Modern Ideas in an Ancient World
Amid all these radical and entirely speculative ideas was a revolutionary idea of Atoms that we today believe to be the truth, though not everyone at the time did. The first to champion this cause was Leucippus (490-? BC) who believed that at some point there was a basic unit that made up the physical objects. (Asimov 2)The believed that the universe is made up of these individual entities (atoms) and of a vacuum. None of Leucippus' works have survived to today but those of Democritus, a follower of Leucippus, have survived long enough allow us to know what they believed. They believed that the atoms are all made of the same material but vary in size and shape. These atoms are eternal, indivisible, and are unable to be sensed. These ideas placed Leucippus and Democritus in conflict with the rest of the Greek philosophers because they believed in the existence of a vacuum or void which the rest of the philosophers had rejected. They, Leucippus and Democritus, proposed that these atoms moved eternally in the void. When some of the atoms collected, things were created, and likewise when the atoms separated, things were dissolved. These theories would continue to be discussed for the next two thousand years but it would take the Renaissance to bring the theories of Leucippus and Democritus to the forefront again. Finally, the theories of these men who had died so long ago were being supported by the greatest scientists in history. Among them were Francis Bacon and Galileo and later Isaac Newton.(Amaldi 21) But it took the Chemist John Dalton to finally prove that if there were atoms, they would precisely correspond to the chemical reactions he had observed. With this science, not speculation, supported the theory of atoms. (Trefil 6) Previous
