Jason Faulkner 5-8-15
Significant Players in the History of Atomism
1) Empedocles (490 - 430 BC)
a. 4 elements, smallest are indestructible (atomism), they mixed randomly to make
what we see today (early Darwinism)
2) Leucippus (500s - 400s BC)
a. Teacher of Democritus
3) Democritus (460 - 370 BC)
a. Indivisible atoms and void, "sharp atoms" and atoms with hooks
b. Deterministic
4) Plato (c. 428 – 348 BC)
a. In his Timaeus he presented his own version of atomism in the context of a
creationist account of the formation of the world and its elements, plants, and
animals
5) Aristotle (384 - 322 BC)
a. 4 elements, but could divide them infinitely small, everything has a telos to realize
its full purpose (contrast this with the materialism of Empedocles' four elements)
b. Rejected the atomism of Democritus
6) Epicurus (341 - 270 BC)
a. Atoms in a void, he was a materialist, but unlike Democritus, atoms could swerve,
thus he shied away from determinism towards free will
b. Gods might exist but they do not concern themselves with human matters
c. Nothing should be believed except that which is tested through direct observation
and rigorously arrived at by logical deduction (methodological naturalist or
materialist?? Or are these essentially the same thing but for different reasons?)
7) Lucretius (99 - 55 BC)
a. Back to Democritus' indivisible atoms, his work would be rediscovered in the late
Middle Ages and bring atomism back to a world that had been dominated by
Aristotelianism for 2000 years. His atomism embraced both the void and the
swerve.
8) William of Conches (1090 – 1154 AD)
a. Accessed Lucretius’ ideas via Cicero, Virgil, and others
b. Found a compromise between Epicureanism and creationism – atoms existed, but
they were created by God
c. His writings catalyzed the very beginnings of a new ontology
9) Poggio Bracciolini (1380 – 1459)
a. The Roman scholar who rediscovered Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura in a German
monastery
b. He devoted his life to the revival of classical studies, recovering many other
manuscripts as well
c. He was a humanist who denounced the corruption of clerical life in the 15th
century
d. Biographers describe Poggio anywhere from an orthodox Christian to an
Epicurean humanist
10)Girolamo Fracastoro (1478 – 1553)
a. A prominent Italian humanist, among the first scientists in the modern era to use
Lucretius’ text
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b. A subscriber to atomism, he thoughts diseases were carried by tiny living bodies
(which became to be called “corpuscles”)
c. He rejected any appeals to the “hidden causes” of Aristotle in scientific
investigation
d. He did appear to conform to the Catholic church
11)Giordano Bruno (1548 – 1600)
a. The first philosopher of the modern era to revive the cosmological ideas of
atomism
b. Also a mathematician and poet
c. He embraced the cosmology of infinite worlds as well as the Copernican
cosmology, which was not yet embraced by the Catholic church
d. Treated the atom as the physical minimum (corresponding to a geometric point)
and the ontological minimum
e. Some scholars say he embraced Lucretianism in order to liberate man from the
fear of death and the gods, to bring about the perfection of the human intellect, and
to discover the truth about the natural world
f. Rejected the void in favor of a vital ethereal medium responsible for the motion
and arrangement of atoms
g. He was influenced by Arab astrology and neo-Platonism, and essentially
subscribed to pantheism
h. He was tried for heresy by the Roman Inquisition and burned at the stake for his
denial of the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary, and the
Transubstantiation of the elements.
12)Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626)
a. “The Democritean doctrine of atoms is either true, or useful for demonstration”
b. Recommended Democritus’ method of “dissecting nature” (empirical science) as
against the Aristotelian method of abstraction (theoretical science), because he
wanted to study the “subtleties” of nature
c. Historians argue about to what extent, if eventually at all, he embraced atomism
d. He rejected the void and the swerve, the latter because he was committed to the
view that all matter is ordered by divine providence (voluntarism)
e. He described the formation of the cosmos out of chaos in terms of atoms
f. He rejected Copernicanism and the cosmology of infinite worlds (so he rejected
Bruno)
g. He denied that rigid atoms in a vacuum were the “true particles,” replacing them
with “schematisms,” resulting from the “texture” of pneumatic matter.
h. This latter thought would influence Robert Boyle
i. Pneumatism goes back to the “active principles” or “indwelling spirit” of neoPlatonism
j. Three periods in Bacon’s atomism:
i. First: he embraces atomism as a good heuristic tool, without acknowledging
whether or not they exist. If atoms existed, they were equal in size, and
they existed concurrently with pneumatic matter.
ii. Second: The atom does constitute the smallest particle of matter. Its
resistance to annihilation defines its characteristics.
iii. Third: Atoms likely exist, but no causative-operational role is assigned to
them. This role is reserved for the schematisms, the true ultimate minimal
particle.
