Word: fissionability
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...quite came off on schedule last week. Especially the atom bomb tests in what the announcers persisted in calling "Doomtown, Nevada." Faithful televiewers turned out at 8 a.m. for six successive mornings only to be met each time with fresh postponements. But this failure to make a rendezvous with fission only brought out the essential pluck of the network newscasters. CBS's Charles Collingwood tried hard to keep his end up by filling in with a telecast from Las Vegas where, amid the clatter of one-armed bandits, he solemnly asked the proprietor of The Sands Hotel...
...electrons must also govern the macrocosms of intergalactic space. Einstein's scratchpad theorems broke through the thought barriers of knowledge and rewrote the basic scientific law of the universe. The now-mundane miracle of television is a splinter off Einstein's achievement; the mushroom clouds of atomic fission and hydrogen fusion are his unwanted monuments; mankind's chance to turn earth-shaking force into good is his legacy...
That was in the old days. Now atomic fission is everywhere. Nowhere is the conflict between East and West, Communism and Democracy, so clearly outlined as on the Charles River. A nightmare is haunting today's single sculler: the vision of a motorboat filled with little boys. The little boys are armed with rocks, and they pursue him relentlessly until he is capsized into the nuclear waters of the Charles, Cambridge's first casuality from radioactivity...
Whether or not the circumstances of Einstein's death seem particularly fitting, the newspaper descriptions of him as "the man who made the atomic bomb possible" seem grossly inappropriate. To be sure, the Theory of Relativity did provide the theoretical basis for nuclear fission. But if there was anything that Einstein's life-work opposed, it was the bomb. A leader in warning of the weapon's destructive potential, Einstein championed total world disarmament to prevent its further use. He early cited the danger of radiation poisoning, and commented in 1945, when told of the Hiroshima bombing, "the world...
...widespread notions that the monastic life was unnatural, unhealthy, a "waste." Today that view is drastically changing: the monastery has begun to recapture the world's imagination. It has dawned on the world that the robed nun, the cowled monk have a place in the Age of Fission...