Talk:Otto Hahn

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Untitled
I question the claim on this page that Hahn worked on the German fission weapon program. For example, this article suggests otherwise: http://www.britannica.com/nobel/micro/254_40.html

So does this one: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GERhahn.htm:
 * Hahn had a strong dislike for Adolf Hitler and his government and told a friend: "If my work would lead to Hitler having an atomic bomb I would kill myself."

If Hahn did participate in some way we should state clearly what he did. Peter Hendrickson — Preceding undated comment added 03:13, 26 June 2004 (UTC)

Lise Meitner, and 1944 Nobel controversy
I'm confused by this statement: "Later few American Jewish historians considered [Lise Meitner's] contributions to have been the greater . . . ."  This use of "few" means "not many" and has a definite negative connotation (i.e., it really means the same as "most American Jewish historians did not consider Meitner's contributions to have been the greater".  Is this true?  If the writer meant Meitner's work was considered by some to have been more important than Hahn's, then I would propose changing "few" to "some", or maybe even "many". Richwales 19:39, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

Regarding this statement: ". . . and in a controversial survey of Nobel Prize winners conducted forty years later, Lise Meitner was voted the most deserving of those who had not received the award." I see an NPOV problem here. What was "controversial" about the survey? Who thought it was controversial? Perhaps a more exact, detailed identification of the survey would be in order, together with some discussion of who considered it controversial and why. Richwales 19:39, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps the "who gets the Nobel Prize" section should be shortened, and I think it is more a question for the Meitner article. To my knowledge the controversy is more about that Meitner did NOT receive the Nobel Prize (of Physics) but not about that Hahn did not deserve to receive the Nobel Prize (of Chemistry) or that we downplayed Meitner's role. I think that definitly the Germans/Jews and Man/Woman question is strongly superposed over the controversy and difficult to separate from the actual question. By the way, I somehow think the remember that after war Hahn and Meitner hat still good relations with each other. Does somebody know about that? I list three articles I found by searching a scientific database for "meitner l*":

MEITNER L: OTTO HAHN ZUM 85. GEBURTSTAG (Otto Hahn to the 85th birthday), NATURWISSENSCHAFTEN 51, 9 (1964)

MEITNER L: EINIGE ERINNERUNGEN AN DAS KAISER-WILHELM-INSTITUT FUR CHEMIE IN BERLIN-DAHLEM (Some memories on the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin-Dahlem) NATURWISSENSCHAFTEN 41, 97-99 (1954)

MEITNER L: ZUR ENTWICKLUNG DER RADIOCHEMIE - HAHN,OTTO ZUM 50 JAHRIGEN DOKTOR-JUBILAUM (On the evolution of radiochemistry - Hahn, Otto to the 50th PhD jubilee), ANGEWANDTE CHEMIE 64, 1-4 (1952) --Linksrechts 19:21, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

The latest edit, by an anonymous user from 217.225.221.201, has removed the question of the controversy completely. For the record, the cut material read as follows, in case people feel it or something like it should go back in:


 * There was also considerable controversy from anti-Germans and anti-Nazis that he had downplayed the role of Lise Meitner, a former Jew and a woman, in their collaboration such that she was excluded in the credit and the Nobel Prize. Some historians have asserted that her contributions were equal if not greater, and in a controversial survey of Nobel Prize winners conducted forty years later Lise Meitner was voted the most deserving of those who had not received the award.

Jheald 17:27, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

lise meitner and hahn
why dont i see a passage dealing with the controversy surrounding hahn and meitner? i have read in the book "e-mc^2" by david bodanis and also seen a documentary "einstein's big idea"(PBS Nova)that hahn purposefully tried to underplay the influence meitner had on his work — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tirthkpatel (talk • contribs) 04:32, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

Although Hahn was one of the great contributors to the field, I think that the article as it presently stands is overly laudatory, that it suppresses the Meitner contributions, and that it is far too silent on Hahn's continuing to work under and, in some cases, on behalf of the Nazi regime. I believe the betrayal of Meitner and Hahn's complicity in removing her from the KWI deserves a mention here. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Danite1 (talk • contribs) 16:12, 29 January 2007 (UTC)


 * In response to the two main topics above "Lise Meitner, and 1944 Nobel controversy" by Richwales and "lise meitner and hahn" (unsigned), which should be under one topic:

Many people indeed feel Meitner was left on the fringes of the discovery of splitting the atom, and its true she played a key role. Hahn seems to have failed to actively acknowledge her role, but I haven't seen any particular evidence that he actively intended to suppress her contributions either.
 * A good source of info from the Meitner POV is the book "Lise Meitner, A Life in Physics" by Ruth Lewin Sime (herself a physics prof). The book is about Meitner of course, but it is excellently researched - and referenced - and by necessity includes a great deal about her 30 year collaboration with Hahn.


