Democritus The Seer of Materialism......or Democritus Our Atom Heart Father | for everyone |
It
is a sobering thought to remember that the first people in the history
of humanity to ever actually 'see' atoms were Nobel Prize winning
physicists Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Roher in 1986.
Before
that of course atoms had been perfectly well demonstrated to exist. New
Zealander Ernest Rutherford had had the idea of using atoms to look
inside other atoms in 1901, but to actually see what they look like when
they sit together was not to happen for more than 80 years.
Binnig
and Roher saw what looked like footballs, or what Markus Chown
(2006) describes as boxes of oranges stacked row upon row....these were
atoms the basic building blocks of all existence finally captured in
their natural state so to speak. Amazing.
Chown
makes the observation that these atoms looked most particularly like
the tiny hard grains of matter that Democritus had seen in his mind's
eye 2400 years ago.
He
goes on to point out that "nobody has ever made a prediction that far
in advance of experimental confirmation." (Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt
You p.8).
I
have always had a soft spot for Democritus who is often misleadingly
referred to as a 'Pre-Socratic' philosopher due to the characterisation
of him by Aristotle, when in-fact he was a near contemporary of
Socrates.
His Wikipedia entry begins:-
Democritus (Greek: Δημόκριτος, Dēmokritos, "chosen of the people", aka The Laughing Philosopher) was a pre-Socratic Greek materialist philosopher (born at Abdera in Thrace ca. 460 BC - died ca 370 BC). Democritus was a student of Leucippus and co-originator of the belief that all matter is made up of various imperishable, indivisible elements which he called atoma (sg. atomon) or "indivisible units", from which we get the English word atom.
Domocitus's
teacher and mentor Leucippus is a very shadowy figure; his exact dates
are unknown, some even say he never existed, but it is likely that he
was a contemporary of Empedocles (around 440 BC) and that he came either
from Miletus or from Elea.
Democritus, who was a student of Leucippus, is a known to have existed and his biography is somewhat more substantiated.
He
was born 460 BC in Abdera in the north of Greece and died at the age of
90 years, after leaving an expansive work elaborating his philosophy
including the atomistic theory in great detail.
Democritus
had written somewhere in the region of 70 books but unfortunately none
of his original writings remain intact, but a great deal of what he said
has survived in Epicurus.
Under
the guidance of Leucippus, Demoritus set about demolishing the popular
philosophical belief of 'monism' and the pantheism that it justifies in
Greek thinking of his day.
Following a long and still current tradition H.P. Owen (1971: 65) claimed that
- "Pantheists are ‘monists’...they believe that there is only one Being, and that all other forms of reality are either modes (or appearances) of it or identical with it."
The
monist position as stated by Parmenides had said that the void could
not exist because that would mean the nothingness would have to exist as
something which he thought was a logical absurdity.
Overthrowing
monism was exactly what Leucippus and Democritus intended. They
succeeded elegantly by inventing the concept of atoms, for which they
are still known
Democritus began with stating a notion of space that served as its premise.
Rather
than an attribute of matter that describes its extension, Democritus
characterizes space as a receptacle for stationary and moving objects,
which -under certain circumstances- can as well be completely empty.
They
held that the nature of things consists of an infinite number of
extremely small particles, which they called atoms. Atoms are
physically, but not geometrically, indivisible. Democritus described
atoms as being indestructible and completely full, i.e. containing no
empty space. Because of their indestructibility, atoms are eternal.
This
incredible prescient conceptualisation of the building blocks of matter
for which Democritus is credited is to my mind a materialist miracle.
He
was wrong about the empty spaces of course an atom is nearly all
emptiness we now know, but his visualisation of the construction of the
universe means he is the Moses of modern science.
Wikipedia again:-
Democritus
agreed that everything which is must be eternal, but denied that "the
void" can be equated with nothing. This makes him the first thinker on
record to argue the existence of an entirely empty "void". In order to
explain the change around us from basic, unchangeable substance he
created a theory that argued that there are various basic elements which
always existed but can be rearranged into many different forms.
Democritus' theory argued that atoms only had several properties,
particularly size, shape, and (perhaps) weight; all other properties
that we attribute to matter, such as color and taste, are but the result
of complex interactions between the atoms in our bodies and the atoms
of the matter that we are examining. Furthermore, he believed that the
real properties of atoms determine the perceived properties of
matter--for example, something that is solid is made of small, pointy
atoms, while something that has water like properties is made of large,
round atoms. Some types of matter are particularly solid because their
atoms have hooks to attach to each other; some are oily because they are
made of very fine, small atoms which can easily slip past each other:
Democritus
made important contributions to mathematics and geometry and was also
the first philosopher we know who realized that the celestial body we
call the Milky Way is formed from the light of distant stars.
Other philosophers, including later Aristotle argued against this.
Democritus
was among the first to propose that the universe contains many worlds
and some of them he thought could be inhabited by other life forms.
He was a humanist, Democratus rejected the existence of the gods and thought that mankind is responsible for it's own actions.
He had the nickname of the Laughing Philosopher.
Some sources suggest that it derives from his theory that man's highest ethical goal is 'cheerfulness'.
Roman
philosopher Seneca (4BC - 65AD) puts a rather different spin on that
epithet however, claiming Democritus was prone to displaying his
contempt of human absurdity by laughing at his fellow-citizens, who in
turn, called him 'the mocker'.
Personally I like him which ever spin we put on this story is the closest to the truth.
Demoratus
is a patriarch of the scientific age. His insights have stood the test
of time and unlike the spiritual seers of his own epoch his visions are
testament to human creativity and intelligence.
When
the CERN experiments begin again hopefully next Spring the cosmological
questions it raises were first raised by Leucippus and Democritus round
400 years before the start of the Christian era.
The
philosophical score therefore seems to be materialism 1 idealism 0 at
this juncture in the evolution of human knowledge. With the stalled but
currently now underway CERN particle acceleration experiment we stand on
the brink of a possible revolution in our understanding of the nature
of existence.
If
we needed an icon for this attempt to establish a theory of everything,
we should look no further than Democritus as the originator of our
scientific age which has been steadily unfolding since 400 BC.
All
western society and technology is a footnote to Greek philosophy and
here in the shape of Democritus there stands a laughing giant of
contemporary culture.
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