Word: atomically
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Back in the benign 1950s, Americans looked on the atom as a friend, a cheerful Reddy Kilowatt that would provide cheap, abundant electricity to run their factories, power their TV sets and even chill the beer they drank while watching them. Today much of this enthusiasm has not only evaporated but turned into antipathy. Antinuclear activists have slowed construction of power plants from Seabrook, N.H., to Diablo Canyon, Calif. Angry people in Texas, New Mexico and Washington have packed public meetings to protest government plans to use their areas for nuclear-waste disposal and to demand the removal of wastes...
Nature could hardly have created anything that seems more innocuous. An invisible and odorless gas, carbon dioxide is a simple molecular linkup of just a single atom of carbon and two atoms of oxygen (CO2). It constitutes a mere fraction of the atmosphere (.03% vs. about 78% for nitrogen and 20% for oxygen) but becomes dangerous to man and other air-breathing creatures when it accumulates in concentrations higher than 10% as, say, at the bottom of deep wells or mine shafts...
Even in an age that has witnessed everything from the harnessing of the atom to flights across the solar system, the thought of matter going down a kind of cosmic drain stretches the mind. It is totally at odds with common sense and, a cynic might say, smacks slightly of selfdelusion, if not madness. After all, the frightful Heffalump turned out to be only Pooh with his head stuck in a jar of honey...
...weeks such exploding stars may shine as brightly as all the galaxy's billions of stars combined. Zwicky and Baade felt sure that the force of such a gravitational collapse and explosion could not only spray material far off into the heavens, but also actually crush the very atoms in the core of a star. Orbiting electrons would be pounded right into the atom's nucleus and wedded with its protons. The result of this celestial alchemy, they said, would be a clump of solidly packed neutrons...
...intervention with Faulknerian tenacity, a battle that began over control of oil reserves and evolved into a crusade against "forced integration," which he saw as the plot of an international Communist conspiracy. Taunted Governor Earl Long: "What are you going to do now, Leander? The Feds have got the atom bomb...