Sending my heartfelt condolences to the family and friends of someone who was one of the few sincere human beings in the media.

She, Like Emmy Noether, is another all-time favorite. Her work in nuclear physics contributed at least as much as the Curies…

Born: Vienna, Austria, November 7, 1878

Died: Cambridge, England, October 27, 1968

A Battle for Ultimate Truth

In 1945, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Otto Hahn for the discovery of nuclear fission, overlooking the physicist Lise Meitner, who collaborated with him in the discovery and gave the first theoretical explanation of the fission process.

While Meitner was celebrated after World War II as “The mother of the atomic bomb,” she had no role in it, and her true scientific contribution became, if anything, more obscure in subsequent years. A new biography by Ruth Lewin Sime*[1] tells Meitner’s often paradoxical story and sets forth the daily sequence of events that constituted the discovery of fission and, subsequently, the “Forgetting” of the role of one discoverer.

Lise Meitner was the third of eight children of a Viennese Jewish family. I 1908, two of Lise’s sisters became Catholics and she herself became protestant. While conscientious, these conversions counted for nothing after Hitler came to power. Owing to Austrian restrictions on female education, Lise Meitner only entered the University of Vienna in 1901. With Ludwig Boltzmann as her teacher, she learned quickly that physics was her calling. Years later, Meitner’s nephew, Otto Robert Frisch, wrote that “Boltzmann gave her the vision of physics as a battle for the ultimate truth, a vision she never lost”[2]

Doctorate in hand, she went to Berlin in 1907 to study with Max Planck. She began to work with a che3mist, Otto Hahn, she doing the physics and he the chemistry of radioactive substances. The collaboration continued for 30 years, each heading a section of Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry. Together and independently they achieved important results in the new field of nuclear physics, competing with Irene Curie, Frederic Joliot, and other foreign groups.

In 1934, Enrico Fermi produced radioactive isotopes by neutron bombardment, coming to a puzzle only with uranium. There were several products; were any of them transuranic elements? Meitner drew Hahn and also Fritz Strassmann into a new collaboration to probe the possibilities. By 1938, the puzzle had only grown.

After the Anschluss (German annexation of Austria in March 1938), Lise Meitner had to emigrate. In the summer of 1938, she went to Manne Siegbahn’s institute in Stockholm. As Sime writes, “Neither asked to join Siegbahn’s group nor given the resources to for m her own, she had laboratory space but no collaborators, equipment, or technical support, not even her own set of keys…”[3] She corresponded with Hahn as he and Strassmann tried to identify their “transuranes.”

On November 13, 1938, Hahn met secretly with Meitner in Copenhagen. At her suggestion, Hahn and Strassmann performed further tests on a uranium product they thought was radium. When they found that it was in fact barium, they published their results in Naturwissenschaften (January 6, 1939). Simultaneously, Meitner and Frisch explained (and named) nuclear fission, using Bohr’s “liquid drop” model of the nucleus; their paper appeared in Nature (February 11, 1939). The proof of fission required Meitner’s and Frisch’s physical insight as much as the chemical findings of Hahn and Strassmann.

But the separation of the former collaborators and Lise’s scientific and actual exile led to the Novel committee’s failure to understand her part in the work. Later Hahn rationalized her exclusion and others buried her role even deeper. The Nobel “mistake,” never acknowledged, was partly rectified in 1966, when Hahn, Meitner, and Strassmann were awarded the U.S. Fermi Prize.

By PHILIP ELLIOTT, Associated Press Writer

Sun Jan 6, 12:31 PM ET

MANCHESTER, N.H. - Bill Bradley, a former presidential hopeful and senator, on Sunday endorsed Democrat Barack Obama for president.  

“Barack Obama is building a broad new coalition that brings together Democrats, independents and Republicans by once again making idealism a central focus of our politics,” Bradley said in a statement released by Obama’s campaign. “Because of his enormous appeal to Americans of all ages and backgrounds, Obama is the candidate best positioned to win in November. … His movement for change could create a new era of American politics — truly a new American story.

“Bradley, a hall of fame professional basketball player, will campaign for Obama on Monday, Obama aides told The Associated Press.

The aides, speaking on condition of anonymity ahead of the formal announcement, said they hoped the endorsement would help Obama end rival Hillary Rodham Clinton’s status as the national front-runner. Clinton finished a disappointing third in Iowa’s caucuses last week and is deadlocked with Obama in New Hampshire, according to a poll released Saturday.

