Originally posted by allan
"The barest atomic research only got started after the turn of the century and atomic weopans research only really got serious during the course of WW2."
I meant theories. Back in that era, did scientists understand, for example, how the sun produces its energy? Not that they had any idea how to go about reproducing this process, but did they have theoretical knowledge of it? That of course is fusion, but was there any theories at the time about the energy that holds atomic particles together (the "strong" force), and that (theoretically) if an atom were split apart, this energy would be released--i.e. fission? I'm not sure when the existence of subatomic particles was first hypothesized, maybe it is in fact more recent than I think. But I would think it would've been long before we actually figured out how to split an atom.