Although his arguments were explicitly against Democritus' atomism, including them in his treatise shows that elite Greek philosophers took atomism very seriously. Aristotle claimed that the basic elements earth, fire, air, and water were not made of atoms. Instead, Plato's disciple, Aristotle, although he did not agree with the writings of Democritus, was aware that it could exist. Plato may have had some personal conflicts with Democritus, as he wanted all of his writings removed, regardless of the philosophical arguments against it.
Although Democritus and atomism were accepted in his time, there were some prominent philosophers who disagreed with his arguments. Furthermore, atoms are indestructible and are always in motion. Different types of atoms have different types of shapes.Īnother central thesis of atomism is that atoms are physically indivisible, even though they are geometrically divisible. To account for the different materials, atomists believe that there are various types of atoms with variable spaces between them. Although this model is entirely philosophical and has no basis in physics, it is a very good approximation. This group of Greek philosophers founded a school of philosophy known as atomism, which asserted that all matter is made up of two things, atoms and emptiness. atomic theoryĭemocritus and his teacher Leucippus were the creators of this concept. This model is especially interesting if we think that it comes from philosophers who could not experiment like modern scientists. Democritus is considered the father of the atom, and although it is a very primitive model compared to what we currently know, comes surprisingly close to the contribution of the model we currently believe to be correct. However, the model was cool at the time, and it took 2200 years for the next atomic model to resonate with the scientific community. It can be seen that the model is completely mechanistic and only considers the bond between atoms.
To explain his model, Democritus splits a stone, which means that if he cuts it in half, he will get two identical stones, and if he keeps repeating this operation, he will find a different stone within a stone up to a point where they no longer meet.