The CNN-WMUR poll conducted Friday night and Saturday afternoon showed the two in a tight race, each with 33 percent support. A second poll, from The Concord Monitor and Research 2000, shows Obama at 34 and Clinton at 33.

New Hampshire’s presidential primary is Tuesday.

Bradley, who represented New Jersey in the Senate, ran in the 2000 presidential primary against Vice President Al Gore, appealing to the party’s liberal base and portraying himself as an alternative to Gore. Bradley failed to win because many of New Hampshire’s largest voting bloc — independents — flocked to Arizona Sen. John McCain.

Bradley briefly considered running in 2004, but instead supported then-Vermont Gov. Howard Dean.

Obama said he was grateful for the endorsement.

“Bill Bradley has always called on Americans to reach for what is possible in our politics,” Obama said in the statement. “As a presidential candidate and author, he has continued to challenge us to build a mandate for pragmatic solutions and progressive change.”

Obama’s state director, Matt Rodriguez, was a top aide to Bradley’s campaign here in 2000. 

I know a lot of people are starting to do something they might have not done for decades…

…they are starting to believe again.

History was made indeed. I know the whole world took note of what took place in Iowa.

I was watching one of the spokespersons on Fox news last night when they were discussing what happened after Obama won. Some of the ’skeptics’ were saying that Obama’s challenges lie in finding answers to situations like, “When will you take us to war when we need to fight?” and clarifying his stand among other analogous circumstances. But one commentator spoke of Obama being right for the country at this moment, and I tend to agree. The U.S. is the military power of the world, and I don’t think defending itself or any other country would be an issue.

Could it possibly be that matters of a country’s conscience and heart would become national issues that may finally be realized in Obama?

Perhaps we saw a little bit of it in Iowa last night.

Marching towards the land of the free…

Saw this today and had to post it…

Speaking to unprecedented crowds all across Iowa, in fact, the largest by far, it is undeniable that Obama is going into this thing with some momentum.   All three major candidates have pulled out the stops and performed with maximum effort.   We are only 3 hours to prime time now and the anticipation is bout to kill me.  I didn’t leave the house until late and could barely sleep.  I have never seen anything like this before, unless you take Obama’s first Senate Campaign and Deval Patrick’s Gubernatorial Campaign into account.     This is really something.     I’ll be back later to update with my thoughts and opinions.

Posted by skepticalbrotha on January 3, 2008 at 4:34 pm

One of my all-time favorites…

EMMY NOETHER
Creative Mathematical Genius

Born: Erlangen, Germany, March 23, 1882

Died: Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, April 14, 1935

It might be that Emmy Noether was designed for mathematical greatness. Her father Max was a math profesor at the University of Erlangen. Scholarhsip was in her family; two of her three brothers became scientists as well. Emmy would surpass them all. Ultimately Max would become best known as Emmy Noether’s father.

Amalie Emmy Noether spent an average childhood learning the arts that were expected of upper middle class girls. Girls were not allowed to attend the college preparatory schools. Instead, she went to a general “finishing school,” and in 1900 was certified to teach English and French. But rather than teaching, she pursued a university education in mathematics.

She audited classes at Erlangen as one of two women among thousands of men, then took the entrance exam. She entered the University of Gottingen in 1903, again as an auditor, and transferred back to Erlangen in 1904 when the university finally let women enroll. She received her mathematics Ph. D. in 1907.

Noether worked at the Mathematical Institute of Erlangen, without pay or title, from 1908 to 1915. It was during this time that she collaborated with the algebraist Ernst Otto Fischer and started work on the more general, theoretical algebra for which she would later be recognized. She also worked with the prominent mathematicians Hermann Minkowski, Felix Klein and David Hilbert, whom she had met at Gottingen. In 1915 she joined the Mathematical Institute in Gottingen and started working with Klein and Hilbert on Einstein’s general relativity theory. In 1918 she proved two theorems that were basic for both general relativity and elementary particle physics. One is still known as “Noether’s Theorem.”

