Atomism
/ˈætəmɪzəm/noun
The theory that matter consists of indivisible particles moving in empty space.
The Greek roots
Literally: “the doctrine of uncuttables”
The story of the word
ἄτομος means uncuttable, and Leucippus and Democritus meant it strictly: cut matter far enough and you arrive at something that cannot be cut again. Lucretius carried the doctrine to Rome in verse, and a single surviving manuscript, found in a German monastery in 1417, carried it to the Renaissance. By the time Cockcroft and Walton split a lithium nucleus in 1932 the name had been handed to something eminently divisible, which is how physics ended up with an uncuttable thing made of quarks.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → modern Latin → English
- First recorded
- 17th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
Greek atomism was an argument about logic before it was ever an argument about evidence.
He accused the department of methodological atomism, meaning they never looked at whole patients.