Читать книгу 2,637 Years of Physics from Thales of Miletos to the Modern Era - Sheldon Cohen - Страница 4

Once humankind developed the capability to contemplate who they were in relation to the world about them, some began to wonder if there was a similarity to all objects in the environment. It was easy to notice that the differences were visually vast, but could there be a common indivisible building block for all the great variety of animate and inanimate objects that were visible to our senses?

For instance, some of these thinkers wondered: if you were able to cut a gold bar in half, and then cut the half piece in half, and then cut the quarter piece in half, and then the eighth, and then the sixteenth, etcetera, when are you forced to stop; or will you ever reach that point? Is there a time in this process when you would end up with a fragment that could no longer be broken down into a smaller piece (the smallest possible piece still identifiable as gold)? The Greeks named this infinitesimally tiny end piece atomos (atom) meaning ‘unbreakable’ in the Greek language.

In this era, proof of the makeup of the microscopic world did not exist in the minds of man, so the level of the infinitesimally small could only be conjectured upon via mythological thought experiments. Thus it would remain for many centuries until the invention of the microscope opened up this realm to human view and slowly expanded thought.

Although the atomistic concept, devised strictly through the minds of human beings, was a brilliant thought experiment and portended great advances to come, there were still those who disputed this theory and felt that the animate and inanimate objects of the world were visually accessible and made of materials that were common to our senses. We could see these primary substances. Everything in our sight was visually accessible, and formed by combining together in a variety of amounts that made for almost infinite combinations. It would be this mythological thought that would remain supreme in the minds of man for the centuries it would take before a return to the atomistic concept and the rapid advances which would finally ensue in the minds of advanced thinkers. Who were these great pioneers of ancient times?