Atoms And Leucippus Of Miletus

The origins of Leucippus of Miletus are a mystery. The exact dates of his birth and death are not known. We know only that he was alive during the fifth century BCE. It is thought that his date of birth was between 440 and 430 BCE. He is said to have started the School of Abdera in the land of Thrace. Some people have argued that the man never existed in the first place.

Many sources give him credit for the first atomic theories, which were later elaborated on by one of his students, Democritus. The theories held that two different elements, known as the "void" and the "solid", made up all matter in the universe.

The void and the solid atoms contained within the void were both considered by the ancient Greek philosopher to be infinite. These two elements constituted the whole of the universe.

The Greek philosopher was attempting to combine two opposing schools of thought about reality by Parmenides and Heraclitus. Parmenides said reality was unchanging and permanent. Heraclitus in contrast believed that the real world was in a ongoing state of flux.

The philosopher from Miletus took Parmenides' ideas and included an infinite amount of particles, also called atoms, and taught that these atoms were unchanging. These unchanging pieces, though, were themselves subject to flux on a grand scale through decomposition, rearrangement and the motion of the atoms.

He believed that atoms would lock to one another and then later fly apart, to rebound against some atoms and lock up with others. This was how he explained the changing nature of the real world. He felt that each type of atom had its own unique shape. For example, atoms of metal had hooks in order to form connections, where atoms of water were smoother.

The student Democritus would go on to expand the atomist model further to such an extent that Epicurus, another Greek philosopher, said that the teacher had never been there at all and was just an alias for Democritus. In any event, the teacher and pupil appear often mentioned side by side in surviving writings.

Not everyone accepted atomist theory. Aristotle chose to reject the idea that reality boiled down to a haphazard collection of particles moving through a void, choosing to believe that this theory was a violation of natural law. He felt rather that the real world experienced change because matter itself underwent transformation. In addition, Aristotle gave credit to Leucippus for the creation of atomism in some writings but credited Democritus in others.

Regardless of which man first came up with atomism, Democritus is widely considered to have fathered modern science, which makes Leucippus of Miletus the grandfather of modern science. Together, these two Greek thinkers pioneered the first inquiries regarding atomic reality, and they had a big impact on how the scientists that followed would investigate the real world.

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