76 Years Ago Lise Meitner First Described Nuclear Fission

"I love physics with all my heart ... It is a kind of personal love, as one has for a person to whom one is grateful for many things." - Lise Meitner, 1915  On February 11th 1939 Austrian physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch published a one page note in Nature describing the impossible: the splitting of a uranium atom into two lighter elements, barium and krypton. They coined this process "fission" as an analogue to biological fission process of cell division and ignited immediate i...