 * A couple of points: 1) The Nobel prizes are never rescinded, as far as I know. The comittee never does that. 2) Far as I know, they also do not re-award prizes for the same event (discovery, or what have you) to other contributors after the fact. With these two points in mind, I don't see much need for discussing Hahn's Nobel prize as having a "controversy" other than a brief mention and maybe linking to to Meitner's Wiki bio. Rather it seems to be as much a product of a flaw in the awarding system as anything to do with Hahn. He didn't award the prize to himself! 3) Meitner's contributions do not downgrade Hahn's own work. We keep looking at it as an "either-or" contest. Both probably should have recieved a prize. 4) Meitner's insights flowed to Hahn via their letters in the time that Meitner was isolated in Sweden in an unsupportive environment in Manne Siegbahn's institution - she was given minimal assets (money, space, equipment, assistants, etc) to work with. Meitner was an Experimental physicist, as opposed to Theoretical, and without adequate lab support her work (and her 'visiblity') slowed considerably for 10 years. Point is, this gives a sense of her being in a support role to observers watching from a distance (I do not mean to take away from her brilliant insights or her life's work...). The Sweden era threw Meitner's career off track compared to Hahn.


 * In response to the concern mentioned above about Meitner: "Regarding this statement: ". . . and in a controversial survey of Nobel Prize winners conducted forty years later, Lise Meitner was voted the most deserving of those who had not received the award." I see an NPOV problem here. What was "controversial" about the survey? Who thought it was controversial? Perhaps a more exact, detailed identification of the survey would be in order, together with some discussion of who considered it controversial and why. Richwales 19:39, 18 November 2005 (UTC)"...I agree w/ Richwales - any statement like that about Meitner is better discussed under her Wiki bio, not Hahn. As far as it being controversial, surveying this type of subject after the fact is bound to be problematic. The survey probably included scientists not even born at the time of events we're discussing. Its basically looking back in hindsight.


 * In regard to the statement above by anonymous: "Although Hahn was one of the great contributors to the field, I think that the article as it presently stands is overly laudatory, that it suppresses the Meitner contributions, and that it is far too silent on Hahn's continuing to work under and, in some cases, on behalf of the Nazi regime. I believe the betrayal of Meitner and Hahn's complicity in removing her from the KWI deserves a mention here."...I don't really think the article is overly laudatory - Hahn was surely one of the greatest chemists of the 20th century (maybe in the top three? Or ten?). I also think the fact that he worked under the Nazi regime is obvious, and not overly noteworthy unless someone knows of some particularly heinous project(s) he completed directly promoting Nazi crimes (as opposed to wartime contributions going on all over the world by scientists, medical doctors, etc)...Hahn was never known as a fan of the Nazis, compared, say, to Phillip Lenard who actively wanted Meitner removed. Per Ruth Lewin Sime's exhaustively researched book, Meitner and the Hahn family remained friends up to their deaths... Engr105th 00:12, 30 June 2007 (UTC)
 * yes! Mlgcb (talk) 05:13, 9 January 2024 (UTC)

I put the bit quoted above back in with some modifications.--Gloriamarie 04:06, 4 August 2007 (UTC)

having just read e=mc^2 as well, i thought that the summary at the beginning was a bit of a joke. if you take what's in that book as true, then the line "[he was] Considered by many to be a model for scholarly excellence and personal integrity" doesn't make much sense. --att159 11:18, 7 July 2011 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.207.49.104 (talk)  — Preceding undated comment added 06:19, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

quotes about hahn
I took them off of this page and put them in wikiquote, since it seems more appropriate Acornwithwings 06:11, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

The quotes were added back to this article for some reason. I removed them again and added a link to Otto Hahn's wikiquote page. –panda (talk) 15:40, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

"Radioactinium"
Do I smell an error here? Then-"Radioactinium" IMHO has nothing to do with actinium, but it's a historical name for the isotope thorium-227! Hence, I don't see why you are linking to the Actinium article here. -andy 77.191.205.168 (talk) 16:01, 9 January 2011 (UTC)
 * If you have a reliable source for radioactinium being thorium-227, I'll change the redirect accordingly.--Roentgenium111 (talk) 16:37, 9 January 2011 (UTC)
 * I just noticed this today and I have found a source. See Joseph Angelo, Nuclear Technology, p.117. Angelo says that "radiothorium" is Th-228 and "radioactinium" is Th-227, and that the original names were given by Hahn when working as a postdoc for Rutherford in 1904-1906. This was before atomic numbers were assigned or isotopes were understood, so it is not surprising that the inital identifications were very confused. Dirac66 (talk) 02:45, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

