Word: fissioned
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Polish Peasant Party, once the largest in Poland, began to show distinct signs of fission last week. Through the German occupation it stood stoutly against pressure from without; now it was splitting from pressure from within...
...Communist wing of the Peasant Party also tried a little fission of its own. In Warsaw it set up a new party policymaking body called "Peasant Self Aid." "Conservatives" would not be included...
...just about to leave for Princeton. Bohr told U.S. experimenters about it. They sprang to their atom-smashing machines and quickly confirmed it (TIME, Feb. 6, March 13, 1939). They also stood gallantly back while Dr. Meitner published the first notes on uranium splitting. She called it "fission," a familiar word in biology but a new term for physics...
Energy Profit. Fission was revolutionary, sensational-not only because the heaviest of all elements had been cracked wide open, but because of the tremendous energy profit. Up to then, scientists had always had to put more energy into their projectiles than was released in the breakup. Now, an explosion of about 200,000,000 electron-volts was touched off by idling neutrons of less than one electron-volt. Matter equal to about one-fifth of a neutron's mass was converted into energy according to the Einstein formula...
Explosive Calculations. Before the war it was discovered that slow-moving neutrons could split the atoms of the uranium isotope, U-235, giving a mighty gush of energy. Besides energy, their "fission" produced more flying neutrons. If enough of these in turn split uranium atoms, the reaction would maintain itself, gain momentum. It would flash through all the uranium, like the flame of a match through excelsior...