Radiation may be dangerous, but every time a radioactive atom fires out one of these little missiles there is a potentially very useful by-product (besides helium) - heat.
When a vortex is formed, it creates a membrane of atoms at its outer edge, and the outer band of atoms catches fire, forming a sun and stars.
The other paper presents the world's most precise laser, which uses individual atoms to fire off a beam of high-energy electrons.
Over the last decades, small semiconductor systems with discrete energy spectra, known as quantum dots (QDs) and that are analogs of atoms, have fired the imagination of researchers in many fields of physics [1 3].
In the classic double-slit experiment, atoms are fired at a wall with two breaks in it, and they pass through to the other side, where they hit a detector, creating the kind of interference pattern expected from a wave.
According to Aristotle, Democritus regarded the soul as composed of one kind of atom, in particular fire atoms.
History has a persistent habit of making scientists look like fools – so while they now fire atoms at each other at high speed in tunnels under the Swiss Alps, how can they criticise religion when their own beliefs sometimes turn out to be wrong?
This seems to have been because of the association of life with heat, and because spherical fire atoms are readily mobile, and the soul is regarded as causing motion.
Many theologians explained this sort of change in terms of a theory of latency (kumun), which maintained that the fire atoms were already present in the wood or stone, albeit latent in them, and then were made manifest through the action of burning or striking.
There's a great story to be told about atoms and the void: how atoms evolved out of fire and bent space and grew into Homer, Chartres cathedral and "Blonde on Blonde". How those same atoms came to learn that the earth, sun, life, intelligence and the whole universe will eventually die.