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k. You might say he infused atomism with Paracelsianism – atoms may exist but they
are passive; it is the active principle or “spirit” or “schematisms” that determined
the distinctive characteristics of matter
l. Bacon saw the pursuit of science and man’s control and exploration of the natural
world to be the fulfillment of his created role of dominion in Genesis
i. " Evermore, it must be remembered that the least part of knowledge is
subject to the use for which God hath granted it, which is the benefit and
relief of the state and society of man."
ii. "Man by the Fall fell at the same time from the state of innocence and from
his dominion over creation. Both of these losses, however, can even in this
life be in some part repaired; the former by religion and Faith, the latter by
arts and sciences.”
13)Daniel Sennert (1572 – 1637)
a. A prolific academic writer in the fields of chemistry and alchemy
b. He defended atomism, pointing out that silver atoms retain their individuality even
after being combined with gold, because they could later be filtered back out. (In
other words, he established an empirical example of a reversible physical change)
c. The results of this experiment were widely cited by proponents of atomism
d. Sennert was an intermediate step between Aristotelian forms and corpuscular
particle theory
e. Thought to have been a Lutheran
f. He sought a middle path, attempting to reconcile Aristotle with Democritus by
arguing that the theory of substantial forms could co-exist with an atomistic
understanding of matter
14)Rene Descartes (1596 – 1650)
a. A materialist, mechanist, voluntarist, deist, but not an atomist. Perhaps a bit of an
occasionalist, maintaining that God’s power alone sustains the universe moment to
moment
b. Rejected Aristotelian concept of matter imbued with active forms and teleological
principles
c. Believed that the original object of creation was “extended substance”—matter
that has no qualities apart from being measurable and extended.
d. Denied that there are atoms—least particles—on the grounds that their existence
conflicts with God’s power to do anything we can imagine (voluntarism).
e. His conception of life was specifically materialistic (mechanical), although he
added that humans alone possessed an incorporeal soul, and said that God is the
only source of power, force, or motion, being possessed of unlimited will and
power by which he sustains the universe moment to moment.
i. Nevertheless, Descarter retained the Lucretian notion that from a chaotic
state of distributed matter planets, earths, animals, and even men were
formed and brought forth spontaneously
15)Pierre Gassendi (1592 – 1655)
a. Influenced by the writings of William of Conches
b. A critic of Descartes and the most important reviver of ancient atomism in the
early modern period
c. His atomism was tempered by his belief in Aristotle’s “final causes.”
d. He wanted to redeem atomism from the accusations of impiety and hedonism
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e. He admitted the existence of least particles, but denied that they were eternal and
uncreated
f. While an approver of Epicurean physics, he rejected the epicurean negation of God
and particular providence
g. He states the various proofs for the existence of an immaterial, infinite, supreme
Being, asserts that this Being is the author of the visible universe, and strongly
defends the doctrine of the foreknowledge and particular providence of God.
h. His model reconciled theology with matter theory and would become the
dominant scientific world-view, picked up and developed further by Boyle,
Newton, and others
i. Maintained that the atoms cannot move by themselves, but they have “the power
of moving and acting which God instilled in them at their very creation” (neoPlatonism)
j. *Against pure atomism, which was compatible with voluntarist theology, requiring
neither eternal forms nor necessary essences, Gassendi (against Lucretius and
Descartes) accepted the appeal to final causes in explaining the parts and functions
of plants and animals.
k. His system preserved the notion that the entanglement, motion, and interaction of
invisible corpuscles are the basis of all phenomena, but he rejected the
corporeality and mortality of the soul (so not a pure materialist)
16)Robert Boyle (1627 – 1691)
a. Boyle straddled neo-Platonism and mechanism. He largely embraced the machine
metaphor of the mechanists, but like the neo-Platonists, he also believed that there
were some “active principles” in nature that could not be explained by mechanical
processes.
b. Boyle was also a devout Christian, and his Christian convictions probably kept him
from going to the extreme end of either the neo-Platonist or mechanistic spectrum
(naturalism or materialism, respectively)
c. Boyle argued that the mechanistic order of nature was evidence of an Intelligent
Designer; thus, he used his mechanistic philosophy as a Christian apologetic
d. Boyle was also influenced by voluntarism, which held that the structure of the
universe was contingent upon the free and transcendent will of God
e. Boyle’s voluntarism combined with his mechanistic (atomistic) views led him to
take an empirical (experimental) approach to natural philosophy
f. He described nature as “the system of corporeal works of God,” consisting only of
corpuscles moved according to laws imposed by the creator.
