title: Murder of Lindsay Hawker

text: was born in Gifu Prefecture on 5 January 1979. He grew up in Gifu as well as in Chiba Prefecture, which is just east of Tokyo. His mother is a dentist and his father is a medical doctor. After graduating from the Department of Horticulture at Chiba University in 2005, Ichihashi did not work and lived on a monthly allowance of about around or $760 at that time from his parents. Ichihashi was 28 years old at the time of the murder, and lived in the city of Ichikawa in Chiba.


title: Murder of Lindsay Hawker

text: Ichihashi had no previous convictions, but he had been the subject of an allegation of "theft and injury" six years before Hawker's death. He had allegedly assaulted a man on the street during a robbery, but the matter had been settled out of court. Ichihashi had been in a stable, year-long relationship with a Japanese woman at the time of Hawker's killing. Police described him as a loner with an obsession for physical fitness; he regularly attended a gym and cycled 25 kilometres a day. He also had an interest in violent manga, which some reporters linked to the case.


title: Murder of Lindsay Hawker

text: Hawker told her boyfriend in England how she met Ichihashi in an e-mail message. Four days before she died, Ichihashi approached Hawker during her train journey home from work. He at first said Hawker was his English teacher (she was not) and then asked her to confirm that. Ichihashi chased her as she cycled home and asked for a glass of water when she arrived. Hawker felt sorry for him and allowed him inside her flat, but showed him to her two flatmates as a precaution. Once inside, Ichihashi drew a picture of her and signed it with his name, telephone number and e-mail address. The pair agreed to meet for an English lesson at a cafe four days later, which was permitted by the Nova school.


title: Murder of Lindsay Hawker

text: Hawker and Ichihashi met on Saturday, 24 March 2007 in a cafe. Afterwards, they caught a taxi to Ichihashi's apartment, a few hundred yards away. Hawker told the taxi driver to wait for a short time and went to the apartment. Seven minutes later, the taxi driver left after she failed to return. Hawker's naked body was later found buried in a bath filled with a mixture of compost soil and sand on the apartment's balcony. She had been bound and gagged with plastic ties and scarves, with one of her hands lying outside the mixture.


title: Murder of Lindsay Hawker

text: Bruises across Hawker's upper body indicated that she had been subjected to a prolonged attack. Police said the egg-sized bruises on the left side of her face appeared to have been inflicted with a fist, while lesser marks on her upper body resulted from collisions with furniture. Both Hawker and Ichihashi were familiar with martial arts; Ichihashi was more experienced than Hawker, having attained a black belt. Hawker had died when her assailant began strangling her and broke the cartilage in her neck. Hawker's head was shaved after she was killed. Her possessions were found strewn across the room.


title: Murder of Lindsay Hawker

text: Media had reported in the days after Hawker's death that Ichihashi had buried her in sand, but he actually buried the body in a mixture of sand and compost soil, then sprayed it with a substance used to compact and decompose waste. It is believed that he planned to either bury the body in concrete or to wait until it had decomposed. Ichihashi had bought the materials over the course of six visits to his local hardware store in the hours leading up the arrival of the police on 26 March.


title: Murder of Lindsay Hawker

text: Nova reported Hawker missing at 2:30 pm on 26 March after she failed to teach her classes scheduled for 25 and 26 March. Hawker's friends had tried to contact the police, but the message was not conveyed to the proper authorities within the department. Two officers were dispatched; they reached Ichihashi's apartment at 5:40 pm but were not permitted to knock without proper cause. The officers noticed somebody in the apartment even though no light was visible. They had been told of the previous allegation made against Ichihashi, and the officers called for back-up at 7:00 pm. Within the next hour, seven more officers arrived.


title: Murder of Lindsay Hawker

text: Two hours after the nine officers had assembled outside, Ichihashi left the apartment barefoot and wearing a rucksack. He was made aware of the situation and tried to run away from the officers. One officer grabbed his rucksack, but Ichihashi continued to flee. None of the officers had radios, so the officers on the fourth floor could not alert those on the ground. Ichihashi eluded the officers by vaulting the last few feet of the stairway to the ground, but he was later rediscovered wearing a pair of athletic shoes. He escaped again by zig-zagging through the street. The rucksack contained his gym clothes, which police believed he was going to wash at the gym.


title: Murder of Lindsay Hawker

text: Police suspect that between Sunday night and early Monday morning, Ichihashi had moved his bathtub from the bathroom to the balcony and put Hawker's body into it. Neighbours said they heard sounds of something striking metal and something being dragged during that time. On Tuesday, the police obtained an arrest warrant for Ichihashi on suspicion of abandoning Hawker's body; they put him on the nationwide wanted list. On 29 March, detectives removed a shopping trolley, in which Ichihashi is believed to have transported the bags of horticultural soil he used to bury Hawker, from his apartment building. That same day, twenty police officers raided Hotel Chateau a love hotel near Nishi-Funabashi Station east of Tokyo but did not find Ichihashi. Police released a new wanted poster of Ichihashi, which included an enhanced image of the suspect disguised as a woman. They also released images of the drawing he had made of Hawker, hoping that someone would recognize the drawing style.


title: Murder of Lindsay Hawker

text: In early 2008, police investigated sightings of Ichihashi among sections of Kabukicho popular with homosexuals, where he had tentatively been identified by his male sexual partners. However, in the latter part of the year, the investigation stalled. By October 2008, 140 officers were involved in the relatively large investigation. That month, the police suggested that Ichihashi may have committed suicide. Hawker's father called this a ploy to scale down the operation, which some inside sources said was coming to a close. Japanese police told neither the Hawker family nor the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office.


title: Murder of Lindsay Hawker

text: Reports speculating about Ichihashi's location continued, and on 15 January 2009 an article in "Japan Today", citing a reporter from the weekly magazine "Spa!", reported that Ichihashi had fled to the Philippines. On 21 March 2009, on the run-up to the second anniversary of Hawker's death, the police released life-size cut-outs of Ichihashi to raise the profile of the case.


title: Murder of Lindsay Hawker

text: On 26 June 2009, the Japanese National Police Agency raised the cash reward for information leading to Ichihashi's arrest from to . The manner in which this reward would be distributed was questioned when Ichihashi was arrested later that year; several informants including a cosmetic surgery clinic in Nagoya, an employee at an Osaka construction company where Ichihashi worked for fourteen months and an Osaka ferry company employee who reported sighting someone who resembled Ichihashi contributed to his capture.


title: Murder of Lindsay Hawker

text: On 4 November 2009, police disclosed that Ichihashi had undergone plastic surgery on 24 October at a clinic in Nagoya, where he had his nose uplifted. He had failed to receive surgery in Fukuoka in mid-October. He had apparently received cosmetic surgery on several occasions to remove two moles on his cheek, add a fold to his eyelids, thin both lips and increase the height of his nose before he visited the Nagoya clinic. Police released to the press a photograph taken immediately before his latest surgery.


title: Murder of Lindsay Hawker

text: On 10 November 2009, Ichihashi was captured in Osaka while trying to board a ferry to Okinawa. Ichihashi did not confess upon being arrested, and when his 23-day period of detention without charge expired on 2 December, he was initially charged with abandoning a body, and served two more warrants for rape and murder. Ichihashi's lawyers alleged that he was threatened with the death penalty if he did not speak, and his reticence was attributed to fatigue and stress. On 23 December, one of his lawyers announced that he had acknowledged that he was involved in Hawker's death but he had not intended to kill her and had attempted artificial resuscitation.


title: Murder of Lindsay Hawker

text: Stephen Green, writing for "The Japan Times", said that the case, which had been extensively covered by the media, was likely to test the fairness of Japan's judicial system which operates a lay judge system and has the option of the death penalty in certain cases. However, it is extremely rare in Japan to be sentenced to death for killing only one person. , fewer than ten of the 111 inmates of Japan's death row had killed only one person, including previous convictions.


title: Murder of Lindsay Hawker

text: In court, Ichihashi admitted to suffocating Hawker to prevent her from screaming for help while he raped her. On 21 July 2011, the Chiba District Court sentenced Ichihashi to life imprisonment for the murder of Hawker. The Hawker family had requested the death penalty, but the court felt the death penalty was inappropriate because Ichihashi had no previous convictions and because at the age of 32 there was still a chance he could be rehabilitated.


title: Murder of Lindsay Hawker

text: During the investigation, Hawker's parents strove to keep their daughter's case on the media agenda. They appealed for information shortly after the murder, visited Japan three months later to renew attention, and visited again a year after her death, imploring the media to keep the case alive and for Ichihashi to turn himself in. Although Bill Hawker expressed dismay at the lack of information about Ichihashi's whereabouts, he said "we have not come here to criticize the Japanese police". Hawker's family returned again on the second anniversary of her death, and her father revisited the country a month after Ichihashi's arrest to express his gratitude.


title: Murder of Lindsay Hawker

text: Hawker's murder was repeatedly compared to the 2000 murder of British citizen Lucie Blackman, whose dismembered body was found buried in a shallow grave at a beach in Miura, Kanagawa in January 2001.


title: Murder of Lindsay Hawker

text: On 29 February 2008, ABC News aired a US documentary titled "Vanished in Japan" related to the deaths of Hawker and Blackman. In September 2008, BBC Radio 4 broadcast "A Tokyo Murder" by John Dryden and Miriam Smith, a three-part radio play which is loosely based on the Hawker case.


title: Murder of Lindsay Hawker

text: Ichihashi wrote a book titled "Until I Was Arrested", which tells his side of the story. He offered Hawker's family all royalties his book might earn, which the family rejected. A film, "", starring Japanese actor Dean Fujioka, was released in November 2013, based on the book by Ichihashi, and covering the two and a half years he spent on the run before being arrested in November 2009.


title: Stephen Chbosky

text: Stephen Chbosky (; born January 25, 1970) is an American screenwriter, film producer, film director, novelist, television writer, and television producer. He is best-known for writing the bestselling coming-of-age novel "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" (1999), as well as for writing and directing the 2012 film adaptation of the book. Most recently, he directed the 2017 drama "Wonder" and the 2021 film adaptation of "Dear Evan Hansen". His first psychological horror novel, "Imaginary Friend", was published in October 2019.


