The second Otto in this story was also born in Vienna. His father was a painter and his mother a pianist. He enjoyed music but shared his aunt’s passion for physics and went on to study at Lise Meitner’s alma matter, the University of Vienna. He graduated in 1926.

​

He moved to London in 1933, when Hitler’s rise to power forced him to leave his position at a German university. In 1934 he moved to Copenhagen, where he spent time working under Niels Bohr – the star of another play about nuclear physics, Copenhagen. He spent five years in Copenhagen, and in Christmas 1938 visited Lise in Sweden.

​

He happened to be visiting just as Lise received an interesting letter from Otto Hahn. Otto had noted in his lab that uranium seemed to transform into barium when hit with a neutron. Frisch and Meitner considered the letter on a cross-country skiing trip, and coined the term nuclear fission to explain what they believed was happening.

​

Since Meitner and Frisch were Jewish and so unable to publish in Nazi Germany, they had to publish their idea separately to Hahn. Hahn published first, discussing his experiment. Meitner and Frisch then followed, releasing an article explaining what had happened.

In the middle of 1939 Frisch left Copenhagen for a short trip to Birmingham, but as war broke out in Europe he was forced to stay. He met with physicist Rudolf Peierls and produced a memorandum at Birmingham University suggesting that an atomic explosion could be created out of the chain reaction he and his aunt had realised. (As it happens, this memo was the inspiration for two plays by Zinnie Harris – part of The Bomb collection from Tricycle Theatre.) It was the first time the idea of an atomic bomb had been formally considered, and his note arguably began the British and American nuclear programmes.

​

Throughout the war, Frisch was engaged in atomic research at Los Alamos, the secret base of the Manhatten Project.

​

In 1946, he returned to England and became the head of the nuclear physics division of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment. He also taught at Cambridge, as a professor of Natural Philosophy and a fellow of Trinity College.

​

He retired in 1972 and died seven years later. His son is also a physicist.