“The only existing things are atoms and empty space; all else is mere opinion.”

From In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality -by John Gribbin.

The book begins with a discussion of the atom theory of matter, and its development


Many popular accounts of the history of science say that the idea of atoms goes back to the ancient Greeks, a time of the birth of science, and go on to praise the ancients for their early perception of the true nature of matter. But this account is a bit of an exaggeration. It is true that Democritus of Abdera, who died sometime close to 370 BC, did propose that the complex nature of the world could be explained if all things were composed of different kinds of unchangeable atoms, each type with its own shape and size, in constant motion. “The only existing things are atoms and empty space; all else is mere opinion,” he wrote, and later Epicurius of Samos and the Roman Lucretius-Carus adopted the idea. But it was not in those days the front-runner among theories to account for the nature of the world, and Aristotle’s suggestion that everything in the universe is made up from the four “elements” fire, earth, air, and water proved much more popular and enduring. While the idea of atoms was largely forgotten by the time of Christ, Aristotle’s four elements were accepted for two thousand years.

Although the Englishman Robert Boyle used the concept of atoms in his work on chemistry in the 17th century, and Newton had it in mind in his work on physics and optics, atoms only really became a part of scientific thought in the latter part of the 18th century when the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier investigated why things burn. Lavoisier identified many real elements, pure chemical substances that cannot be separated into other chemical substances, and he realized that burning is simply the process by which oxygen from the air combines with other elements. In the early years of the 19th century John Dalton put the role of atoms in chemistry on a secure footing. he stated that matter is made up of atoms, which are themselves indivisible; that all the atoms of one element are identical, but that different elements have different kinds of atoms (different sizes or shapes); that atoms cannot be created or destroyed, but are rearranged by chemical reactions; and that a chemical compound, made from two or more elements, is composed of molecules, each of which has a small, fixed number of atoms from each of the elements in the compound. So the atomic concept of the material world really came into being, in the form that is taught in textbooks today, less than two hundred years ago.

In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality

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3 Responses to “The only existing things are atoms and empty space; all else is mere opinion.”

  1. John says:

    The attribution of Atomic Theory to the Greeks irritates me. They were just a bunch of drunken philosophers, speculating idly over a lot of possible scenarios covering the make-up of the cosmos (not that drunken philosophy doesn’t have its time and place).

    With a few exceptions, they did not put their hypotheses to rigorous testing (although they had fewer means of hypothesis testing, they did not fully use htose at their disposal). As such, their work is more worthy of the title “natural philosophy” than “science”. In science it is worse for the progress of knowledge in the long run to be right for the wrong reasons (guessing right when the known facts contradict or do not support your theory) than to formulate a theory later proved incorrect by the discovery of new facts.

  2. Bernard says:

    All “things are atoms and empty space…” and as I understand it, are mostly the latter. Mind boggling, to say the least.

  3. red says:

    Ah, drunken philosophy. I swear to God there were certain college parties where my group of friends literally solved ALL the problems in the world.

    Time and place, indeed. :)

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