Word: split
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...thoughts and things were split. The sudden achievement of victory was a mercy, to the Japanese no less than to the United Nations; but mercy born of a ruthless force beyond anything in human chronicle. The race had been won, the weapon had been used by those on whom civilization could best hope to depend; but the demonstration of power against living creatures instead of dead matter created a bottomless wound in the living conscience of the race. The rational mind had won the most Promethean of its conquests over nature, and had put into the hands of common...
...promise of good and of evil bordered alike on the infinite? with this further, terrible split in the fact: that upon a people already so nearly drowned in materialism even in peacetime, the good uses of this power might easily bring disaster as prodigious as the evil. The bomb rendered all decisions made so far, at Yalta and at Potsdam, mere trivial dams across tributary rivulets. When the bomb split open the universe and revealed the prospect of the infinitely extraordinary, it also revealed the oldest, simplest, commonest, most neglected and most important of facts: that each man is eternally...
...when the British did not dragoon their scientists as sternly as in this one, somebody asked gruff Sir Ernest Rutherford (later Lord Rutherford) if he would please stop puttering with the atom and work full time on antisubmarine devices. Rutherford answered, in effect: Gentlemen, I am trying to split the atom. If I succeed, it will be more important than...
...Event. Sunday-supplement readers had long been warned that if ever an atom were split, the whole world might blow up. Yet when the great event occurred, only the scientific world quivered...
...succeeded because he chose the right target, an atom of an extremely rare form of uranium (U 235), which he bombarded with a stream of neutrons. The explosion which occurred when the uranium atom finally split was, proportionately, the greatest man-made blast in history; it released 200 million electron-volts. But because the source and volume were so small, the shock was not enough to knock a fly off the wall. As war overtook the world, the problem of releasing atomic energy in quantity, as for a bomb, still remained unsolved...