title: Stephen Chbosky

text: Chbosky was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and was raised in the Pittsburgh suburb of Upper St. Clair, Pennsylvania. He is the son of Lea (née Meyer), a tax preparer, and Fred G. Chbosky, a steel company executive and consultant to CFOs. Chbosky has a sister, Stacy, who is married to director John Erick Dowdle. He was raised Catholic. As a teenager, Chbosky "enjoyed a good blend of the classics, horror, and fantasy." He was heavily influenced by J. D. Salinger's novel "The Catcher in the Rye" and the writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Tennessee Williams. Chbosky graduated from Upper St. Clair High School in 1988, around which time he met Stewart Stern, screenwriter of the 1955 James Dean film "Rebel Without a Cause". Stern became Chbosky's "good friend and mentor", and proved a major influence on Chbosky's career.


title: Stephen Chbosky

text: In 1992, Chbosky graduated from the University of Southern California's screenwriting program. He wrote, directed, and acted in the 1995 independent film "The Four Corners of Nowhere", which gained Chbosky his first agent. It also was accepted by the Sundance Film Festival, and became one of the first films shown on the Sundance Channel. In the late 1990s, Chbosky wrote several unproduced screenplays, including ones titled "Audrey Hepburn's Neck" and "Schoolhouse Rock".


title: Stephen Chbosky

text: In 1994, Chbosky was working on a "very different type of book" than "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" when he wrote the line, "I guess that's just one of the perks of being a wallflower." Chbosky recalled that he "wrote that line. And stopped. And realized that somewhere in that [sentence] was the kid I was really trying to find." After several years of gestation, Chbosky began researching and writing "The Perks of Being a Wallflower", an epistolary novel that follows the intellectual and emotional maturation of a teenager who uses the alias Charlie over the course of his first year of high school. The book is semi-autobiographical; Chbosky has said that he "relate[s] to Charlie[...] But my life in high school was in many ways different."


title: Stephen Chbosky

text: The book, Chbosky's first novel, was published by MTV Books in 1999, and was an immediate popular success with teenage readers; by 2000, the novel was MTV Books' best-selling title, and "The New York Times" noted in 2007 that it had sold more than 700,000 copies and "is passed from adolescent to adolescent like a hot potato". As of May 2013, the number of copies in print reached over two million. "Wallflower" also stirred up controversy due to Chbosky's portrayal of teen sexuality and drug use. The book has been removed from circulation in several schools and appeared on the American Library Association's 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009 lists of the 10 most frequently challenged books. In July 2013, "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" had spent over a year on the "New York Times" Bestseller list, and was published in 31 languages.


title: Stephen Chbosky

text: In 2000, Chbosky edited "Pieces", an anthology of short stories. The same year, he worked with director Jon Sherman on a film adaptation of Michael Chabon's novel "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh", though the project fell apart by August 2000. Chbosky wrote the screenplay for the 2005 film adaptation of the Broadway rock musical "Rent", which received mixed reviews. In late 2005, Chbosky said that he was writing a film adaptation of "The Perks of Being a Wallflower".


title: Stephen Chbosky

text: In the mid-2000s, Chbosky decided, on the advice of his agent, to begin looking for work in television in addition to film. Finding he "enjoyed the people [he met who were working] in television", Chbosky agreed to serve as co-creator, executive producer, and writer of the CBS serial television drama "Jericho", which premiered in September 2006. The series revolves around the inhabitants of the fictional small town of Jericho, Kansas in the aftermath of several nuclear attacks. Chbosky has said the relationship between Jake Green, the main character, and his mother, reflected "me and my mother in a lot of ways". The first season of "Jericho" received lackluster ratings, and CBS canceled the show in May 2007. A grassroots campaign to revive the series convinced CBS to renew the series for a second season, which premiered on February 12, 2008, before being canceled once more in March 2008.


title: Stephen Chbosky

text: Chbosky wrote the screenplay of and directed the film "The Perks of Being a Wallflower", based on his novel. Production took place in mid-2011, and the film was released in fall 2012. The film starred Logan Lerman, Emma Watson and Ezra Miller. Chbosky was nominated in the Best Adapted Screenplay category for the 2013 Writers Guild Awards, and the film won the 2013 Independent Spirit Awards for Best First Feature, as well as the 2013 People's Choice Award for Best Dramatic Movie.


title: Stephen Chbosky

text: Chbosky re-wrote Evan Spiliotopoulos's original script for the 2017 live action reboot of Disney's "Beauty and the Beast", directed by Bill Condon and starring Emma Watson as Belle. Chbosky and Watson developed a close relationship during the production of "The Perks of Being a Wallflower." The adaptation was faithful to the original 1991 animated film "Beauty and the Beast", with all the original musical numbers included. The film was released on March 17, 2017.


title: Stephen Chbosky

text: Chbosky directed the 2017 film "Wonder", co-written by Chbosky, Jack Thorne, and Steve Conrad and based on the 2012 novel of the same name by R. J. Palacio. The film starred Julia Roberts, Owen Wilson, and Jacob Tremblay, and was released on November 17, 2017.


title: Stephen Chbosky

text: On November 29, 2018, Universal Pictures announced that Chbosky was in talks to direct the film adaptation of Steven Levenson and Pasek & Paul's Tony Award-winning musical, "Dear Evan Hansen". On June 11, 2020, he was officially confirmed to direct the film. It stars Ben Platt in the title role, which he originated on Broadway, along with Kaitlyn Dever, Amandla Stenberg, Nik Dodani, Colton Ryan, Amy Adams, Danny Pino and Julianne Moore. The film had its world premiere at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival on September 9, 2021 as its Opening Night Gala Presentation, and was released in theaters on September 24, 2021.


title: Stephen Chbosky

text: In October 2019, Chbosky's second novel, "Imaginary Friend", debuted as a Top 10 New York Times Best Seller.


title: Lise Meitner

text: Elise Meitner ( , ; 7 November 1878 – 27 October 1968) was an Austrian-Swedish physicist who was one of those responsible for the discovery of the element protactinium and nuclear fission. While working at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute on radioactivity, she discovered the radioactive isotope protactinium-231 in 1917. In 1938, Meitner and her nephew, the physicist Otto Robert Frisch, discovered nuclear fission. She was praised by Albert Einstein as the "German Marie Curie".


title: Lise Meitner

text: Completing her doctoral research in 1905, Meitner became the second woman from the University of Vienna to earn a doctorate in physics. She spent most of her scientific career in Berlin, Germany, where she was a physics professor and a department head at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute; she was the first woman to become a full professor of physics in Germany. She lost these positions in the 1930s because of the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany, and in 1938 she fled to Sweden, where she lived for many years, ultimately becoming a Swedish citizen.


title: Lise Meitner

text: In mid-1938, Meitner with chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute found that bombarding thorium with neutrons produced different isotopes. Hahn and Strassmann later in the year showed that isotopes of barium could be formed by bombardment of uranium. In late December, Meitner and Frisch worked out the phenomenon of such a splitting process. In their report in February issue of "Nature" in 1939, they gave it the name "fission". This principle led to the development of the first atomic bomb during World War II, and subsequently other nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors.


title: Lise Meitner

text: Meitner did not share the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for nuclear fission, which was awarded exclusively to her long-time collaborator Otto Hahn. Several scientists and journalists have called her exclusion "unjust". According to the Nobel Prize archive, she was nominated 19 times for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry between 1924 and 1948, and 29 times for the Nobel Prize in Physics between 1937 and 1965. Despite not having been awarded the Nobel Prize, Meitner was invited to attend the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in 1962. However, she received many other honours, including the naming of chemical element 109 meitnerium after her in 1997.


title: Lise Meitner

text: She was born Elise Meitner on 7 November 1878 into a Jewish upper-middle-class family at the family home in 27 Kaiser Josefstraße in the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna, the third of eight children of Hedwig and Philipp Meitner. The birth register of Vienna's Jewish community lists her as being born on 17 November 1878, but all other documents list her date of birth as 7 November, which is what she used. Her father was one of the first Jewish lawyers admitted to practice in Austria. She had two older siblings, Gisela and Auguste (Gusti), and four younger: Moriz (Fritz), Carola (Lola), Frida and Walter; all ultimately pursued an advanced education. Her father was a confirmed freethinker, and she was brought up as such. As an adult, she converted to Christianity, following Lutheranism, and was baptised in 1908; her sisters Gisela and Lola converted to Catholic Christianity that same year. She also adopted a shortened name "Lise".


title: Lise Meitner

text: Meitner's earliest research began at age eight, when she kept a notebook of her records underneath her pillow. She was particularly drawn to mathematics and science, and first studied colours of an oil slick, thin films, and reflected light. Women were not allowed to attend public institutions of higher education in Vienna until 1897, and she completed her final year of school in 1892. Her education included bookkeeping, arithmetic, history, geography, science, French and gymnastics.


title: Lise Meitner

text: The only career available to women was teaching, so she trained as a French teacher. Her sister Gisela passed the "Matura", and entered medical school in 1900. In 1899, Meitner began taking private lessons with two other young women, cramming the missing eight years of secondary education into just two. Physics was taught by Arthur Szarvasy. In July 1901 the girls sat an external examination at the Akademisches Gymnasium. Only four out of fourteen girls passed, including Meitner and Henriette Boltzmann, the daughter of physicist Ludwig Boltzmann.


title: Lise Meitner

text: Meitner entered the University of Vienna in October 1901. She was particularly inspired by Boltzmann, and was said to often speak with contagious enthusiasm of his lectures. Her dissertation was supervised by Franz Exner and Hans Benndorf. Her thesis titled "Prüfung einer Formel Maxwells" (""Examination of Maxwell's Formula"") was submitted on 28 November 1905, evaluated by Exner and Boltzmann, and approved on 28 November 1905. She became one of the first women to earn a doctoral degree in physics at the University of Vienna, after Olga Steindler who had received her degree in 1903. Her thesis was published as "Wärmeleitung in inhomogenen Körpern" (""Thermal Conduction in Inhomogeneous Bodies"") on 22 February 1906.


title: Lise Meitner

text: Paul Ehrenfest asked her to investigate an article on optics by Lord Rayleigh that detailed an experiment that produced results that Rayleigh had been unable to explain. She was not only able to explain what was going on; she went further and made predictions based on her explanation, and then verified them experimentally, demonstrating her ability to carry out independent and unsupervised research.


