Lise Meitner

Lise Meitner was a physicist who never lost her humanity, a woman who read the secret language of the atom and refused to let it be turned into a weapon in her name. Her Sun shines in Scorpio, and her whole life was Scorpionic transformation made real: death and rebirth, the Phoenix rising from the ashes, power drawn from the mind rather than the fist. She was born in Vienna in 1878 into a Jewish family, one of the first women admitted to the university, only the second to earn a doctorate there in 1906. Scorpio is the sign of the researcher and the investigator, and she gave her deep, penetrating gaze to the most secretive matter in the universe: the nucleus itself. When her collaborator Otto Hahn found barium where uranium should have been, it was Meitner, exiled in Sweden by the Nazi regime, who saw the truth. With her nephew she explained that the nucleus had split, and she named it nuclear fission.

Her Moon in Aries is a fierce, courageous, warrior's moon, at peace only in action and never in surrender. That bravery let her survive exile, injustice, and the theft of her Nobel recognition, and still keep her conscience whole.