this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
127 points (97.0% liked)

Asklemmy

43950 readers
894 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Proved the atoms were arrangements of the four elements, not so much.

Wasn't the Epicurean position. Lucretius only surmises that there were likely a few handfuls of base forms of indivisible parts and then a multitude of their combinations. In fact, he rejects the elemental view.

And given we jumped the gun on naming 'atoms' after the word for indivisible, the closer philosophical parallel to modern concepts is quanta. And in that context, you even have Lucretius claiming that the behaviors of said indivisible parts must have a degree of indeterminate outcomes beyond following static physical laws for there to be free will (long before Bell's work relating the behavior of quanta to superderminism). He also surmised that light was made up of indivisible parts that were extremely light and moving very, very fast around 2,000 years before Einstein proved the discrete nature of light.

They were right about everything from survival to the fittest, contribution of traits from each parent, the quantization of light, and the indeterminate behaviors of quanta literally thousands of years before these things are proven.

It wasn't mere happenstance that they ended up being the most correct about the physical world of all the schools of philosophy in antiquity. They had a concrete methodology behind their success, and frankly it's a methodology that modernity would do well to have learned more from.