christmas 1938, with her nephew Frisch and a piece of paper. The result was two hundred million electronvolts per nucleus, some twenty times more than any known chemical reaction gave.

Hahn had found barium in the laboratory and did not know what it meant. The interpretation arrived from Swedish exile, by letter.

The 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to Hahn alone. Meitner was nominated forty-eight times and never received it.

Element 109 has carried her name since 1997. They gave it to her after she was dead.

Details