But she still could not join the faculty at Gottngen University because of her gender. Noether was only allowed to lecture under Hilbert’s name, as his assistant. Hilbert and Albert Einstein interceded for her, and in 1919 she obtained permission to lecture, although still without salary. In 1922 she became an “associate professor without tenure” and began to receive a small salary. Her status did not change while she remained at Gottingen, owing not only to prejudices against women, but also because she was a Jew, a Social Democrat, and a pacifist*[1]

During the 1920’s Noether did foundational work on abstract algebra, working in group theory, ring theory, group representations, and number theory. Her mathematics would be very useful for physicists and crystallographers, but it was controversial then. There as debate wether mathematics should be conceptual and abstract (intuitionist) or more physically based and applied (constructionist). Noether’s conceptual approach to algebra led to a body of principles unifying algebra, geometry, linear algebra, topology, and logic.

In 1928-29 she was a visiting professor at the University of Moscow. In 1930, she taught at Frankfurt. The International Mathematical Congress in Zurich asked her to give a plenary lecture in 1932, and in the same year she was awarded the prestigious Ackermann-Teubner Memorial Prize in mathematics.

Nevertheless, in April 1933 she was denied permission to teach by the Nazi government. It was too dangerous for her to stay in Germany, and in September she accepted a guest professorship at Bryn Mawr College. She also lectured at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The guest position was extended, but in April 1935 she had surgery to remove a uterine tumor and died from a postoperative infection.

Wish I could have known her personally. Only God knows what black women have been through in realizing even half of their dreams. Makes me, as a man, realize the importance of both sides of our human heritage…

ROGER ARLINER YOUNG

Born: Clifton Forge, Virginia, 1899

Died: New Orleans, November 9, 1964

Lifelong Struggle of a Zoologist

Roger Arliner Young was the first African-American woman to receive a doctorate in zoology, after years of juggling research and teaching with the burden of caring for her invalid mother. Her story is one of grit and perseverance.

Roger Arliner Young grew up in Burgettstown, Pennsylvania. In 1916, she entered Howard University. In 1921, she took her first science course, Under Ernest Everett Just, a prominent black biologist and head of the zoology department at Howard. Although her grades were poor, Just saw some promise and started mentoring Young. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1923.

Her relationship with Just improved her skills, and he continued working with her. According to his biographer, Just probably chose a woman protégé because he thought men more likely to pursue lucrative careers in medicine than to remain in academe.*[1] Just helped young find funding to attend graduate school. In 1924 she entered the University of Chicago part-time. Her grades improved dramatically. She was asked to join Sigma Xi, an unusual honor for a master’s student. She also began publishing her research. Her first article, “On the Excretory Apparatus in Paramecium,” appeared in Science in September 1924. She obtained her master’s degree in 1926.

Just invited Young to work with him during the summers at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, starting in 1927. Young assisted him with research on the fertilization process of marine organisms. She also worked on the processes of hydration and dehydration in living cells. Her expertise grew, and Just called her a “real genius in zoology”.

Early in 1929, Young stood in for Just as head of the Howard zoology department while Just worked on a grant project in Europe. I was the first of many trips to Europe for Just and the first of many stand-in appointments for Young. In the fall of that year, Young returned to Chicago to start a Ph. D. under the direction of Frank Lillie, the embryologist who had been Just’s mentor at Woods Hole. But she failed her qualifying exams in January 1930.

She had given little indication of stress, but the failure to qualify was devastating. She broke and still had to care for her mother. She left and told no one her whereabouts. Lillie, deeply concerned, wrote the president of Howard to teach and continued working at Woods Hole in the summers, but her relationship with Just cooled considerably.

Just started easing her out of her position in 1933. There had been rumors about romance between Just and Young. Various accusations were exchanged. They had a confrontation in 1935, and in 1936 she was fired, ostensibly for missing classes and mistreating lab equipment.

She took an assistant professorship at the North Carolina College for Negroes in Raleigh.[2] Unfortunately, her mental health failed again. She worked short contracts in Texas and at Jackson State College in Mississippi. While in Mississippi in the late 1950’s, she was hospitalized at the State Mental Asylum. She was discharged in 1962 and she went to Southern University in New Orleans. She died, poor and alone, on November 9, 1964.   

As Physics is a male dominated society, the recognition for women has been somewhere between minute and non-existent. As the discipline is not merely about theories but the individuals behind them, I am showcasing one of several women who have had a significant impact to the field itself.  

