Word: atomically
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...nuclear age dawned in the wrong place, at the wrong time. In 1938, outside Berlin's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, Nazis paraded in the streets. Inside, German Chemist Otto Hahn patiently probed the secrets of the atom. He repeated an experiment that had been tried by half a dozen researchers, including Enrico Fermi in Rome and Irene Joliot-Curie in Paris...
With his primitive equipment, he repeatedly bombarded the element uranium with neutrons in an effort to create new man-made radioactive isotopes. According to the theories of the time, the neutrons should have combined with the nucleus of the uranium atoms to produce heavier, unstable isotopes. Yet he kept finding lighter atoms of barium. Gradually, the inexplicable presence of the barium, which is only about half the weight of uranium, persuaded Hahn that he had done what had always been considered impossible: he had split the atom...
...this step, so contradictory to all the experience of nuclear physics." But Hahn's former coworker, Physicist Lise Meitner, had no such hesitation. Hearing of the experiment in exile in Sweden, she not only proclaimed that Hahn and Strassmann had achieved nuclear fission, but also calculated that each atom of uranium had released 20 million times as much energy as a comparable amount...
...farther back for a causative scientific theory, one must not be so shortsighted as to focus on 1917. The actual origin of the theory that made the laser possible must be credited to the Greek scientists Leucippus (fl. 5th century B.C.) and Democritus (460-370 B.C.), who originated the atomic theory and also coined the word atom (Greek for not + cutting, indivisible...
...Einstein pointed out that an atom or molecule stimulated by an electro-magnetic wave (light, for example) would give off a basic unit of light called the photon, which would have the same wave length as the stimulating wave. A number of subsequent experiments proved Einstein correct. But not until 1958 did Physicists Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes describe a device that they thought would be able to stimulate molecules of gas confined in a cylinder until they gave off photons in an intense and powerful stream. Their device was a variation of Townes's earlier Nobel Prizewinning invention...