Discoverer of Nuclear Fission
Why does the first paragraph not identify him as a discoverer of nuclear fission? HowardMorland (talk) 21:15, 12 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks to User:Dirac66 for fixing this. HowardMorland (talk) 02:11, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

water-tap or faucet
Is Otto Hahn the inventor of the water-tap (faucet)? In german it translates to Wasserhahn. Just a "theory". User:ScotXW t@lk 10:34, 26 June 2014 (UTC)

A bit more about chemical warfare in WWI
The article on the Battle of Caporetto says:

In September three experts from the Imperial General Staff led by the chemist Otto Hahn went to the Isonzo front to find a site suitable for a gas attack.

The article on Hahn has a brief mention of his involvement in chemical warfare, under "discovery of protactinium." I suggest adding a subhead on chemical warfare, to give this aspect of his life a bit more prominence, with a cross-ref. to the Battle of Caporetto. Oaklandguy (talk) 20:48, 14 November 2014 (UTC) --User:Ceyockey ( talk to me ) 17:38, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

Meitner did not bombard uranium with neutrons
I don't think that Meitner and Frisch were involved in the fission experiment until after the data were collected. Their brilliant 1939 paper explained the results obtained by Hahn and Strassmann a year earlier in Berlin, but at that time the actual experiment was complete. My understanding is that Hahn and Strassmann were the experimental half of the team, and Meitner and Frisch were the theoretical half. The current wording in the article makes it sound like Meitner (but not Frisch) was one of the experimentalists. I believe that when the experiments were performed at the lab in Berlin, Meitner was already a refugee in Sweden because of her race.

Note that the Nobel prize was awarded to Hahn (but not to Strassmann for some reason) for the experiment, and not to Meitner and Frisch for the theory. Rwflammang (talk) 17:13, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

Added a citation regarding the diamond ring Hahn gave Meitner. — Preceding unsigned comment added by MrColeJohnson (talk • contribs) 02:28, 31 October 2016 (UTC)

Removed Quote
- More curious than challenging you: So you are saying the quote is not in a reliable source? How are you certain it didn't happen? --John (User:Jwy/talk) 19:16, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

"Hahn’s biographer, Klaus Hoffmann wrote that the news of Hiroshima had so upset Hahn the other Farm Hall internees feared he would commit suicide, and some even kept watch over him that night to ensure he could not do so. The Farm Hall transcript, however, does not support the claim that Hahn contemplated suicide, and instead indicates that it was the physicist Walther Gerlach who was quite upset by the news of Hiroshima, so much that when his fellow internees Max von Laue and Paul Harteck tried to comfort him Gerlach threatened to shoot himself. According to Major Ritter, Gerlach “consider[ed] himself in the position of a defeated general, the only alternative to whom is to shoot himself.”440 However, Gerlach had no gun and was ultimately calmed by Laue and Harteck, and later by Hahn as well. There is no evidence at all that any of the other internees, including Hahn, reacted so strongly to Hiroshima. J. Michael Cole, the translator of Hoffmann’s biography agrees that Hoffmann probably had a poor version of the Farm Hall transcript (the transcripts were not officially released or published until 1993, by which time Hoffmann’s biography was in press) and as a result confused Hahn and Gerlach. As Cole wrote: “This direct record [the Farm Hall transcripts]…counters the contention that Hahn was of any suicidal mind, let alone sufficient to cause his colleagues serious concern, and reveals that it was Gerlach who was badly affected with such a mood, here [in Hoffmann] incorrectly imprecated upon Hahn.”"


 * I've checked Jeremy Bernstein, Hitler’s Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall, pp. 133-137. The quote from Cole comes from the translator's notes in the 2001 edition of Hoffmann's book; I don't have that book (and the library has lost its copy), and the article writer had the earlier 1993 edition, and Badash writing in 1983 so must have had a still earlier copy. So I removed the quite under WP:NOTFALSE.  Hawkeye7   (discuss)  20:47, 6 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Sounds reasonable. Thanks --John (User:Jwy/talk) 22:33, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

Thoughts on edits
Today I made some 65 edits. Not all are cut and dried improvements, for example see my es's. Other questions I met and could not answer completely:

1. How to note isotopes? And wikilink them? They appear in contemporary names (mesothorium I), modern names (uranium-234), uranium X2 (protactinium-234), plus wrong or dead-end names.