title: Lise Meitner

text: While engaged in this research, Meitner was introduced by Stefan Meyer to radioactivity, then a very new field of study. She started with alpha particles. In her experiments with collimators and metal foil, she found that scattering in a beam of alpha particles increased with the atomic mass of the metal atoms. Later on, this led Ernest Rutherford to predict the nuclear atom. She submitted her findings to the "Physikalische Zeitschrift" on 29 June 1907.


title: Lise Meitner

text: Encouraged and backed by her father's financial support, Meitner went to the Friedrich Wilhelm University, where the renowned physicist Max Planck taught. Planck invited her to his home, and allowed her to attend his lectures, which was an unusual gesture by Planck, who was on the record as opposing the admission of women to universities in general, but he was willing to admit that there was the occasional exception; apparently he recognised Meitner as one of the exceptions. She became friends with Planck's twin daughters Emma and Grete, who shared her love of music.


title: Lise Meitner

text: Attending Planck's lectures did not take up all her time, and Meitner approached Heinrich Rubens, the head of the experimental physics institute, about doing some research. Rubens said that he would be happy for her to work in his laboratory. He also added that Otto Hahn at the chemistry institute was looking for a physicist to collaborate with. A few minutes later she was introduced to Hahn. He had studied radioactive substances under Sir William Ramsay, and in Montreal under Rutherford, and was already credited with the discovery of what were then thought to be several new radioactive elements. (In fact, they were isotopes of known elements, but the concept of an isotope, along with the term, was only propounded by Frederick Soddy in 1913.) Hahn was the same age as herself, and she noted his informal and approachable manner. In Canada there had been no requirement to be circumspect when addressing the egalitarian New Zealander Rutherford, but many people in Germany found his manner offputting, and characterised him as an "Anglicised Berliner". In Montreal, Hahn had become accustomed to collaboration with physicists, including at least one woman, Harriet Brooks.


title: Lise Meitner

text: The head of the chemistry institute, Emil Fischer, placed a former woodworking shop ("Holzwerkstatt") at Hahn's disposal in the basement to use as a laboratory. Hahn equipped it with electroscopes to measure alpha and beta particles and gamma rays. It was not possible to conduct research in the wood shop, but Alfred Stock, the head of the inorganic chemistry department, let Hahn use a space in one of his two private laboratories. Like Meitner, Hahn was unpaid, and lived off an allowance from his father, although somewhat larger than hers. He completed his habilitation in the spring of 1907, and became a "Privatdozent". Most of the organic chemists at the chemistry institute did not regard Hahn's work—detecting minute traces of isotopes too small to see, weigh or smell through their radioactivity—as real chemistry. One department head remarked that "it is incredible what one gets to be a "Privatdozent" these days!"


title: Lise Meitner

text: The arrangement was difficult for Meitner at first. Women were not yet admitted to universities in Prussia. Meitner was allowed to work in the wood shop, which had its own external entrance, but she could not set foot in the rest of the institute, including Hahn's laboratory space upstairs. If she wanted to go to the toilet, she had to use one at the restaurant down the street. The following year, women were admitted to Prussian universities, and Fischer lifted the restrictions, and had women's toilets installed in the building. Not all the chemists were happy about this. The Institute of Physics was more accepting, and she became friends with the physicists there, including , James Franck, Gustav Hertz, Robert Pohl, Max Planck, and Wilhelm Westphal.


title: Lise Meitner

text: During the first years Meitner worked together with Hahn they co-authored three papers in 1908, and six more in 1909. She also, together with Hahn, discovered and developed a physical separation method known as radioactive recoil, in which a daughter nucleus is forcefully ejected from its matrix as it recoils at the moment of decay. While Hahn was more concerned with discovering new elements (now known to be isotopes), Meitner was more concerned with understanding their radiations. She observed that radioactive recoil could be a new way of detecting radioactive substances. They set up some tests and soon discovered two more new isotopes.


title: Lise Meitner

text: Meitner was particularly interested in beta radiation. By this time, they were known to be electrons. Alpha particles were emitted with characteristic energy, and she expected that this would be true of beta particles too. Hahn and Meitner carefully measured the absorption of beta particles by aluminium, but the results were puzzling. In 1914, James Chadwick found that electrons emitted from the atomic nucleus formed a continuous spectrum, but Meitner found this hard to believe, as it seemed to contradict quantum physics.


title: Lise Meitner

text: In 1912, Hahn and Meitner moved to the newly founded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) for Chemistry. Hahn accepted an offer from Fischer to become a junior assistant in charge of its radiochemistry section, the first laboratory of its kind in Germany. The job came with the title of "professor" and a salary of 5,000 marks per annum. Meitner worked without salary as a "guest" in Hahn's section. Later that year, perhaps fearing that Meitner was in financial difficulties and might return to Vienna, since her father had died in 1910, Planck appointed her his assistant at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in the Friedrich Wilhelm University. As such, she marked his students' papers. It was her first paid position. Assistant was the lowest rung on the academic ladder, and Meitner was the first female scientific assistant in Prussia.


title: Lise Meitner

text: Proud officials presented Meitner to Kaiser Wilhelm II at the official opening of the KWI for Chemistry on 23 October 1912. The following year she became a "Mitglied" (associate), the same rank as Hahn (although her salary was still less), and the radioactivity section became the Hahn-Meitner Laboratory. Meitner celebrated with a dinner party at the Hotel Adlon. Hahn and Meitner's salaries would soon be dwarfed by royalties from mesothorium ("middle thorium", radium-228 also called "German radium") produced for medical purposes, for which Hahn received 66,000 marks in 1914, of which he gave ten percent to Meitner. In 1914, Meitner received an attractive offer of an academic position in Prague. Planck made it clear to Fischer that he didn't want Meitner to leave, and Fischer arranged for her salary to be doubled to 3,000 marks.


title: Lise Meitner

text: The move to new accommodation was fortuitous, as the wood shop had become thoroughly contaminated by radioactive liquids that had been spilt, and radioactive gases that had vented and then decayed and settled as radioactive dust, making sensitive measurements impossible. To ensure that their clean new laboratories stayed that way, Hahn and Meitner instituted strict procedures. Chemical and physical measurements were conducted in different rooms, people handling radioactive substances had to follow protocols that included not shaking hands, and rolls of toilet paper were hung next to every telephone and door handle. Strongly radioactive substances were stored in the old wood shop, and later in a purpose-built radium house on the institute grounds.


title: Lise Meitner

text: In July 1914—shortly before the outbreak of World War I in August—Hahn was called to active duty with the army in a "Landwehr" regiment. Meitner undertook X-ray technician training, and a course on anatomy at the city hospital in Lichterfelde. Meanwhile, she completed both the work on the beta ray spectrum that she had begun before the war with Hahn and Baeyer, and her own study of the uranium decay chain. In July 1915, she returned to Vienna, where she joined the Austrian Army as an X-ray nurse-technician. Her unit was soon deployed to the Eastern front in Poland, and she also served on the Italian front for a while before being discharged in September 1916.


title: Lise Meitner

text: Meitner returned to the KWI for Chemistry and her research in October. In January 1917, she was appointed the head of her own physics section. The Hahn-Meitner Laboratory was divided into separate Hahn and Meitner Laboratories, and her pay was increased to 4,000 marks. Hahn returned to Berlin on leave, and they discussed another loose end from their pre-war work: the search for the mother isotope of actinium. According to the radioactive displacement law of Fajans and Soddy, this had to be an isotope of the undiscovered element 91 on the periodic table that lay between thorium and uranium. Kasimir Fajans and Oswald Helmuth Göhring discovered this element in 1913, and named it "brevium" after its short half-life. However, the isotope they had found was a beta emitter, and therefore could not be the mother isotope of actinium. This had to be another isotope of the same element.


title: Lise Meitner

text: In 1914 Hahn and Meitner had developed a new technique for separating the tantalum group from pitchblende, which they hoped would speed the isolation of the new isotope. When Meitner resumed work in 1917, though, not only Hahn but most of the students, laboratory assistants and technicians had been called up, so Meitner had to do everything herself. In February, Meitner extracted 2 grams of silicon dioxide () from 21 grams of pitchblende. She set 1.5 grams aside and added a tantalum pentafluoride () carrier to the other 0.5 grams, which she dissolved in hydrogen fluoride (). She then boiled it in concentrated sulfuric acid (), precipitated what was believed to be element 91, and verified that it was an alpha emitter. Hahn came home on leave in April, and together they devised a series of indicator tests to eliminate other known alpha emitters. The only known ones with similar chemical behaviour were lead-210 (which decays to alpha emitter polonium-210) and thorium-230.


title: Lise Meitner

text: For this more pitchblende was required. Meitner went to Vienna, where she met with Stefan Meyer. The export of uranium from Austria was forbidden due to wartime restrictions, but Meyer was able to offer her a kilogram of uranium residue, pitchblende from which the uranium had been removed, which was actually better for her purpose. The indicator tests showed that the alpha activity was not due to these substances. All that now remained was to find evidence of actinium. For this more pitchblende was required, and this time Meyer was unable to assist, as the export was now prohibited. Meitner managed to obtain 100 g of "double residue"—pitchblende without uranium or radium—from Friedrich Oskar Giesel and began tests with 43 grams of it, but its composition was different, and at first her tests did not work. With Giesel's help, she was able to produce a pure product that was strongly radioactive. By December 1917 she was able to isolate both the mother isotope and its actinium daughter product. She submitted their findings for publication in March 1918.


title: Lise Meitner

text: Although Fajans and Göhring had been the first to discover the element, custom required that an element was represented by its longest-lived and most abundant isotope, and brevium did not seem appropriate. Fajans agreed to Meitner naming the element "protoactinium" (subsequently shortened to protactinium), and assigning it the chemical symbol Pa. In June 1918, Soddy and John Cranston announced that they had independently extracted a sample of the isotope, but unlike Meitner they were unable to describe its characteristics. They acknowledged Meitner's priority, and agreed to the name. The connection to uranium remained a mystery, as neither of the known isotopes of uranium decayed into protactinium. It remained unsolved until the mother isotope, uranium-235, was discovered in 1929.


