subatomically

English

Etymology

From subatomic +‎ -ally.

Adverb

subatomically (not comparable)

  1. Being lesser than or below atomic level.
    • 1903, Halliday Sutherland, Mary Leeds, The Electrical World and Engineer, Volume XLII‎[1], McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, →ISBN, page 902:
      Chemists have always clung to the hope, and cherished the belief, that the list of seventy odd elements might be curtailed. All these elements were considered as substances which had not yet yielded to further or more remote analysis. It may, however, at any time be found possible to reduce some element or elements to yet more elementary forms. The old alchemists sought vainly to convert one metal to another. The recent conclusions of physicists that atoms of substances are complex structures, of which ions are the component parts, has paved the way for the revived belief that matter is evanescent in type, and that it may be capable of being changed from one substance to another, either by internal forces in cases of particular instability, or by external forces, such as those that exist in the neighborhood of a Rontgen ray tube cathode surface. It now seems as though radium may be one of those forms of matter which exists in a condition of ionic or subatomic instability, and that radium may be constantly breaking down subatomically, with a disengagement of energy, to form a new and more stable subatomic structure or structures, such as helium.
    • 1946, Smithsonian Institution Board of Regents, United States National Museum, Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution‎[2], Smithsonian Institution, page 143:
      The subsurface temperature and radiation pressure of the sun are exceedingly high; the sun is gaseous from surface to center and generates energy subatomically in such a manner that the present size has not appreciably changed in a billion years or more.
    • 2008, Marc Jeffrey Seifer, Transcending the Speed of Light: Consciousness, Quantum Physics, and the Fifth Dimension‎[3], Inner Traditions, →ISBN, page 81:
      As discussed in the first chapter, the number 137 shows up on the macroscopic scale as well, as in the “fine structure” constant, which measures the ratio of matter to energy; it also shows up subatomically in the strength of the electromagnetic force inside of atoms (1/137 is the probability that an electron will absorb a photon).

Translations

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