Can we use a convention to: write contemporary name throughout (when describing a contemporal process). At introduction, add modern name in -brackets, and wl'ed (the wl to precise article/section as possible; at least the Isotopes of ... page). Repeat this for every section (ie, introduce an isotope in every section where it is used; once/article is not helpful IMO). I would not mind when someone uses the symbolic notation also (234U), to describe a process (like alpha-decay, or beta-decay). This is better than, as a reader, having to make written notes while reading ;-) )
 * I needed a list while writing! All the sources used the old names and while the Wikipedia notes them in the "isotopes of..." articles, often you didn't know what element they were. I constructed a table. Each of the old names is followed by a modern one in parentheses. The new names are anachronistic until Chadwick's discovery of the neutron in 1932. Even isotopes were not discovered until 1913; before that Hahn was credited with discovering new elements. I stuck with linking each element on first appearance. In some cases isotopes have their own articles, some have a section in the isotopes article, and some are merely part of a table of isotopes. Hahn nearly blew the symbolic notation out of the water when he discovered nuclear isomerism. We could say  but many readers won't know what I'm talking about. I decided not to use the chemical symbols as those of elements like protactinium are not well known. However, the Discovery of nuclear fission article uses them extensively.   Hawkeye7   (discuss)  22:58, 30 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Is WP:CHEMNAME of any help? --John (User:Jwy/talk) 02:47, 1 July 2020 (UTC)
 * WP:CHEMNAME does not solve this issue: when Hahn discovered new species, they gave odd names to what were isotopes etc. This Hahn article could use a good old-name/current-name translation table in the text, while preventing being illegible ;-) -DePiep (talk) 20:51, 5 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Wow! You people are more educated than I but THANK YOU for saying cut & dried! As a word/grammar/spelling person, drives me nuts that people think it's "cut & dry". It's not! Glad to see some actual smart people on here. Mlgcb (talk) 05:25, 9 January 2024 (UTC)

2. Lots of persons are introduced. In some cases I have added qualifications like "physicist" (but not: "American"), to illustrate why that person is of interest. However, there may be too many names to keep this up.

3. General reading: sometimes I added a description (eg for KWS), as a single name may not be clear. Say, at least a section should be understandable without having to click a link. IUPAC, OTOH, may taking up too much space.
 * The abbreviation is KWG. I avoided the use of abbreviations where possible.   Hawkeye7   (discuss)  22:58, 30 June 2020 (UTC)

4. And this: what an interesting person (=article) to read! A great composition to you editor(s). Hawkeye7@undefined


 * Thanks. I found him a pretty complicated person. The article tells the reader a lot about the development of radiochemistry over a half a century, and also a lot about science in Germany. Note that the it is up for review at WP:GAN.  Hawkeye7   (discuss)  22:58, 30 June 2020 (UTC)

5. (sign OP): -DePiep (talk) 18:55, 30 June 2020 (UTC)


 * Tbh, I don't think I should GAN-promote this article, because I am not familiar with the GAN process at all. Meanwhile, I will truly try to improve the article. -DePiep (talk) 20:40, 5 July 2020 (UTC)

Academic history
The personal history of Otto Hahn should have included an explicit listing of his academic credentials. For example, the article says, "A graduate of the University of Marburg," but does not state what field he graduated from nor the academic level---bachelors? Masters? Doctorate? 38.124.147.11 (talk) 17:37, 26 February 2023 (UTC)


 * The article does provide this. It says: "In 1901, Hahn received his doctorate in Marburg for a dissertation entitled "On Bromine Derivates of Isoeugenol", a topic in classical organic chemistry... Hahn completed his habilitation in the spring of 1907, and became a Privatdozent. A thesis was not required; the Chemical Institute accepted one of his publications on radioactivity instead." Hawkeye7   (discuss)  23:32, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Incarceration section
In this section we read that all the captive scientists were held at Chateau Facqueval. This is not referenced but after some searching I found the following article https://www.dissident-media.org/infonucleaire/bombe_reich.pdf dated in 1993. It is written in French but does confirm that they were held in Chateau Facqueval. Maybe somebody could create a reference in the page. Everybody got to be somewhere! (talk) 23:48, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

This lede does not conform with other pages on nuclear fission and its discovery
Hello to everyone that has contributed to this specific article.