title: Lise Meitner

text: In 1921, Meitner accepted an invitation from Manne Siegbahn to come to Sweden and give a series of lectures on radioactivity as a visiting professor at Lund University. She found that very little research had been done on radioactivity in Sweden, but she was eager to learn about X-ray spectroscopy, which was Siegbahn's specialty. At his laboratory, she met a Dutch doctoral candidate, Dirk Coster, who was studying X-ray spectroscopy, and his wife Miep, who was working on her doctorate in Indonesian language and culture. Armed with her newly acquired knowledge of X-ray spectroscopy, Meitner took a fresh look at the beta-ray spectra when she returned to Berlin. It was known that some beta emission was primary, with electrons being ejected directly from the nucleus, and some was secondary, in which alpha particles from the nucleus knocked electrons out of orbit. Meitner was sceptical of Chadwick's claim that the spectral lines were entirely due to secondary electrons, while the primary ones formed a continuous spectrum. Using techniques developed by Jean Danysz, she examined the spectra of lead-210, radium-226 and thorium-238. Meitner discovered the cause of the emission of electrons from surfaces of atoms with "signature" energies, now known as the Auger effect. The effect is named for Pierre Victor Auger, who independently discovered it in 1923.


title: Lise Meitner

text: Women were granted the right of habilitation in Prussia in 1920, and in 1922 Meitner was granted her habilitation and became a "Privatdozentin". She was the first woman to receive her habilitation in physics in Prussia, and only the second in Germany after Hedwig Kohn. Since Meitner had already published over 40 papers, she was not required to submit a thesis, but Max von Laue recommended that the requirement for an inaugural lecture not be waived, since he was interested in what she had to say. She therefore gave an inaugural lecture on "Problems of Cosmic Physics". From 1923 to 1933, she taught a colloquium or tutorial at Friedrich Wilhelm University each semester, and supervised doctoral students at the KWI for Chemistry. These included Arnold Flammersfeld, Kan-Chang Wang and Nikolaus Riehl. In 1926, she became an "außerordentlicher Professor" (extraordinary professor), the first woman university physics professor in Germany. Her physics section became larger, and she acquired a permanent assistant. Scientists from Germany and around the world came to the KWI for Chemistry to conduct research under her supervision. In 1930, Meitner taught a seminar on "Questions of Atomic Physics and Atomic Chemistry" with Leó Szilárd.


title: Lise Meitner

text: Meitner had a Wilson cloud chamber constructed at the KWI for Chemistry, the first one in Berlin, and with her student Kurt Freitag studied the tracks of alpha particles that did not collide with a nucleus. With her assistant Kurt Philipp she later used it to take the first images of positron traces from gamma radiation. She proved Chadwick's assertion that the discrete spectral lines were entirely the result of secondary electrons, and the continuous spectra were therefore indeed entirely caused by the primary ones. In 1927, Charles Drummond Ellis and William Alfred Wooster measured the energy of the continuous spectrum produced by the beta decay of bismuth-210 at 0.34 MeV where the energy of each disintegration was 0.35 MeV. Thus, the spectrum accounted for nearly all of the energy. Meitner was so stunned by this result that she repeated the experiment with Wilhelm Orthmann using an improved method, and verified Ellis and Wooster's results. It appeared that the law of conservation of energy did not hold for beta decay, something Meitner regarded as unacceptable. In 1930, Wolfgang Pauli wrote an open letter to Meitner and Hans Geiger in which he proposed that the continuous spectrum was caused by the emission of a second particle during beta decay, one that had no electric charge and little or no rest mass. The idea was taken up by Enrico Fermi in his 1934 theory of beta decay, and he gave the name "neutrino" to the hypothetical neutral particle. At the time there was scant hope of detecting neutrinos, but in 1956 Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines did just that.


title: Lise Meitner

text: Adolf Hitler was sworn in as the Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933, as his Nazi Party (NSDAP) was now the largest party in the "Reichstag (Weimar Republic)". The 7 April 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service removed Jewish people from the civil service, which included academia. Meitner never tried to conceal her Jewish descent, but initially was exempt from its impact on multiple grounds: she had been employed before 1914, had served in the military during the World War, was an Austrian rather than a German citizen, and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute was a government-industry partnership. However, she was dismissed from her adjunct professorship on 6 September on the grounds that her World War I service was not at the front, and she had not completed her habilitation until 1922. This had no effect on her salary or work at the KWI for Chemistry. Carl Bosch, the director of IG Farben, a major sponsor of the KWI for Chemistry, assured Meitner that her position there was safe. Although Hahn and Meitner remained in charge, their assistants, Otto Erbacher and Kurt Philipp respectively, who were both NSDAP members, were given increasing influence over the day-to-day running of the institute.


title: Lise Meitner

text: Others were not so fortunate; her nephew Otto Frisch was dismissed from his post in the Institute for Physical Chemistry at the University of Hamburg, as was Otto Stern, the director of the institute. Stern found Frisch a position with Patrick Blackett at Birkbeck College in England, and he later worked at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen from 1934 to 1939. Fritz Strassman had come to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry to study under Hahn to improve his employment prospects. He declined a lucrative offer of employment because it required political training and Nazi Party membership, and resigned from the Society of German Chemists when it became part of the Nazi German Labour Front rather than become a member of a Nazi-controlled organisation. As a result, he could neither work in the chemical industry nor receive his habilitation. Meitner persuaded Hahn to hire him as an assistant. Soon he would be credited as a third collaborator on the papers they produced, and would sometimes even be listed first. Between 1933 and 1935, Meitner published exclusively in "Naturwissenschaften", as its editor Arnold Berliner was Jewish, and continued to accept submissions from Jewish scientists. This generated a boycott of the publication, and in August 1935 publisher Springer-Verlag fired Berliner.


title: Lise Meitner

text: After Chadwick discovered the neutron in 1932, Irène Curie and Frédéric Joliot irradiated aluminium foil with alpha particles, and found that this results in a short-lived radioactive isotope of phosphorus. They noted that positron emission continued after the neutron emissions ceased. Not only had they discovered a new form of radioactive decay, they had transmuted an element into a hitherto unknown radioactive isotope of another, thereby inducing radioactivity where there had been none before. Radiochemistry was now no longer confined to certain heavy elements, but extended to the entire periodic table. Chadwick noted that being electrically neutral, neutrons could penetrate the atomic nucleus more easily than protons or alpha particles. Enrico Fermi and his colleagues in Rome picked up on this idea, and began irradiating elements with neutrons.


title: Lise Meitner

text: The radioactive displacement law of Fajans and Soddy said that beta decay causes isotopes to move one element up on the periodic table, and alpha decay causes them to move two down. When Fermi's group bombarded uranium atoms with neutrons, they found a complex mix of half lives. Fermi therefore concluded that the new elements with atomic numbers greater than 92 (known as transuranium elements) had been created. Meitner and Hahn had not collaborated for many years, but Meitner was eager to investigate Fermi's results. Hahn, initially, was not, but he changed his mind when Aristid von Grosse suggested that what Fermi had found was an isotope of protactinium. "The only question", Hahn later wrote, "seemed to be whether Fermi had found isotopes of transuranium elements, or isotopes of the next-lower element, protactinium. At that time Lise Meitner and I decided to repeat Fermi's experiments in order to find out whether the 13-minute isotope was a protactinium isotope or not. It was a logical decision, having been the discoverers of protactinium."


title: Lise Meitner

text: Between 1934 and 1938, Hahn, Meitner, and Strassmann found a great number of radioactive transmutation products, all of which they regarded as transuranic. At that time, the existence of actinides was not yet established, and uranium was wrongly believed to be a group 6 element similar to tungsten. It followed that the first transuranic elements would be similar to group 7 to 10 elements, i.e. rhenium and platinoids. They established the presence of multiple isotopes of at least four such elements, and (mistakenly) identified them as elements with atomic numbers 93 through 96. They were the first scientists to measure the 23-minute half life of the synthetic radioisotope uranium-239 and to establish chemically that it was an isotope of uranium, but with their weak neutron sources they were unable to continue this work to its logical conclusion and identify the real element 93. They identified ten different half lives, with varying degrees of certainty. To account for them, Meitner had to hypothesise a new class of reaction and the alpha decay of uranium, neither of which had ever been reported before, and for which physical evidence was lacking. Hahn and Strassmann refined their chemical procedures, while Meitner devised new experiments to shine more light on the reaction processes.


title: Lise Meitner

text: In May 1937, Hahn and Meitner issued parallel reports, one in "Zeitschrift für Physik" with Meitner as the first author, and one in "Chemische Berichte" with Hahn as the first author. Hahn concluded his by stating emphatically: "Vor allem steht ihre chemische Verschiedenheit von allen bisher bekannten Elementen außerhalb jeder Diskussion" ("Above all, their chemical distinction from all previously known elements needs no further discussion"); Meitner was increasingly uncertain. She considered the possibility that the reactions were from different isotopes of uranium; three were known: uranium-238, uranium-235 and uranium-234. However, when she calculated the neutron cross section, it was too large to be anything other than the most abundant isotope, uranium-238, and concluded that it must be another case of the nuclear isomerism that Hahn had discovered in protactinium years before. She therefore ended her report on a very different note to Hahn, reporting that: "The process must be neutron capture by uranium-238, which leads to three isomeric nuclei of uranium-239. This result is very difficult to reconcile with current concepts of the nucleus."


title: Lise Meitner

text: With the "Anschluss", Germany's unification with Austria on 12 March 1938, Meitner lost her Austrian citizenship. Niels Bohr extended an offer to lecture in Copenhagen, and Paul Scherrer invited her to attend a congress in Switzerland, with all expenses paid. Carl Bosch still said that she could remain at the KWI for Chemistry, but by May she was aware that the Reich Ministry of Science, Education and Culture was looking into her case. On 9 May she decided to accept Bohr's invitation to go to Copenhagen, where Frisch worked, but when she went to the Danish consulate to get a travel visa, she was told that Denmark no longer recognised her Austrian passport as valid. She could not leave for Denmark, Switzerland or any other country.


title: Lise Meitner

text: Bohr came to Berlin in June, and was gravely concerned. When he returned to Copenhagen, he began looking for a position for Meitner in Scandinavia. He also asked Hans Kramers to see if anything was available in the Netherlands. Kramers contacted Coster, who in turn notified Adriaan Fokker. Coster and Fokker attempted to secure a position for Meitner at the University of Groningen. They found that the Rockefeller Foundation would not support refugee scientists, and that the International Federation of University Women had been flooded with applications for support from Austria. On 27 June, Meitner received an offer of a one-year position at Manne Siegbahn's new in Stockholm, then under construction, which would be devoted to nuclear physics, and she decided to accept it. But on 4 July she learned that academics would no longer be granted permission to travel abroad.


