Meitner and the "Matilda Effect" | I read

Text/Zhou Jie (Senior Media Person)

Fifty-year-old Wu Jianxiong invited eighty-year-old senior Meitner to visit Columbia University, and the two ate at a nearby restaurant, "laughing and laughing together, talking in the dim lights", and they were happy to see each other. Wu Jianxiong, worried that Meitner was old and might often have to go to the toilet, asked her if she wanted to go. Meitner smiled slightly and said, No, I was in the lab all day and had been trained.

Two generations of female physicists will understand this joke, so Wu Jianxiong's biography specifically records it.

It is said that the best joke is tearful laughter, so Meitner said the best joke: there is tearful heartache in trained joy.

The laboratory where Meitner works is called the Royal Wilhelm Institute of Chemistry in Berlin, Germany. This study has one rule: women are not allowed to work here. After receiving her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Geneva, Meitner came to the holy land of scientific research at the time, and the institute naturally refused to accept her on the grounds of gender. Fischer, a professor at the University of Berlin and winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, had the insight to allow her to work in the basement next to the laboratory building, and she could not go in and out of the main entrance, only the side door. The basement is where carpenters work, only men's toilets, no women's toilets. Meitner had to drink as little water as possible, hold back urine, and hold back all day. In time, of course, well trained.

Meitner also had no title at the institute and could only conduct research in the name of an assistant. Her boss was Hahn, and even though she was a year older than Hahn, even if she understood modern nuclear physics more thoroughly than Hahn—at a time when the physics revolution was in full swing, and she was more like a leader in collaborative research with Hahn—she could only be an assistant: all the research could only be published in the name of Hahn's assistant, and even if Hahn joined the army, in his absence, The work that Meitner had to do independently had to be signed as hahn as the first author.

This was the price that a female scientist had to pay at the time: to pursue scientific research, she had to endure gender injustice. This treatment, in the words of the meitner biographer, is "a persistent double exclusion: the exclusion of women in science and the exclusion of women's work in the scientific record." ”

The latter type of rejection is, of course, the discovery of "nuclear fission". In 1938, when Hahn and Strassmann bombarded uranium nuclei with neutrons, they discovered that barium was contained in the resulting radiation. Puzzled, he wrote to Metna, who had fled Germany for Sweden because of his Jewish identity, and with the help of his nephew Frisch, He quickly realized that this was not a new transuranic element that everyone had previously thought, but a fission of the uranium nucleus, divided into pieces of different sizes. This is an epoch-making discovery, and its significance goes without saying. It should be noted that this phenomenon was actually discovered by the Fermi experimental group in Rome and the Jolio-Curie in Paris, but neither of them considered nuclear fission, and they were constantly looking for new elements in the opposite direction - Fermi also cited this as the biggest regret of his life. Only Meitner's theory perfectly explained this phenomenon, and since then the dark night of nuclear physics has been illuminated, and some people have called Meitner the "mother of the atomic bomb." That is to say, Hahn's discovery is not unique, and Meitner's theory is the key to epoch-making. However, the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded only to Hahn and Strassmann, and Meitner was ignored.

The injustices suffered by women in science are also known as the "Matilda effect", and compared to the "Matthew effect" – the strong are stronger, the rich are richer – the "Matilda effect", the weak are weak, and the few are fewer. For female scientists, it is that "women's scientific research results are less recognized, and the influence of co-authored research results tends to go to men." The masculine temperament that pervades science interacts with the socially constructed expectations of gender roles, making women's hierarchical status influenced by disciplines. Women who work in traditional male-dominant disciplines such as engineering have a negative impact on their hierarchical status. This is a conclusion based on a paper on the hierarchical situation of Chinese scientific and technological workers.

Although the conclusion is based on the current situation in China, it is a common phenomenon on a worldwide scale. Moreover, the "Matilda effect" is not a historical effect, but a realistic effect that accompanies the development of science. From Wu Jianxiong, who is related to Meitner, who has not been a professor at Columbia University for a long time, and the perfect experiment of confirming that "cosmology is not conserved" has been forgotten by the Nobel Prize; to the 2018 Nobel Prize winner in physics, the female Strickland is only an associate professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada, all of which prove the existence of this effect, and there is no shortage of People in The Metner-style "tearful laughter".

When today's public opinion cheers that "associate professors can also win the Nobel Prize", the opposite side of the news may hear Meitner's exclamations in his later years of looking back on his life path:

Life does not need to be comfortable, as long as it is not empty.

Yes? Phyah? Open-minded? Helpless yeah?

Reading List:

Liz Meitner: A Life in Physics by Rutz Livin Sem, translated by Goe, Jiangxi Education Publishing House

"Wu Jianxiong - The First Lady of Physical Science" by Jiang Caijian Fudan University Press

"The Matilda Effect and Gender Inequality in Science: Based on a Survey on the Stratification of Chinese Science and Technology Workers", Zhu Tingyu/Zhao Wanli, Dialectics of Nature Newsletter, 2017-9

【Editor: Ye Jun】