Word: atomical
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...question has not seemed rhetorical. The century began with the Russians shaking the world, but he world seemed prepared to be shaken. Hitler was free to conquer most of Europe and to kill most of the Jews. India free; Africa free. In the 1930s scientists sought to free the atom. In the 1960s blacks and women sought freedoms of their own. Free ove. Free fall. Psychologists freed minds from guilt. Vatican II freed the church from its past. Drugs too proffered self-fulfillment. In the 1980s experimental engineers would see if the body could be freed from genetic dictates. With...
...process of occurring, it was sometimes difficult for the world to weigh Hitler, to judge him, to predict him, to know his ambition or his lunacy. He was a perfect phenomenon of the age of Einstein, in which seemingly infinitesimal causes can produce spectacular effects: cataclysms. Hitler was an atom, a nonentity convinced he could conquer the world. But the very madness of Hitler's enterprise made war, from the Allied perspective, seem sane and necessary. If ever there was a war that should be fought, it was that one, against such evil. But war always has its reasons...
With the controlled splitting of the atom, humanity, already profoundly perplexed and disunified, was brought inescapably into a new age. The race had been won, the weapon had been used by those on whom civilization could best hope to depend; but the demonstration of power against living creatures instead of dead matter created a bottomless wound in the living conscience of the race. The rational mind had won the most Promethean of its conquests over nature, and had put into the hands of common man the fire and force of the sun itself...
...young people, who had previously thought of themselves as part of an isolated minority, experienced the euphoric sense of discovering that they are, as the saying goes, what's happening. Adults were made more aware than ever before that the children of the welfare state and the atom bomb do indeed march to the beat of a different drummer, as well as to the tune of an electric guitarist...
...unraveling of the DNA double helix was one of the great events in science, comparable to the splitting of the atom or the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. It also marked the maturation of a bold new science: molecular biology. Under this probing discipline, man could at last explore-and understand-living things at their most fundamental level: that of their atoms and molecules...