title: Lise Meitner

text: Through Bohr in Copenhagen, Peter Debye communicated with Coster and Fokker, and they approached the Netherlands Ministry of Education with an appeal to allow Meitner to come to the Netherlands. As foreigners were not allowed to work for pay, an appointment as a non-salaried "privaat-docente" was required. Wander Johannes de Haas and Anton Eduard van Arkel arranged for one at Leiden University. Coster also spoke to the head of the border guards, who assured him that Meitner would be admitted. A friend of Coster, E. H. Ebels, was a local politician from the border area, and he spoke directly to the guards on the border.


title: Lise Meitner

text: On 11 July, Coster arrived in Berlin, where he stayed with Debye. The following morning, Meitner arrived early at the KWI for Chemistry, and Hahn briefed her on the plan. To avoid suspicion, she maintained her usual routine, remaining at the institute until 20:00 correcting one of the associate's papers for publication. Hahn and Paul Rosbaud helped her pack two small suitcases, carrying only summer clothes. Hahn gave her a diamond ring he had inherited from his mother in case of emergency; she took only 10 marks in her purse. She then spent the night at Hahn's house. The next morning Meitner met Coster at the train station, where they pretended to have met each other by chance. They travelled on a lightly-used line to Bad Nieuweschans railway station on the border, which they crossed without incident; the German border guards may have thought that "Frau Professor" was the wife of a professor. A telegram from Pauli informed Coster that he was now "as famous for the abduction of Lise Meitner as for the discovery of hafnium".


title: Lise Meitner

text: Meitner learned on 26 July that Sweden had granted her permission to enter on her Austrian passport, and two days later she flew to Copenhagen, where she was greeted by Frisch, and stayed with Niels and Margrethe Bohr at their holiday house in Tisvilde. On 1 August she took the train to Stockholm, where she was met at Göteborg station by Eva von Bahr. They took a train, and then a steamer to von Bahr's home in Kungälv, where she stayed until September. Hahn told everyone at the KWI for Chemistry that Meitner had gone to Vienna to visit her relatives, and a few days later the institute had closed for the summer vacation. On 23 August, she wrote to Bosch requesting retirement. He tried to ship her belongings to Sweden, but the Reich Ministry of Education insisted they remain in Germany.


title: Lise Meitner

text: Meitner was also concerned about her family back in Austria. One of her first actions in Sweden was to apply for a Swedish immigration permit for Gusti and her husband Justinian (Jutz) Frisch. Hahn selected Josef Mattauch to replace her as head of the physics section, and went to Vienna to offer him the job. While there he dined with Meitner's sisters Gusti and Gisela and their husbands Jutz Frisch and Karl Lion on 9 November. The next day Gusti informed him that Jutz Frisch had been arrested. That day, Meitner arrived in Copenhagen; arranging a travel visa had been difficult with her invalid Austrian passport. Hahn joined her in Copenhagen on 13 November, and had discussions about the uranium research with Meitner, Bohr and Otto Robert Frisch. The physicists, particularly Meitner, told him that the results of the experiments, particularly the supposed discovery of isomers of radium, could not be correct, and the experiments would have to be re-done.


title: Lise Meitner

text: Hahn and Strassmann isolated the three radium isotopes (verified by their half-lives) and used fractional crystallisation to separate it from its barium carrier by adding barium bromide crystals in four steps. Since radium precipitates preferentially in a solution of barium bromide, at each step the fraction drawn off would contain less radium than the one before. However, they found no difference between each of the fractions. In case their process was faulty in some way, they verified it with known isotopes of radium; the process was fine. On 19 December, Hahn wrote to Meitner, informing her that the radium isotopes behaved chemically like barium. Anxious to finish up before the Christmas break, Hahn and Strassmann submitted their findings to "Naturwissenschaften" on 22 December without waiting for Meitner to reply. Hahn concluded the paper with: "As chemists... we should substitute the symbols Ba, La, Ce for Ra, Ac, Th. As 'nuclear chemists' fairly close to physics we cannot yet bring ourselves to take this step which contradicts all previous experience in physics."


title: Lise Meitner

text: Frisch normally celebrated Christmas with Meitner in Berlin, but in 1938 she accepted an invitation from Eva von Bahr to spend it with her family at Kungälv, and Meitner asked Frisch to join her there. Meitner received the letter from Hahn describing his chemical proof that some of the product of the bombardment of uranium with neutrons was barium. Barium had an atomic mass 40% less than uranium, and no previously known methods of radioactive decay could account for such a large difference in the mass of the nucleus. Nonetheless, she had immediately written back to Hahn to say: "At the moment the assumption of such a thoroughgoing breakup seems very difficult to me, but in nuclear physics we have experienced so many surprises, that one cannot unconditionally say: 'It is impossible.'"


title: Lise Meitner

text: Meitner and Frisch had correctly interpreted Hahn's results to mean that the nucleus of uranium had split roughly in half. The first two reactions that the Berlin group had observed were light elements created by the breakup of uranium nuclei; the third, the 23-minute one, was a decay into the real element 93. On returning to Copenhagen, Frisch informed Bohr, who slapped his forehead and exclaimed "What idiots we have been!" Bohr promised not to say anything until they had a paper ready for publication. To speed the process, they decided to submit a one-page note to "Nature". At this point, the only evidence that they had was the barium. Logically, if barium was formed, the other element must be krypton, although Hahn mistakenly believed that the atomic masses had to add up to 239 rather than the atomic numbers adding up to 92, and thought it was masurium (technetium), and so did not check for it:


title: Lise Meitner

text: Over a series of long-distance phone calls, Meitner and Frisch came up with a simple experiment to bolster their claim: to measure the recoil of the fission fragments, using a Geiger counter with the threshold set above that of the alpha particles. Frisch conducted the experiment on 13 February, and found the pulses caused by the reaction just as they had predicted. He decided he needed a name for the newly discovered nuclear process. He spoke to William A. Arnold, an American biologist working with de Hevesy, and asked him what biologists called the process by which living cells divided into two cells. Arnold told him that biologists called it fission. Frisch then applied that name to the nuclear process in his paper. Frisch mailed both papers to "Nature" on 16 January; the jointly-authored note appeared in print on 11 February and Frisch's paper on recoil on 18 February.


title: Lise Meitner

text: These three reports, the first Hahn-Strassmann publications of 6 January and 10 February 1939, and the Frisch-Meitner publication of 11 February 1939, had electrifying effects on the scientific community. In 1940 Frisch and Rudolf Peierls produced the Frisch–Peierls memorandum, which established that an atomic explosion could be generated.


title: Lise Meitner

text: Despite the many honours that Meitner received in her lifetime, she did not receive the Nobel Prize while it was awarded to Otto Hahn for the discovery of nuclear fission. She was nominated 49 times for Physics and Chemistry Nobel Prizes but never won. On 15 November 1945, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that Hahn had been awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "his discovery of the fission of heavy atomic nuclei". Meitner was the one who told Hahn and Strassman to test their radium in more detail, and it was she who told Hahn that it was possible for the nucleus of uranium to disintegrate. Without these contributions of Meitner, Hahn would not have found that the uranium nucleus can split in half.


title: Lise Meitner

text: In 1945 the Nobel Committee for Chemistry in Sweden that selected the Nobel Prize in Chemistry decided to award that prize solely to Hahn: Hahn only found out from a newspaper while interned in Farm Hall Cambridgeshire England. In the 1990s, the long-sealed records of the Nobel Committee's proceedings became public, and the comprehensive biography of Meitner published in 1996 by Ruth Lewin Sime took advantage of this unsealing to reconsider Meitner's exclusion. In a 1997 article in the American Physical Society journal "Physics Today", Sime and her colleagues Elisabeth Crawford and Mark Walker wrote:


title: Lise Meitner

text: The five-member physics committee included Manne Siegbahn, his former student Erik Hulthén, the professor of experimental physics at Uppsala University, and Axel Lindh, who eventually succeeded Hulthén. All three were part of the Siegbahn school of x-ray spectroscopy. The poor relationship between Siegbahn and Meitner was a factor here, as was the bias towards experimental rather than theoretical physics. In his report on the work of Meitner and Frisch, Hulthén relied on pre-war papers. He did not think that their work was groundbreaking, and argued that the prize for physics was given for experimental rather than theoretical work, which had not been the case for many years.


title: Lise Meitner

text: At the time Meitner herself wrote in a letter, "Surely Hahn fully deserved the Nobel Prize for chemistry. There is really no doubt about it. But I believe that Frisch and I contributed something not insignificant to the clarification of the process of uranium fission—how it originates and that it produces so much energy and that was something very remote to Hahn." Hahn's receipt of a Nobel Prize was long expected. Both he and Meitner had been nominated for both the chemistry and the physics prizes several times even before the discovery of nuclear fission. According to the Nobel Prize archive, she was nominated 19 times for Nobel Prize in Chemistry between 1924 and 1948, and 29 times for Nobel Prize in Physics between 1937 and 1965. Her nominators included Arthur Compton, Dirk Coster, Kasimir Fajans, James Franck, Otto Hahn, Oscar Klein, Niels Bohr, Max Planck and Max Born. Despite not having been awarded the Nobel Prize, Meitner was invited to attend the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in 1962.


title: Lise Meitner

text: Max Perutz, the 1962 Nobel prizewinner in chemistry, reached a similar conclusion: "Having been locked up in the Nobel Committee's files these fifty years, the documents leading to this unjust award now reveal that the protracted deliberations by the Nobel jury were hampered by lack of appreciation both of the joint work that had preceded the discovery and of Meitner's written and verbal contributions after her flight from Berlin."


