Greek writing itself changed shape long after alpha's ancient religious and numerical roles, covered elsewhere in this atlas, were fixed. Classical inscriptions used only capital letters; a cursive minuscule hand developed gradually through the Byzantine period and was standardised by scribes around the 9th century CE, giving Greek the lowercase forms, alpha included, still used in print today.
In modern science alpha denotes the first in a numbered or ranked series far removed from any ancient use: physicists call the helium nucleus emitted in radioactive decay an alpha particle, a name Ernest Rutherford gave it in 1899 when he sorted newly discovered radiation into alpha, beta and gamma types by penetrating power; astronomers, following the 17th-century Bayer system for naming stars, generally label the brightest star in a constellation Alpha, as in Alpha Centauri; and software developers call an early, unfinished test release an alpha version, the first stage before a beta release.
None of these modern technical senses existed before the 19th or 20th century, and none carries over any of alpha's ancient gematria or scriptural associations discussed elsewhere in this atlas, even where the word alpha itself, as in an alpha predator or an alpha personality, has drifted into everyday English well beyond any of these technical fields.