![]() ![]() He wrote the book The Great Cosmology, in which he advanced new ideas about the transient and permanent aspects of the world. The traveller’s name was Leucippus little is known about his life, but his intellectual spirit proved indelible. It was to be a crucial journey for the history of knowledge. But the dialogue doesn't stop there.According to tradition, in the year 450 BCE, a man embarked on a 400-mile sea voyage from Miletus in Anatolia to Abdera in Thrace, fleeing a prosperous Greek city that was suddenly caught up in political turmoil. The intellect starts out, saying: "By convention there is sweetness, by convention bitterness, by convention color, in reality only atoms and the void." In my book, this one line already puts Democritus shoulder-to-shoulder with Plato, Aristotle, or any other ancient philosopher you care to name. One passage of Democritus that does survive is a dialogue between the intellect and the senses. And the arguments I'd use are not entirely different from the ones Democritus used: mostly they hinge on inherent mathematical difficulties with the continuum. If you want an ignorant, uninformed layperson's opinion, my money is on the atomist side. Ironically, the physicists have almost no experimental evidence to go on, and are basically in the same situation that Democritus was in 2400 years ago. At issue in this debate is whether space and time themselves are made up of indivisible atoms, at the Planck scale of 10 -33 centimeters or 10 -43 seconds. Incidentally, some of you might know that there's a debate raging even today between atomists and anti-atomists. It's clear that the points on one side go into the first piece and the points on the other side go into the second piece, but what about the points exactly on the boundary? Do they "disappear"? Do they get duplicated? Does the symmetry get broken? None of these possibilities seem particularly elegant. And suppose we take a knife and cut the apple into two pieces. Suppose we have an apple, and suppose the apple's not made of atoms but is instead this continuous, hard stuff. Why does Democritus think there are these atoms surrounded by void? He gives a few arguments, one of which can be paraphrased as follows (following Carl Sagan). For if the atoms that made up the ocean were "intrinsically blue," then how could they form the white froth on waves? On the other hand, Democritus says that properties like color and taste are not intrinsic to atoms, but instead emerge out of the interactions of many atoms. They can have different sizes, weights, and shapes - maybe some are spheres, some are cylinders, whatever. These atoms can hit each other and bounce off, and they can stick together to make bigger things. ![]() So, what were the ideas they criticized? Democritus thought the whole universe is composed of atoms in a void, constantly moving around according to determinate, understandable laws. (Some of them apparently survived into the Middle Ages, but they're lost now.) What we know about him is mostly due to the fact that other philosophers, like Aristotle, brought him up in order to criticize him. That gives you a sense of how important he's considered: "Yeah, the pre-Socratics - maybe stick 'em in somewhere in the first week of class." (Incidentally, there's a story that Democritus journeyed to Athens to meet Socrates, but then was too shy to introduce himself.)Īlmost none of Democritus's writings survive. ![]() He's called a "pre-Socratic," even though actually he was a contemporary of Socrates. He was a disciple of Leucippus, according to my source, which is Wikipedia. where people from Athens said that even the air causes stupidity. He was born around 450BC in Abdera, which was sort of this podunk town. " First of all, who was Democritus? He was this ancient Greek dude. I just learned about Democritus from a wonderful book by Scott Aaronson called "Quantum Computing Since Democritus." Since I'm advertising his book, I guess he won't mind if I steal the following passage from his lecture notes (), which are much more fun than anything I write. ![]()
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