title: Lise Meitner

text: Meitner found that Siegbahn did not want her. At the time the offer to come to Sweden had been extended, he had said that he had no money, and could only offer Meitner a place to work. Eva von Bahr had then written to Carl Wilhelm Oseen, who had provided money from the Nobel Foundation. This left her with laboratory space, but now she had to perform herself work that for the previous twenty years she had been able to delegate to her laboratory technicians. Ruth Lewin Sime wrote that:


title: Lise Meitner

text: On 14 January 1939, Meitner learned that her brother-in-law Jutz had been released from Dachau and he and her sister Gusti were permitted to emigrate to Sweden. Jutz's boss, Gottfried Bermann had escaped to Sweden, and offered Jutz his old job back at the publishing firm if he was able to come. Niels Bohr interceded with a Swedish official, Justitieråd Alexandersson, who said that Jutz would receive a labour permit on arrival in Sweden. He worked there until he was pensioned off in 1948, and then moved to Cambridge to join Otto Robert Frisch. Her sister Gisela and brother-in-law Karl Lion moved to England, Meitner also considered moving to Britain. She visited Cambridge in July 1939, and accepted an offer from William Lawrence Bragg and John Cockcroft of a position at the Cavendish Laboratory on a three-year contract with Girton College, Cambridge, but the Second World War broke out in September 1939 before she could make the move.


title: Lise Meitner

text: In Sweden, Meitner continued her research as best she could. She measured the neutron cross sections of thorium, lead and uranium using dysprosium as a neutron detector, an assay technique pioneered by George de Hevesy and Hilde Levi. She was able to arrange for Hedwig Kohn, who faced deportation to Poland, to come to Sweden, and eventually to emigrate to the United States, travelling via the Soviet Union. She was unsuccessful in bringing Stefen Meyer out, but he managed to survive the war. She declined an offer to join Frisch on the British mission to the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos Laboratory, declaring "I will have nothing to do with a bomb!" She later said that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had come as a surprise to her, and that she was "sorry that the bomb had to be invented". After the war, Meitner acknowledged her own moral failing in staying in Germany from 1933 to 1938. She wrote: "It was not only stupid but very wrong that I did not leave at once." She not only regretted her inaction during this period, she was also bitterly critical of Hahn, Max von Laue, Werner Heisenberg, and other German scientists. In a June 1945 letter addressed to Hahn, but that he never received, she wrote:


title: Lise Meitner

text: In the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima, Meitner found that she had become a celebrity. She had a radio interview with Eleanor Roosevelt, and a few days later another one with a radio station in New York, during which she heard her sister Frida's voice for the first time in years. "I am of Jewish descent", she told Frida, "I am not Jewish by belief, know nothing of the history of Judaism, and do not feel closer to Jews than to other people." On 25 January 1946, Meitner arrived in New York, where she was greeted by her sisters Lola and Frida, and by Frisch, who had made the two-day train trip from Los Alamos. Lola's husband Rudolf Allers arranged a visiting professorship for Meitner at the Catholic University of America. Meitner lectured at Princeton University, Harvard University and Columbia University, and discussed physics with Albert Einstein, Hermann Weyl, Tsung-Dao Lee, Yang Chen-Ning and Isidor Isaac Rabi. She went down to Durham, North Carolina and saw Hertha Sponer and Hedwig Kohn, and spent an evening in Washington, DC, with James Chadwick, who was now the head of the British Mission to the Manhattan Project. She also met the project's director, Major General Leslie Groves. She spoke at Smith College, and went to Chicago, where she met Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Victor Weisskopf and Leo Szilard. On 8 July, Meitner boarded the for England, where she met with Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli and Max Born. There were belated celebrations for the 300th birthday of Isaac Newton, but the only German invited to attend was Max Planck.


title: Lise Meitner

text: For her friends in Sweden, Siegbahn's obstruction of Meitner's Nobel Prize was the final straw, and they resolved to get her a better position. In 1947, Meitner moved to the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, where established a new facility for atomic research. There had been scant nuclear physics research in Sweden, which was blamed on Siegbahn's lack of support for Meitner's work, and now such knowledge seemed vital for Sweden's future. At the KTH, Meitner had three rooms, two assistants, and access to technicians, with the amiable Sigvard Eklund occupying the room next door. The intention was that Meitner would have the salary and title of a "research professor"—one without teaching duties.


title: Lise Meitner

text: The professorship fell through when the Minister for Education, Tage Erlander, unexpectedly became the Prime Minister of Sweden, but Borelius and Klein ensured that she had the salary of a professor, if not the title. In 1949, she became a Swedish citizen, but without surrendering her Austrian citizenship thanks to a special act passed by the Riksdag. Plans were approved for R1, Sweden's first nuclear reactor in 1947, with Eklund as the project director, and Meitner worked with him on its design and construction. In her last scientific papers in 1950 and 1951, she applied magic numbers to nuclear fission. She retired in 1960 and moved to the UK where most of her relatives were, although she continued working part-time and giving lectures.


title: Lise Meitner

text: In the 1950s and 1960s, Meitner enjoyed visiting Germany and staying with Hahn and his family for several days on different occasions. Hahn wrote in his memoirs that he and Meitner had remained lifelong close friends. Even though their friendship was full of trials, arguably more so experienced by Meitner, she "never voiced anything but deep affection for Hahn". On occasions such as their 70th, 75th, 80th and 85th birthdays, they addressed recollections in each other's honour. Hahn emphasised Meitner's intellectual productivity, and work such as her research on the nuclear shell model, always passing over the reasons for her move to Sweden as quickly as possible. She emphasised Hahn's personal qualities, his charm and musical ability.


title: Lise Meitner

text: A strenuous trip to the United States in 1964 led to Meitner's having a heart attack, from which she spent several months recovering. Her physical and mental condition weakened by atherosclerosis. After breaking her hip in a fall and suffering several small strokes in 1967, Meitner made a partial recovery, but eventually was weakened to the point where she moved into a Cambridge nursing home. Meitner died in her sleep on 27 October 1968 at the age of 89. Meitner was not informed of the deaths of Otto Hahn on 28 July 1968 or his wife Edith on 14 August, as her family believed it would be too much for someone so frail. As was her wish, she was buried in the village of Bramley in Hampshire, at St James parish church, close to her younger brother Walter, who had died in 1964. Her nephew Frisch composed the inscription on her headstone. It reads:


title: Lise Meitner

text: Meitner was praised by Albert Einstein as the "German Marie Curie". On her visit to the US in 1946, she received the honour "Woman of the Year" from the National Press Club and had dinner with the President of the United States, Harry S. Truman, at the Women's National Press Club. She received the Leibniz Medal from the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1924, the Lieben Prize from the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 1925, the Ellen Richards Prize in 1928, the City of Vienna Prize for science in 1947, Max Planck Medal of the German Physical Society jointly with Hahn in 1949, the inaugural Otto Hahn Prize of the German Chemical Society in 1954, the Wilhelm Exner Medal in 1960, and in 1967, the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art. The President of Germany, Theodor Heuss, awarded her the highest German order for scientists, the peace class of the Pour le Mérite in 1957, the same year as Hahn. Meitner became a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1945, and a full member in 1951, permitting her to participate in the Nobel Prize process. Four years later she was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. She was also elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1960. She received honorary doctorates from Adelphi College, the University of Rochester, Rutgers University and Smith College in the United States, the Free University of Berlin in Germany, and the University of Stockholm in Sweden.


title: Lise Meitner

text: In September 1966 the United States Atomic Energy Commission jointly awarded the Enrico Fermi Award to Hahn, Strassmann and Meitner for their discovery of fission. The ceremony was held in the Hofburg palace in Vienna. It was the first time that this prize had been awarded to non-Americans, and the first time it was presented to a woman. Meitner's diploma bore the words: "For pioneering research in the naturally occurring radioactivities and extensive experimental studies leading to the discovery of fission". Hahn's diploma was slightly different: "For pioneering research in the naturally occurring radioactivities and extensive experimental studies culminating in the discovery of fission." Hahn and Strassmann were present, but Meitner was too ill to attend, so Frisch accepted the award on her behalf. Glenn Seaborg, the discoverer of plutonium, presented it to her in the home of Max Perutz in Cambridge on 23 October 1966.


title: Lise Meitner

text: After her death in 1968, Meitner received many naming honours. In 1997, the element 109 was named meitnerium. She is the first and so far the only non-mythological woman thus exclusively honoured (since curium was named after both Marie and Pierre Curie). Additional naming honours are the Hahn–Meitner-Institut in Berlin, craters on the Moon and Venus, and the main-belt asteroid 6999 Meitner. In 2000, the European Physical Society established the biannual "Lise Meitner Prize" for excellent research in nuclear science. In 2006 the "Gothenburg Lise Meitner Award" was established by the University of Gothenburg and Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden; it is awarded annually to a scientist who has made a breakthrough in physics. In October 2010, the building at the Free University of Berlin that had once housed the KWI for Chemistry, and was known as the Otto Hahn Building since 1956, was renamed the Hahn-Meitner Building, and in July 2014 a statue of Meitner was unveiled in the garden of the Humboldt University of Berlin next to similar statues of Hermann von Helmholtz and Max Planck.


title: Lise Meitner

text: Schools and streets were named after her in many cities in Austria and Germany, and a short residential street in Bramley, her resting place, is named Meitner Close. Since 2008 the Austrian Physical Society together with the German Physical Society organize the Lise-Meitner-Lectures, a series of annual public talks given by distinguished female physicists, and since 2015 the AlbaNova University Centre in Stockholm has an annual Lise Meitner Distinguished Lecture. In 2016, the Institute of Physics in the UK established the Meitner Medal for public engagement within physics. In 2017, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy in the United States named a major nuclear energy research program after her. On 6 November 2020, a satellite named after her (ÑuSat 16 or "Lise", COSPAR 2020-079H) was launched into space.


title: Hutton Gibson

text: Hutton Peter Gibson (August 26, 1918 – May 11, 2020) was an American writer on sedevacantism, a World War II veteran, the 1968 "Jeopardy!" grand champion and the father of 11 children, one of whom is the actor and director Mel Gibson.


title: Hutton Gibson

text: Gibson was an outspoken critic both of the post-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church and of those Traditionalist Catholics who reject sedevacantism, such as the Society of Saint Pius X. In a 2003 interview, he engaged in Holocaust denial, wondering how the Nazis could have disposed of six million bodies during the Holocaust, and claimed that the September 11 attacks were perpetrated by remote control. He was also quoted as saying that the Second Vatican Council was "a Masonic plot backed by the Jews".


