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"[Science fiction is ] That branch of literature which is concerned with the impact of scientific advance upon human beings."
- Isaac Asimov

A-Bomb  
  Abbreviation for "atomic bomb".  

I find it hard to believe that Heinlein was the first to use this expression, since HG Wells coined the phrase atomic bomb way back in 1914 in The World Set Free. So, if anyone can find any earlier reference, let me know.

Space-time is standard stuff in high school these days. But these men really mean it. They really mean that space and time and mass and energy and radiation and gravity are all simply different ways of thinking about the same thing. And if you once catch on to how just one of them works, you have the key to all of them. According to Wilkie, physicists up to now, even after the A-bomb was developed, were just fooling around the edges of the subject; they had the beginnings of a unified field theory, but they didn't really believe it themselves; they usually acted as if these were all as different as the names for them."
Technovelgy from Sixth Column, by Anson MacDonald.
Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1941
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