It is comparable in its implications to the discovery of how to split the atom.

BBC: Margaret Thatcher: How PM legitimised green concerns

But notice, that extra tail of a line crosses the entire range of background radiation on Earth, what is considered normal, what humans and every other life form has lived with long before we split the atom.

FORBES: Fear Of Radiation -- It's All In The Noise

For Mark Oliphant, the most exciting time of his early career was when he won a scholarship to Cambridge to work with Ernest Rutherford, a New Zealand-born physicist, in whose Cavendish laboratory British scientists first split the atom.

ECONOMIST: Sir Mark Oliphant

We should do it because in a nation where we split the atom, sent a man to the moon, mapped the human genome, where we have some of the most promising treatments and cures available, hard working people should get the care they need when they're sick.

CNN: Clinton's September 17, 2007, speech on health care