title: Hutton Gibson

text: Gibson was born in Peekskill, New York, the son of businessman John Hutton Gibson (1884–1937) and Australian opera singer Eva Mylott (1875–1920). His maternal grandparents were Irish emigrants to Australia, while his father, who was from a wealthy tobacco-producing family from the American South, had Irish, English, Scottish, and Welsh ancestry. He was raised in Chicago. His mother died when he was two years old and his father died when he was nineteen. Gibson supported his younger brother, Alexis, who died in his early twenties. He graduated from high school early, at age 15, and ranked third in his class.


title: Hutton Gibson

text: According to Wensley Clarkson's biography of Mel Gibson, Hutton Gibson studied for the priesthood in a Chicago seminary which was operated by the Society of the Divine Word but he left the seminary because he considered the modernist theological doctrines which were being taught there disgusting. However, in 2003, Gibson stated that he really left the seminary because he did not want to be sent to New Guinea or the Philippines as a missionary. Instead, he found work with Western Union and the Civilian Conservation Corps. He also contributed to and edited the newsletter "The Pointer" while he worked in Wisconsin for the CCC from 1938–39.


title: Hutton Gibson

text: After serving with the United States Marine Corps at the Battle of Guadalcanal, Gibson married Irish-born Anne Patricia Reilly on May 1, 1944, at the Catholic parish church of Our Lady of Good Counsel in Brooklyn, New York. They had ten children and adopted another one after their arrival in Australia. As of 2003, Gibson had 48 grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren. His wife died in December 1990. In January 2002, he married Teddy Joye Hicks, but in 2012 Gibson filed for divorce due to irreconcilable differences. From early 2006, he resided in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh after moving from Australia to Houston, Texas, in 1999, and to Summersville, West Virginia, in 2003.


title: Hutton Gibson

text: In the 1960s, Gibson worked for New York Central Railroad. In the early morning hours of December 11, 1964, he slipped off a steel platform which was covered in oil and snow and injured his back. A work injury lawsuit followed and finally reached court on February 7, 1968. Seven days later, Gibson was awarded $145,000 by the jury. Gibson paid his debts and attorney's fees and later that year, he relocated his family, first to Ireland, then to Australia.


title: Hutton Gibson

text: Gibson said in 2003 that the move to his mother's native country was undertaken because he believed that the Australian Army would reject his oldest son for the Australian Vietnam War draft, unlike the American military. Because of his back injuries, Gibson sought retraining in a new career. He was encouraged to become a computer programmer after IQ testing placed him in the genius range.


title: Hutton Gibson

text: Gibson was ousted as secretary of the Latin Mass Society of Australia after becoming increasingly vocal in expressing the allegation that the See of Peter is vacant due to Pope John XXIII, who convened the Second Vatican Council, and accusing subsequent popes of being heretical antipopes.


title: Hutton Gibson

text: In 1968, Gibson appeared on the Art Fleming-hosted version of the game show "Jeopardy!" as "Red Gibson, a railroad brakeman from South Ozone Park, New York". Gibson won $4,680 and retired undefeated after five shows, in accordance with the rules of the show then in force. He was invited back to appear in the 1968 Tournament of Champions, where he became the year's grand champion, winning slightly over one thousand dollars more, as well as a two-person cruise to the West Indies. Art Fleming observed on the October 18, 1968, episode that the "Jeopardy!" staff had had difficulty informing Gibson about his invitation as Gibson had decamped with his family to County Tipperary, Ireland.


title: Hutton Gibson

text: Gibson later participated in many Australian quiz shows, including "Big Nine" with Athol Guy and "Ford Superquiz" with Bert Newton. In 1986, "The Sydney Morning Herald" reported that Gibson had recently won $100,000 and an automobile in a TV quiz program.


title: Hutton Gibson

text: Gibson was an outspoken critic of the modern post-conciliar Catholic Church and a conspiracy theorist. He disseminated his views in a quarterly newsletter called "The War is Now!" and self-published three collections of these periodicals: "Is the Pope Catholic?", "The Enemy is Here!", and "The Enemy is Still Here!"


title: Hutton Gibson

text: Gibson was especially critical of Pope John Paul II, whom he once described as "Garrulous Karolus the Koran-Kisser". His allegation that the Pope kissed the Qur'an is corroborated by a FIDES News Service report of June 1, 1999, which quotes the Chaldean Catholic Patriarch, Raphael I Bidawid, as having confirmed to the news service that he was personally present when John Paul II kissed the text, which is sacred to Muslims:


title: Hutton Gibson

text: Gibson also used his newsletter to argue against Feeneyism. At the January 2004, We The People conference, Gibson advocated that the states should secede from the Federal government of the United States and the United States public debt should be abolished.


title: Hutton Gibson

text: One week before Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" (2004) was released in American film theaters, Hutton Gibson told radio talk show host Steve Feuerstein that the Holocaust was fabricated and "mostly fictional". He said that the Jews had simply emigrated to other countries rather than having been killed, a view which observers described as Holocaust denial. He claimed that census statistics prove that there were more Jews in Europe "after" World War II than before. Gibson said that certain Jews advocate a global religion and one world government.


title: Hutton Gibson

text: In his interview for "The New York Times Magazine" article, Gibson dismissed historical accounts that six million Jews were exterminated:


title: Hutton Gibson

text: Gibson was further quoted as saying that the Second Vatican Council was "a Masonic plot backed by the Jews" and the September 11, 2001 attacks were perpetrated by remote control: "Hutton flatly rejected that Al Qaeda hijackers had anything to do with the attacks. 'Anybody can put out a passenger list,' he said".


title: Hutton Gibson

text: In the early 1990s, Gibson and Tom Costello hosted a video called "Catholics, Where Has Our Church Gone?". It is critical of the changes made within the Catholic Church by the Second Vatican Council and espouses the Siri thesis that in 1958, after the death of Pope Pius XII, the man originally elected pope was not Angelo Roncalli, but another cardinal, "probably Cardinal Siri of Genoa" (a staunch conservative candidate and first papabile). Gibson stated that the white smoke which emanated from a chimney in the Sistine Chapel to announce a new pope's election was done in error; black smoke signifying that the papacy was still vacant was quickly created and the public was not informed of the reason for the initial white smoke. A still photograph of a newspaper story about this event is shown. "Had our church gone up in smoke"? asked Gibson. He stated that the new pope was forced to resign under duress and two days later, the "modernist Roncalli" was elected pope and took the name "John XXIII". In 1962, Roncalli, as Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council. In 2006, Hutton Gibson reversed his position on the Siri thesis, asserting that this theory was based on a mistranslation of an article written on October 27, 1958, by Silvio Negro for the evening edition of the Milan-based "Corriere della Sera".


title: Hutton Gibson

text: A similar event happened in 1939; in that case a confusing mixture of white and black smoke emanated from the Sistine Chapel chimney. In a note to Vatican Radio, the secretary of the Papal conclave at the time, a monsignor named Santoro said that a new pope, Eugenio Pacelli, had been properly elected regardless of the color of the smoke. Pacelli took the name Pius XII.


title: Hutton Gibson

text: Gibson endorsed Ron Paul for president in the 2008 United States presidential election. In January 2010, he made an appearance on the far-right-wing radio show, "The Political Cesspool", to promote his views. In August 2010, he made another appearance on "The Political Cesspool" during which he made a widely discussed allegation that Pope Benedict XVI is "homosexual" and "half the people in the Vatican are queer". During the same interview, he also claimed that the Pope was a Freemason.


title: Hutton Gibson

text: In 2006, Gibson's foundation, The World Faith Foundation of California, which is funded by Mel Gibson, purchased an existing church structure in the Pittsburgh suburb of Unity, Pennsylvania, and used it to establish a Tridentine sedevacantist congregation called St. Michael the Archangel Roman Catholic Chapel. Rev. Leonard Bealko, purportedly a former Roman Catholic priest who had left the church voluntarily in 1986, was appointed pastor. By mid-2007, Gibson and his fellow congregants had dismissed Bealko and dissolved the congregation amid charges that Bealko had misrepresented his credentials and mishandled its finances.


title: Director's cut

text: A director's cut is an edited version of a film (or video game, television episode, music video, or commercial) that is supposed to represent the director's own approved edit in contrast to the theatrical release. "Cut" explicitly refers to the process of film and game editing; in preparing a film for release, the director's cut is preceded by the assembly and rough editor's cut and usually followed by the final cut meant for the public film release and video game release.


title: Director's cut

text: Director's cuts of film are not generally released to the public because on most films the director does not have the final cut privilege. Those with money invested in the film, such as the production companies, distributors, or studios, may make changes intended to make the film more profitable at the box office. This sometimes means a happier ending or less ambiguity, or excluding scenes that would earn a more audience-restricting rating, but more often means that the film is simply shortened to provide more screenings per day.


title: Director's cut

text: With the rise of home video, the phrase became more generically used as a marketing term (including media such as comic books and music albums, neither of which actually have directors), and the most commonly seen form of director's cut is a cut where extra scenes and characters are added in, often making the director's cut considerably longer than the final cut.


title: Director's cut

text: Traditionally, the "director's cut" is not, by definition, the director's ideal or preferred cut. The editing process of a film is broken into stages: First is the assembly/rough cut, where all selected takes are put together in the order in which they should appear in the film. Next, the editor's cut is reduced from the rough cut; the editor may be guided by their own tastes or following notes from the director or producers. Eventually is the final cut, which actually gets released or broadcast. In between the editor's cut and the final cut can come any number of fine cuts, including the director's cut. The director's cut may include unsatisfactory takes, a preliminary soundtrack, a lack of desired pick-up shots etc., which the director would not like to be shown but uses as a placeholder until satisfactory replacements can be inserted. This is still how the term is used within the film industry, as well as commercials, television, and music videos.


title: Director's cut

text: The trend of releasing alternate cuts of films for artistic reasons became prominent in the 1970s; in 1974, the "director's cut" of "The Wild Bunch" was shown theatrically in Los Angeles to sold-out audiences. The theatrical release of the film had cut 10 minutes to get an R rating, but this cut was hailed as superior and has now become the definitive one. Other early examples include George Lucas's first two films being re-released following the success of "Star Wars", in cuts which more closely resembled his vision, or Peter Bogdanovich re-cutting "The Last Picture Show" several times. Charlie Chaplin also re-released all of his films in the 1970s, several of which were re-cut (Chaplin's re-release of "The Gold Rush" in the 1940s is almost certainly the earliest prominent example of a director's re-cut film being released to the public). A theatrical re-release of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" used the phrase "Special Edition" to describe a cut which was closer to Spielberg's intent but had a compromised ending demanded by the studio.


