Word: democritus
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Atom Anatomy. The largest atom is only .00000001 inch in diameter, and many of the most important atoms handled by physicists are considerably smaller. An ancient Greek, Democritus, coined the word "atom" which means indivisible. For thousands of years this was a perfectly good name but for the past two decades, since the first atoms were sundered, it has been archaic...
...next few years Marx studied jurisprudence, Greek philosophy, Hegel, wrote his doctoral dissertation on Democritus and Epicurus, came into conflict with the Prussian censor, became widely known in radical intellectual circles. At the age of 24 he was editor of a radical paper in Cologne, helped to boost its circulation in six months from 885 to 3,200, before it was suppressed. While editor of the paper he met Friedrich Engels, tall, good-natured son of a wealthy manufacturer, famed for drinking bouts and for philosophic and economic articles in obscure journals. Engels had also begun his literary career...
...From Democritus the Greek (400 B. C.) to the late great Englishman John Dalton (1766-1844) scientists were blandly sure that the atom was the smallest thing in the world. Modern physicists know that this is not so, that the atom is composed of a nucleus and surrounding spheres of electrons, that these constituents are capable of being separated. Scientists probing into the infinitesimal atomic nucleus with various tools, last week published new data concerning the nature of the universe and the physical properties of drinking water...
There is no more fascinating subject than modern physics. Science, always, since the days of Democritus and Lucretius, a field fertile to the romantic imagination, is more rational in its severity and yet more romantic in its doctrine and possibility than ever before. Philosophy, which Professor Whitehead has called the architectural plan, has been hard pressed during the last century. The scientists seem to be building and destroying before the architect has drawn a line, instead of as previously, the architects drawing and destroying plans before the scientist has lifted an unknown into the position of a conscious reality...
...Much Promise? Arthur Holly Compton (U. of Chicago) asked: "Is a girl smoking and listening to jazz from a loud speaker what the great electrical pioneers have been working for. ... Is our science any more likely to last than the science of the ancient Greeks? Democritus thought he had solved the problem as to what, the world is made of and how. Yet around his atoms was staged the first great fight between science and philosophy. And Socrates and Plato, the opponents of science, won that fight. Greek science failed, though the civilization based upon it survived. Was this...