Page "Rosetta Stone" Paragraph 52

The term Rosetta stone has been used idiomatically to represent a crucial key to the process of decryption of encoded information, especially when a small but representative sample is recognized as the clue to understanding a larger whole.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first figurative use of the term appeared in the 1902 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica relating to an entry on the chemical analysis of glucose.

An almost literal use of the phrase appears in popular fiction within H. G. Wells ' 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come, where the protagonist finds a manuscript written in shorthand that provides a key to understanding additional scattered material that is sketched out in both longhand and on typewriter.

Perhaps its most important and prominent usage in scientific literature was Nobel laureate Theodor W. Hänsch's reference in a 1979 Scientific American article on spectroscopy where he says that " the spectrum of the hydrogen atoms has proved to be the Rosetta stone of modern physics: once this pattern of lines had been deciphered much else could also be understood ".