title: Director's cut

text: As the home video industry rose in the early 1980s, video releases of director's cuts were sometimes created for the small but dedicated cult fan market. Los Angeles cable station Z Channel is also cited as significant in the popularization of alternate cuts. Early examples of films released in this manner include Michael Cimino's "Heaven's Gate", where a longer cut was recalled from theatres but subsequently shown on cable and eventually released to home video; James Cameron's "Aliens", where a video release restored 20 minutes the studio had insisted on cutting; James Cameron's "The Abyss", where Cameron voluntarily made cuts to the theatrical version for pacing but restored them for a video release, and most famously, Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner", where an alternate workprint version was released to fan acclaim, ultimately resulting in the 1992 recut. Scott later recut the film once more, releasing a version dubbed "The Final Cut" in 2007. This was the final re-cut and the first in which Scott maintained creative control over the final product, leading to The Final Cut being considered the definitive version of the film.


title: Director's cut

text: Once distributors discovered that consumers would buy alternate versions of films, it became common for films to receive multiple releases. There is no standardization for labelling, leading to so-called "director's cuts" of films despite where the director prefers the theatrically released version, or when the director had actual final cut privilege. These were often assembled by simply restoring deleted scenes, sometimes adding as much as a half-hour to the length of the film without regard to pacing and storytelling.


title: Director's cut

text: As a result, the "director's cut" is often considered a mixed bag, with an equal share of supporters and detractors (including Peter Jackson and James Cameron for the latter; each preferring the phrases "special" and "extended" edition). Roger Ebert approved of the use of the label in unsuccessful films that had been tampered with by studio executives, such as Sergio Leone's original cut of "Once Upon a Time in America", and the moderately successful theatrical version of "Daredevil", which were altered by studio interference for their theatrical release. Other well-received director's cuts include Ridley Scott's "Kingdom of Heaven" (with "Empire" magazine stating: "The added 45 minutes in the Director’s Cut are like pieces missing from a beautiful but incomplete puzzle"), or Sam Peckinpah's "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid", where the restored 115-minute cut is closer to the director's intent than the theatrical 105-minute cut (the actual director's cut was 122 minutes; it was never completed to Peckinpah's satisfaction, but was used as a guide for the restoration that was done after his death).


title: Director's cut

text: Sometimes the term is used a marketing ploy. For example, Ridley Scott states on the director's commentary track of "Alien" that the original theatrical release was his "director's cut", and that the new version was released as a marketing ploy. Director Peter Bogdanovich, no stranger to director's cuts himself, cites "Red River" as an example where


title: Director's cut

text: In some instances, such as Peter Weir's "Picnic at Hanging Rock", Robert Wise's "", John Cassavetes's "The Killing of a Chinese Bookie", Blake Edwards's "Darling Lili" and Francis Ford Coppola's , changes made to a director's cut resulted in a very similar runtime or a shorter, more compact cut. This generally happens when a distributor insists that a film be completed to meet a release date, but sometimes it is the result of removing scenes that the distributor insisted on inserting, as opposed to restoring scenes they insisted on cutting.


title: Director's cut

text: Another way that released director's cuts can be compromised is when directors were never allowed to even shoot their vision, and thus when the film is re-cut, they must make do with the footage that exists. Examples of this include Terry Zwigoff's "Bad Santa", Brian Helgeland's "Payback", and most notably the Richard Donner re-cut of "Superman II". Donner completed about 75 per cent of the shooting of the sequel during the shooting of the first one but was fired from the project. of the film includes, among other things, screen test footage of stars Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder, footage used in the first film, and entire scenes that were shot by replacement director Richard Lester which Donner dislikes but were required for story purposes.


title: Director's cut

text: Separate to director's cuts are alternate cuts released as "special editions" or "extended cuts". These versions are often put together for home video for fans, and should not be confused with 'director's cuts'. For example, despite releasing extended versions of his "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, Peter Jackson told IGN in 2019 that “the theatrical versions are the definitive versions, I regard the extended cuts as being a novelty for the fans that really want to see the extra material.”


title: Director's cut

text: James Cameron has shared similar sentiments regarding the special editions of his films, "What I put into theaters is the Director's Cut. Nothing was cut that I didn't want cut. All the extra scenes we've added back in are just a bonus for the fans." Similar statements were made by Ridley Scott for the 2003 'director's cut' of "Alien".


title: Director's cut

text: Such alternate versions sometimes include changes to the special effects in addition to different editing, such as George Lucas's "Star Wars" films, and Steven Spielberg's "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial".


title: Director's cut

text: Extended or special editions can also apply to films that have been extended for television or cut out to fill time slots and long advertisement breaks, against the explicit wishes of the director, such as the TV versions of "Dune" (1984), "The Warriors" (1979), "Superman" (1978) and the "Harry Potter" films.


title: Director's cut

text: "The Lord of the Rings" film series directed by Peter Jackson saw an "Extended Edition" release for each of the three films "" (2001), "" (2002), and "" (2003) featuring an additional 30 minutes, 46 minutes and 52 minutes respectively of new scenes, special effects and music alongside fan-club credits.


title: Director's cut

text: "" directed by Zack Snyder had an "Ultimate Edition," which added back 31 minutes of footage cut for the theatrical release and received an R rating, released digitally on 28 June 2016, and on Blu-ray on 19 July 2016. The extended director's cut received more positive critical reviews than the theatrically released film.


title: Director's cut

text: The film "Justice League" which suffered a very troubled production, was begun by Snyder, who completed a pre-postproduction director's cut but had to step down before completing the project due to his daughter's death. Joss Whedon was hired to complete the film, which was however heavily re-shot, re-edited and released in 2017 with Snyder retaining the directorial credit, to negative reception from general audience, fans and critics alike and box office failure. Following a global fan campaign to which the director and members of the cast and crew showed support, Snyder was allowed to return and complete the project the way he intended it and a 4-hour version of the film dubbed "Zack Snyder's Justice League" with some additionally shot scenes at the end was released on March 18, 2021 on HBO Max to much favorable reviews and acclaim. Snyder originally teased a 214-minute cut of the film that was supposed to be the theatrical version released in 2017 if he did not step down from the project.


title: Director's cut

text: The film "Caligula" exists in at least 10 different officially released versions, ranging from a sub-90-minute television edit version of TV-14 (later TV-MA) for cable television to an unrated full pornographic version exceeding 3.5 hours. This is believed to be the largest amount of distinct versions of a single film. Among major studio films, the record is believed to be held by "Blade Runner"; the magazine "Video Watchdog" counted no less than seven distinct versions in a 1993 issue, before director Ridley Scott later released a "Final Cut" in 2007 to acclaim from critics including Roger Ebert who included it on his great movies list, The release of "Blade Runner: The Final Cut" brings the supposed grand total to eight differing versions of "Blade Runner".


title: Director's cut

text: Upon its release on DVD and Blu-ray in 2019, "" featured an extended cut with seven minutes of additional footage. This is the first time since "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" that a Wizarding World film has had one.


title: Director's cut

text: An animated example of an extended cut without the approval of the director was 1983's "Twice Upon a Time", which was extended to have more profanity (supervised by co-writer and producer Bill Couturié) as opposed to co-director John Korty's original.


title: Director's cut

text: The Coen Brothers' "Blood Simple" is one of few examples that demonstrate director's cuts are not necessarily longer.


title: Director's cut

text: The music video for the 2006 Academy Award-nominated song "Listen", performed by Beyoncé, received a director's cut by Diane Martel. This version of the video was later included on Knowles' "B'Day Anthology Video Album" (2007). Linkin Park has a director's cut version for their music video "Faint" (directed by Mark Romanek) in which one of the band members spray paints the words "En Proceso" on a wall, as well as Hoobastank also having one for 2004's "The Reason" which omits the woman getting hit by the car. Britney Spears' music video for 2007's "Gimme More" was first released as a director's cut on iTunes, with the official video released 3 days later. Many other director's cut music videos contain sexual content that can't be shown on TV thus creating alternative scenes, such as Thirty Seconds to Mars's "Hurricane", and in some cases, alternative videos, such as in the case of Spears' 2008 video for "Womanizer".


title: Director's cut

text: As the trend became more widely recognized, the term "director's cut" became increasingly used as a colloquialism to refer to an expanded version of other things, including video games, music, and comic books. This confusing usage only served to further reduce the artistic value of a director's cut, and it is currently rarely used in those ways.


title: Director's cut

text: For video games, these expanded versions, also referred as "complete editions", will have additions to the gameplay or additional game modes and features outside the main portion of the game.


title: Director's cut

text: As is the case with certain high-profile Japanese-produced games, the game designers may take the liberty to revise their product for the overseas market with additional features during the localization process. These features are later added back to the native market in a re-release of a game in what is often referred as the international version of the game. This was the case with the overseas versions of "Final Fantasy VII", "Metal Gear Solid" and "Rogue Galaxy", which contained additional features (such as new difficulty settings for "Metal Gear Solid"), resulting in re-released versions of those respective games in Japan ("Final Fantasy VII International", "" and "Rogue Galaxy: Director's Cut").In the case of "" and "", the American versions were released first, followed by the Japanese versions and then the European versions, with each regional release offering new content not found in the previous one. All of the added content from the Japanese and European versions of those games were included in the expanded editions titled "" and "".


title: Director's cut

text: They also, similar to movies, will occasionally include extra, uncensored or alternate versions of cutscenes, as was the case with "". In markets with strict censorship, a later relaxing of those laws occasional will result in the game being rereleased with the "Special/Uncut Edition" tag added to differentiate between the originally released censored version and the current uncensored edition.


title: Director's cut

text: Several of the "Pokémon" games have also received director's cuts and have used the term "extension", though "remake" and "third version" are also often used by many fans. These include "" (Japan only), "Pokémon Yellow" (for "Pokémon Red" and "Green"/"Blue"), "Pokémon Crystal" (for "Pokémon Gold" and "Silver"), "Pokémon Emerald" (for "Pokémon Ruby" and "Sapphire"), "Pokémon Platinum" (for ""Pokémon Diamond" and "Pearl"") and "Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon".