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To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (89230)	10/1/1999 6:43:00 PM
From: John Walliker	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

Off topic! <It took mankind thousands of years to get to the point where we could induce nuclear chain reactions - it's hard to do!> It's pretty hard for me to imagine ancient Roman engineers thinking, "Someday, we'll be able to extract energy by splitting an atom!" I believe that there is geological evidence for criticality having occurred naturally. John

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (89230)	10/1/1999 8:32:00 PM
From: John F. Dowd	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Tench:Actually the Greeks had conceptualized the atom before the Romans. I believe atom is derived from a Greek word. True they did not think of splitting the nucleus to release binding forces but they did think in terms of atomic building blocks. JFD

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (89230)	10/1/1999 10:30:00 PM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Re: It's pretty hard for me to imagine ancient Roman engineers.... The Greeks conceived of the atom about 400BC, by definition, it was the smallest possible piece of anything and couldn't be split. I guess if they thought it couldn't be split, it would imply they had considered the possibility of trying. (They certainly didn't expect to gain an energy source by splitting it.) On the other hand, given the nature of the relationship that developed between the conquered Greeks and the Romans, the Romans would probably have taken any Greek notion of something impossible to split as a challenge - I would guess that there were Roman engineers that pondered splitting atoms! Dan