ROSALIND ELSIE FRANKLIN

Born: London, England, July 25, 1920

Died: London, England, April 16, 1958  

There is probably no other woman scientist with as much controversy surrounding her life and work as Rosalind Franklin. Franklin was responsible for much of the research and discovery work that led to the understanding of the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA. The story of DNA is a tale of competition and intrigue, told one way in James Watson’s book The Double Helix, and another in Anne Sayre’s study, The Rosalind Franklin and DNA. James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins received a Nobel Prize for the double-helix model of DNA in 1962, four years after Franklin’s death at age 37 from ovarian cancer.   

Franklin excelled at science and attended one of the few girls’ schools in London that taught physics and chemistry. When she was 15, she decided to become a scientist. Her father was decidedly against higher education for women and wanted Rosalind to be a social worker. Ultimately he relented, and in 1938 she enrolled at Newnham College, Cambridge, graduating in 1941. She held a graduate fellowship for a year, but quit in 1942 to work at the British Coal Utilization Research Association, where she made fundamental studies of carbon and graphite microstructures. This work was the basis of her doctorate in physical chemistry, which she earned from Cambridge University in 1945.   

After Cambridge, she spent three productive years (1947-1950) in Paris at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de L’Etat, where she learned X-ray diffraction techniques. In 1951, she returned to England as a research associate in John Randall’s Laboratory at King’s College, Cambridge.   

It was in Randall’s lab that she crossed paths with Maurice Wilkins. She and Wilkins led separate research groups and had separate projects, although both were concerned with DNA. When Randall gave Franklin responsibility for her DNA project, no one had worked on it for months. Wilkins was away at the time, and when he returned he misunderstood her role, behaving as though she were a technical assistant. His mistake, acknowledged but never overcome, was not surprising given the climate for women at Cambridge then. Only males were allowed in the university dining rooms, and after hours Franklin’s colleagues went to men-only pubs.  

But Franklin persisted on the DNA project. J.D. Bernal called her X-ray photographs of DNA, “the most beautiful X-ray photographs of any substance ever taken.” Between 1951 and 1953 Rosalind Franklin came very close to solving the DNA structure. She was beaten to publication by Crick and Watson in part because of the friction between Wilkins and herself. At one point, Wilkins showed Watson on of Franklin’s crystallographic portraits of DNA. When he saw the picture, the solution became apparent to him, and the results went into an article in Nature almost immediately. Franklin’s work did appear as a supporting article in the same issue of the journal.   

A debate about the amount of credit due to Franklin continues. What is clear is that she did have a meaningful role in learning the structure of DNA and that she was a scientist of the first rank. Franklin moved to L.D. Bernal’s lab at Birkbeck College, where she did very fruitful work on the tobacco mosaic virus. She also bean work on the polio virus. In the summer of 1965, Rosalind became ill with cancer. She died less than two years later.   

“WOMEN IN SCIENCE: A Selection of 16 Significant Contributors”-MM and LS

Prologue/Disclaimer: I saw this segment about midlife and was so intrigued that I had to repost it here. These women were giving some powerful advice, wisdom and insight. I listened to the segment and recorded it here to the best of my auditory ability. Thus misspelled names, words and terms may at least be written phonetically.  

Overall, it was a great segment, these women were saying some powerful things. I especially liked Dr. Saltz clarification of men and how we deal with trauma by running to (what my pastor would say) indulgences (a fast bike or car, a new flame) as a futile attempt to alleviate rather than grow from the experience. 

Ann: We often talk about the mid life crisis of men; the convertible, the new hairstyle the trophy wife; but women two have their own midlife crisis. So AARP feature editor Gabrielle Redford is here along with Today’s and I Village’s contributing psychologist Dr. Gail Saltz to talk about this because we want to help some people this morning, maybe even our helves-ourselves talking about this topic morning to both of you.  

Dr. Saltz and Gabrielle: Good morning.  

Ann: So how do you think, um, women today Gabby are more, uh, affected at this time of their lives given all the changes that we’ve been able to embrace?  

Gabrielle: well, I think most women between the ages of forty and sixty-five go through a period of re-evaluating their lives and coming to terms with some of the choices they’ve made in their-in their past. Women today have so many more choices than their mothers and their grandmothers had before them. And so with more choices you have more regrets more ‘what ifs?’  

