Word: atomize
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...image. Terrorism is sometimes described (in a frustrated, oh-the-burdens-of-great-power tone of voice) as ?asymmetrical warfare.? So what? Most of history is a pageant of asymmetries. It is mostly the asymmetries that cause history to happen?an obscure Schickelgruber nearly destroys Europe; a mere atom, artfully diddled, incinerates a city. Elegant perplexity puts too much emphasis on the ?asymmetrical? side of the phrase and not enough on the fact that it is, indeed, real warfare. Asymmetry is a concept. War is, as we see, blood and death...
...writer of science fiction and fantasy; of prostate cancer; in Orinda, Calif. A self-described "total social misfit," Anderson escaped high school angst by immersing himself in books. He began writing his own stories and in college sold his first one, Tomorrow's Children, about the consequences of the atom bomb. Of his prolific output--which included such novels as Tau Zero and The Boat of a Million Years--his wife said, "We lost count after...
...both, simultaneously. The jury is still out. And may always be out. This ambivalence is simply the dualism of the world, the secret of its magnetic fields, its gigantic plus and stupendous minus. We split the atom, and what was the moral meaning of Hiroshima? The lives saved? Or the lives incinerated...
...assumptions and beliefs about eternity and how the world will end. For scientists, meanwhile, there are certain details in these discoveries that have profound--and bizarre--implications. For example, the new observations bolster the theory of inflation: the notion that the universe when it was still smaller than an atom went through a period of turbocharged expansion, flying apart (in apparent, but not actual, contradiction of Albert Einstein's theories of relativity) faster than the speed of light...
...cool regions gives theoretical physicists all sorts of information about the newborn cosmos. They were already pretty sure, from the equations of nuclear physics and from measurements of the relative amounts of hydrogen, helium and lithium in the universe, that protons, neutrons and electrons (the building blocks of every atom in the cosmos) add up to only about 5% of the so-called critical density--what it would take to bring the cosmic expansion essentially to a halt by means of gravity...