As per the information I have recently corrected in other articles pertaining to nuclear fission and who did what when, this lede is not correct or accurate in many aspects. It also contradicts other articles quite significantly. Hahn and Strassmann only observed nuclear fission and accidentally when they conducted specific experiments based on Lise Meitner's theoretical suppositions pertaining to research all three had been conducting, but after Mietner had fled Nazi Germany in July. On 19 December 1938 when Hahn and Strassmann conducted a specific bombardment of uranium with neutrons, they misinterpreted their findings regardless of the fact they published them mere days afterwards in a German-only publication. Hahn informed Meitner literally that same evening with their findings, but it took Otto Robert Frisch and Meitner to correctly interpret the theoretical data of Hahn and Strassmann whilst Frisch visited his aunty Lise exiled in Sweden later in December, as he regularly did prior to fleeing Nazi Germany himself in 1933. Frisch and Meitner correctly deduced the observation of Hahn and Strassmann, but it was only Frisch who replicated and confirmed it was replicable in mid-January 1939, as Meitner was still in Sweden.

Frisch published their corrected findings in February. During Frisch's experimentation at Neil Bohr's Institute in Copenhagen, which he'd been exiled to since 1934 as a Jewish-Austrian like his aunt Lise. However, it was Bohr who took this news to the USA with Leon Rosenfeld, and it was Rosenfeld who told John Dunning and Herbert Anderson who had just begun working with Enrico Fermi (exiled from Fascist Italy due to his wife being Jewish-Italian in December 1938) at Columbia University in New York City. CU physics staff also included Leo Szilard, who is the first person to conceive a nuclear chain reaction in 1933 when exiled to London from Nazism as a Jewish-Hungarian.

The experiments of Fermi and Szilard in New York with Bohr, Dunning, Anderson, etc, concurrently occur when Frisch is conducting his experiments to confirm the correct reinterpretation of Hanh and Strassmann's findings, thus it is only Frisch and Meitner who actually discover what had occurred - not Hahn or Strassmann. Frisch is unaware of Bohr letting the cat out of the bag, considering he had asked him not to prior to leaving for the USA in January 1939, and it is Frisch who actually confirmed, and named, nuclear fission through discussions with Bohr in Copenhagen. Hahn did not discover nuclear fission because he misinterpreted his findings, just like Irene Joliot-Curie and Pavle Savic misinterpreted their findings earlier in 1938 conducting similar experiments, which Meitner also corrected and reinterpreted (a fact Irene Curie later acknowledged prior to her death), and from which Hahn and Strassmann could even conduct their experiment to begin with. Irene and Frederic Joliot-Curie only conducted their experiments in Paris due to Enrico Fermi's team in Rome conducting research based on Leo Szilard and Thomas Chalmers in 1934, that discovered the Szilard-Chalmers effect of isotopic separation, which itself was based on Fermi's experiment from earlier in 1934, and again itself relied upon publications by the Joliot-Curie's earlier in 1933. All these publications were predominantly published in Nature and from which each team continued their research.

Hahn and Strassmann did not discover nuclear fission nor name it, they accidentally observed it and got it wrong. Frisch confirms nuclear fission is replicable and Bohr corrected the record that it is indeed Frisch who first confirmed nuclear fission come late-February 1939, but unfortunately after he, Fermi, Szilard, Dunning, Anderson and other physicists in the USA had begun to conduct their own research from Meitner and Frisch's correct reinterpretation. This is because Frisch had not responded to Bohr's telegrams until 20-22 January about were his experiments were at in Copenhagen.

The circumstances are articulated much more accurately and correctly within the other articles lede, but not on Hahn's for some reason, even though Hahn's links to these articles. Obviously, such corrections should be conducted for Hahn. Also, he is not the 'father of nuclear fission or nuclear chemistry' and I've never in all my research ever come across anyone labelling Hahn as such in any fashion. All of Hahn's most important achievements are conducted with Meitner during their decades of joint research prior to July 1938 when Meitner was forced to flee Berlin.

It remains a black mark on the Nobel committee for the fact Hahn was solely awarded the Prize for Chemistry, and it remains a misogynist and bigoted decision considering Meitner became a Swedish citizen in 1949, and everyone who matter within in physics had nominated Meitner for the prize nearly 40 times before Hahn was awarded it, a fact ignored in Hahn's lede but illustrated on Meitner's page. I feel there needs to be some rather extensive corrections to Hahn's lede and to his overall story post haste regarding his true contributions to nuclear chemistry and by default nuclear physics. WolfStonerRocker G'DÄŸ 00:53, 5 June 2024 (UTC)