Democritus — The man who coined the term “Atom”
By: Abishek Babu
Tags: Knowledge, Science, History, Chemistry, Atom

Democritus; a product, that is, of an accidental combination.

Have no idea who these two are, i imagined Democritus to be as such figure.

Few centuries ago; There was a city in greek — Miletus.

Miletus has been a prosperous and flourishing greek city, perhaps the principle city of the greek world before the golden age of Athens and Sparta.

If you ask me i’d say this is the first city which originated a different style of thinking, where the disciple is no longer obliged to respect and share the ideas of the master but is free to build on those ideas without being afraid to discard or criticise the part that can be improved.

This is the city which embarked on the journey to nurture thought provoking ideas not to destroy them; this is the place where several geniuses lived and had spent their time on sole purpose of discovering ideas and unlocking the secrets of the universe, this is the place which first signaled the dawn of scientific thought.

For thousands of years humanity communicated with various forms methods and tried several types of methods to retain knowledge and transfer to the next generation. From cuneiform tablets to ancient Chinese texts; from hieroglyphic writing in the pyramids to the myths of the Sioux; from the most ancient Indian texts to the Bible. from African stories to those aboriginal Australians, it was all a colourful but basically monotonous flow of communications and knowledge storage; funny we can story entire humanity pre-1900s in a 64GB pendrive.

But Miletus didn’t last that long it came to a calamitous end, the persian empire and an anti-imperial revolt led to a ferocious destruction of the city in early 494BCE.

But one scientific thought leader from Miletus named Leucippus escaped and embarked from Miletus to Abdera. On his arrival in Abdera, he founded a scientific and philosophical school to which he soon affiliated a young disciple, Democritus, whose long shadow was to be cast over the thought of all subsequent times.

What had Leucippus and Democritus discovered?

The idea of Democritus’s system is extremely simple: the entire universe is made up of a boundless space in which innumerable atoms run. Space is without limits; has neither an above nor a below; is without a centre, or a boundary. Atoms have no qualities at all, apart from their shape. They have no weight, no colour, no taste.’By convention is sweet, by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention colour; but by verity atoms and void.’

Atoms are indivisible, they are the elementary grains of reality, which cannot be further subdivided, and everything is made of them. They move freely in space, colliding one with another; they hook on to and push and pull each other. Similarly atoms attract each other and join.

This is the weave of the world. This is reality. Everything else is nothing but a by-product, random and accidental, of this movement and this combining of atoms. The infinite variety of the substances of which the world is made derives solely from this combining of atoms.

Atoms combine randomly, just as by combining the letters of the alphabet in different ways we may obtain comedies or tragedies, ridiculous stories or epic poem; as such elementary atoms combine to produce the world in its endless variety of ways.

On contrary many didn’t believe this theory; even Aristotle, Plato, Zeno and several responded with many disputes and paradoxes. One famous example was Zeno’s Paradox. Many also asked if you tell that it’s all comprised of atoms, what size would that be?