Alva Review-Courier -

CARBONDALE, Ill. (AP) — In 1968, an SIU Carbondale physicist named Walter Henneberger published a paper suggesting that an electron could be freed from an atom and bound to it at the same time, with the help of super-intense lasers.

It was a prediction no one could test. The first laser had only been constructed eight years prior, and wasn't nearly powerful enough to produce the conditions Henneberger theorized about.

He saw his solution as a mathematical fact, arising naturally from everything scientists knew about how atoms interact with light.

But to his peers, it was nonsense.

"There were...