The Department of Physics of the University of Trieste, as part of the initiatives of the Scientific Degrees Plan, is organizing the scientific theater performance "Lise Meitner - Restless Microphysics", on Wednesday 13 May 2026, at 11:30 am, at the Basaglia Theater, in via Edoardo Weiss 13, Trieste.

Admission is free while seats last. Reservations are recommended at the link. https://forms.gle/NCBoWJ4boyEVHTVy9 (or by email to orientamento.df@units.it  in the case of entire groups or classes).

Lise Meitner (1878-1968) was an Austrian physicist, best known for her pivotal role in the discovery of nuclear fission. Despite her crucial contributions, her figure was long overshadowed, partly due to gender discrimination and her Jewish origins during the Nazi era.

In 1938, she was forced to flee to Sweden, where she corresponded extensively with Otto Hahn and helped him interpret the results of his experiments, identifying a new phenomenon: uranium fission. But he alone would receive the Nobel Prize. Lise Meitner was not credited with discovering the physical mechanism underlying fission, but was instead improperly attributed responsibility for the atomic bomb. Yet Lise Meitner had refused to work on the Manhattan Project and had promoted the peaceful use of nuclear energy throughout her life. Her epitaph sums up her life thus: "Lise Meitner, a physicist who never lost her humanity."

The staged reading, produced by the “L’Aquila Signorina” company and interspersed with sequences of film fiction projected on video, portrays the figure of Lise Meitner starting from the collapse of the Hitler regime in 1945 and invites us to reflect on the moral dilemmas that scientists found themselves facing in the dramatic period marked by the rise of totalitarianism, the Second World War and then the Cold War.