JF Ptak Science Books Post 2448
I don't often venture into the comic book world unless I'm looking for something, and in a hunt for atomic bomb references in comics <1955 I stumbled upon a reference to Dr. Lise Meitner. (A good short bio and summary of her work can be found here at the American Nuclear Society.) Seeing great physicists in comic books is evidently not common, as subsequent series of searches seem to indicate. The Meitner (1878-1968) mention in Wonder Woman, though, was pretty interesting. Meitner did get a lot of press coverage when she made her tour of the USA in 1946, which I guess led to the panel. She would have been more famous if she had been properly treated by the Nobel committee when they awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry of 1944 to Otto Hahn for work ("for his discovery of the fission of heavy nuclei") that she and Hahn had carried out jointly for years. But it didn't happen, for various reasons, and she really didn't get an official prize/award of recognition for her work until 1966 when she was given the Enrico Fermi award. She did receive an ultimate honor in 1997 when the chemical element with the atomic number of 109 was named (discovered in 1982) was named "Meitnerium" in her honor--the only non-mythological woman's name to be used in designating a chemical element. And she is featured on a few stamps, but outside the general physics community she sort of languished in obscurity for decades--odd since she was about the most significant woman in the history of 20th century physics.
[Source: found in the blog Shakeville, here.Wonder Woman, 1946.]
"Disintegration of Uranium by Neutrons: A New Type of Nuclear Reaction", by Lise Meitner and Otto R. Frisch; Nature, 143, 239-240, (Feb. 11, 1939). Full text here via Atomic Archive.
See below for the Meitner/Frisch paper from Nature 1939, and also the footnotes for papers cited (a number of which may be purchased via the blog bookstore id you were so inclined to own documents like this).
And here's a surprise appearance of Niels Bohr!
http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2014/06/7-public-domain-physics-comics-worth.html
Papers cited in Meitner/Frisch Nature 1939:
1. Fermi, E., Amaldi, F., d'Agostino, O., Rasetti, F., and Segré, E. Proc. Roy. Soc., A, 146, 483 (1934).
2. See Meitner, L., Hahn, O., and Strassmann, F., Z. Phys., 106, 249 (1937).
3. Curie, I., and Savitch, P., C.R., 208, 906, 1643 (1938).
4. Hahn, O., and Strassmann, F., Naturwiss., 26, 756 (1938).
5. Hahn, O., and Strassmann, F., Naturwiss., 27, 11 (1939).
6. Bohr, N., NATURE, 137, 344, 351 (1936).
7. Bohr, N., and Kalckar, F., Kgl. Danske Vis. Selskab, Math. Phys. Medd. 14, Nr. 10 (1937).
8. See Meithner, L., Strassmann, F., and Hahn, O., Z. Phys. 109, 538 (1938).
9. Bethe, A. H., and Placzec, G., Phys. Rev., 51, 405 (1937).
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