Ann: So regrets is the thing that sometimes-it-and we’re talking about an age-an age group between forty and sixty-five that you’re looking at now. You’ve got a list of things that you say are the five most common life regrets for women. You say, um, education is one of them, maybe a lack of education… 

Gabrielle: Lack of education…  

Ann: Career saying I didn’t get that job or that job or that job that kind of idea?  

Gabrielle: Yes  

Ann: And also you say romance; in what way?  

Gabrielle: Romance is lost love. It may be broken marriages. It may be, uh, misguided affairs. Miss, uh-ill advised affairs; things like that.  

Ann: I shouldn’t have done that family; not having become a mother, or perhaps having had too many children, or what?  

Gabrielle: Or perhaps, um, you’ve made the wrong child care choices. You either didn’t’ stay home with your kids or you did stay home with them and wish you had pursued a career.  

Ann: Or maybe you don’t feel that close to your kids any more and you feel that kind of regret Also-also about yourself; people are disappointed in their own abilities, their attitudes and behaviors. So we’re having basically-we’re talking about unhappiness; people being, uh, reaching a point in life where they’re unhappy with what they’re looking back at. See, this is a great opportunity Gail.  

Dr. Shultz: It sure is.  

Ann: To stop, turn around look at the future because you’ve got so many more years ahead because we’re living longer…  

Dr. Saltz: Yes  

Ann: So what do we do with this?  

Dr. Saltz: Well, actually regret can let you evaluate, re-evaluate what’s happened and therefore decide maybe what do I want to change in a very positive way. Or what do I want to accept because you know what there are some things you can’t chance. You can’t go back and change or you might not be able to change moving forward, but if you can find an acceptance in that and a forgiveness of yourself in that, you actually can find a lot of happiness in the moment. So this issue is not to not have regrets because everbody’s gonna have some. You can’t choose everything, you can’t get everything. The point is to really not be paralyzed with regret.  

Ann: Well for one of the things I noticed is that, you know, we say that for men its so obvious. They buy a car or have a trophy girlfriend or whatever; I’ve seen women by the way buying the car and have a trophy boyfriend. But-but-but never the less, how-some women you’re saying may not do the things that lets them know that they’re going through this-through this change. So how can they know that they’re feeling this-that they’re going through this kind of developmental change?  

Dr. Saltz: Well, it, uh, I think it is similar for, that men act out these things if they’re not being introspective so if they stop, if they –if they see they’re doing things, ‘Oh-uh quickly! I want this relationship, I want this car; I’m gonna make this change…’; if you’re blasting out in all directions you might think, ‘Uh, wait a minute; something’s going on in my head that I’m anxious about getting in touch with…’ and you sit down and write down my thoughts and think about it.  

Ann: You say write it down and forget it. You say consider, uh, it final; in other words that’s the end of it?  

Dr. Saltz: you now what you might not forget it but writing it down might help you with your thoughts and-and in terms of moving on you know you have to find some acceptance so some doors may be closed if you accept that its closed you wont keep ruminating on it. 

Ann: Also you suggest look on the dark side?

Gabrielle: Right; instead of really focusing on all the ways your life could have been better, look at the things look at the ways that it might have been worse if you had taken that different career path or if you had made different family choices.  

Ann: So keeping that cup half full. Also you say do something about it. So for example you’re not feeling connected with your kids or you’re feeling as if you didn’t do such a great job on this or that or the other…why not go and confront him and say honey…  

Dr Saltz: Its not too late…   

Gabrielle: Its never too late.  

Ann: I want to apologize about x-y-z…   

Dr. Saltz?: Yes  

Ann: …and I want to say to you face to face I want to move from here…   

Dr Saltz: Exactly   

Ann: I mean there’s a kind of opportunity right to redefine your future.   

Gabrielle: Absolutely  

Ann: You know, I’m kind of against the coulda-shoulda-woulda thinking; the idea that you spend your time going in that circle. You know worrying about what you didn’t do or should-uh done or could-uh done. I mean I really think that we have to kind of let people turn on the dime. What’s your best advice on how we can turn on the dime, Gabby, based on what you’ve learned?  

Gabrielle: Really to just go for your-your possibilities. Think about all the possibilities that you still have available to you no matter what you’re stage in life and embrace those possibilities.  

Ann: Life is short; go get it. Gabby thank you so much…