Democritus was an Ancient Greek philosopher born in Abdera, Thrace, Greece. He was an influential pre-Socratic philosopher and pupil of Leucippus, who formulated an atomic theory for the cosmos.
At around 400 B.C., Democritus was able to come up with the idea that matter could not be divided indefinitely. He asked this question: If you break a piece of matter in half, and then break it in half again, how many breaks will you have to make before you can break it no further? Democritus thought that it ended at some point, a smallest possible bit of matter. He called these basic matter particles, atoms.
However, Democritus' ideas did not have lasting effects on other Greek philosophers for other Greek philosophers like Aristotle had disagreed with his theories therefore making his theory somewhat unpopular.
Aristotle
Although the idea of the atom, the smallest, indivisible component of matter, was first proposed in 400 BC, Aristotle didn't like it. He claimed that there was no smallest part of matter and that different substances were made up of proportions of fire, air, earth, and water. As there were of course no experimental means available to test either view, Aristotle's prevailed mainly because people liked his philosophy better.
Aristotle’s theory of the basic constituents of matter looks to a modern scientist perhaps something of a backward step from the work of the atomists and Plato. Aristotle assumed all substances to be compounds of four elements: earth, water, air and fire, and each of these to be a combination of two of four opposites, hot and cold, and wet and dry. (Actually, the words he used for wet and dry also have the connotation of softness and hardness).
Aristotle’s whole approach is more in touch with the way things present themselves to the senses, the way things really seem to be, as opposed to abstract geometric considerations. Hot and cold, wet and dry are qualities immediately apparent to anyone, this seems a very natural way to describe phenomena. He probably thought that the Platonic approach in terms of abstract concepts, which do not seem to relate to our physical senses but to our reason, was a completely wrongheaded way to go about the problem. It has turned out, centuries later, that the atomic and mathematical approach was on the right track after all, but at the time, and in fact until relatively recently, Aristotle seemed a lot closer to reality. He discussed the properties of real substances in terms of their “elemental” composition at great length, how they reacted to fire or water, how, for example, water evaporates on heating because it goes from cold and wet to hot and wet, becoming air, in his view. Innumerable analyses along these lines of commonly observed phenomena must have made this seem a coherent approach to understanding the natural world.
SOURCES:
- http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virginia.edu/lectures/aristot2.html
- http://improbable.org/era/physics/atom.html
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democritus
made with love by Group 1 Justine Basco Rianna Cruz Bianca Hilario April Ocampo
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