i. If an angel were to work change in the world, he would have to do so by
setting matter in motion
g. Boyle furthered Gassendi’s project of detaching the science of atomism from its
atheistic and hedonistic associations through his promotion of “natural theology.”
h. Boyle named his version of mechanical philosophy “Anaxagorean” – the frame of
the world and its original plants and animals, or at least their “seeds or seminal
principles,” had been intelligently and beneficently designed and created, though
thereafter the laws of motion, the structure of objects and the dispositions of seeds
sufficed for the production of all, or almost all, effects.
17)Isaac Newton (1642 – 1726)
a. Influenced by both Gassendi and Boyle, but he also read Lucretius directly
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b. His physics is recognizably atomistic, and he was in the process of developing an
atomistic chemical theory of matter
c. In his Optics (1718) he published his belief that all things are composed of solid,
hard, impenetrable, indivisible atoms, which “God himself made in the first
creation”
i. This passage from Optics is one of the most influential pieces of writing in
the history of science, fusing Lucretian doctrine with creationism and
voluntarist theology.
d. Along with Gassendi and Boyle, Newton was one of the first to try to quantify
atomic phenomena, and the mathematicisation of the atomic theory is notable in
some sections of his writings, not the least of which was his Principia Mathematica,
which contains a mathematical derivation of Boyle’s Law which assumed the
existence of particles
e. “The main business of [science] is to deduce the causes from effects till we come to
the very first cause, which is certainly not mechanical.”
f. Newton’s results had a major influence on John Dalton
g. Newton’s theory of gravitation, which described a “force at a distance,” tried to
preserve some of the neo-Platonic mystery in creation, thus we cannot say that
Newton was 100% mechanistic, although—unintended by him—his
mathematicisation of the world would lead to an all-out embracing of mechanistic
ontology
h. Newton wanted to leave room for God in his description of the universe—Newton
wrote more on theology than he did on science
18)Gottfried Leibniz (1646 – 1716)
a. He accepted the Lucretian argument that only the indivisible atom is indestructible
and immortal, but he insisted in Platonic fashion (immanence) that anything
material is susceptible of division and destruction, and that only soul-like entities
with experiences and appetitions can function in the role of eternal substances.
b. Where the classical arguments are intended to show that, in order to be the
elements of things, the atoms must be devoid of all qualities except size, shape, and
mobility, Leibniz drew the remarkable inference that the elements of things must
be alive and infinitely complex.
c. For Leibniz, doing justice to the worthiness of the Creator demands that one affirm
the integrity of creation, in particular: the materiality of creation.
d. He challenged the occasionalism of Malebranche, but he also rejected the
mechanistic view of nature offered by Boyle.
e. Leibniz offered a theory of preestablished harmony that emphasizes the relative
self-sufficiency of nature as ordered by the Creator, but without slipping toward an
idolatrous or deistic absolutization of nature.
f. To provide an account of creational, material structures that is worthy of the
Creator, Leibniz radically affirms the self-sufficiency of creation as created—what
he describes as “the God-given nature of things” – but this is not deism, nature
operating autonomously. Rather, nature is working in harmony with the Creator
g. He argues that there is (and must be) an active, creative force inherent in things
(contrast with Boyle who maintained that the “divine law” that governs nature is
external to nature rather than inherent to the structures of nature)
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h. Leibniz argued that emphasizing the integrity of creation guards against an
ontology that views the structures of creation as somehow incomplete or deficient,
which in turn reflects a deficiency in the Creator
i. Leibniz emphasizes the wonder of creation itself as unfolding that which was
enfolded from the beginning, and in doing so, reflecting the imago Dei as this
unfolding proceeds
j. The question of transcendence, then, becomes not a matter of an immaterial
“substance” inhering in matter but rather a structure of “referring and expressing”
that points to an origin.
19)John Dalton (1766 – 1844)
a. A devout Quaker
b. In 1808 he presented the first convincing experimental evidence for atoms
themselves: “Observations have tacitly led to the conclusion which seems
universally adopted, that all bodies of sensible magnitude, whether liquid or solid,
are constituted of a vast number of extremely small particles, or atoms of matter
bound together by a force of attraction, which is more or less powerful according
to circumstances.”
c. He was influenced by Newton’s derivation of Boyle’s Law
d. Dalton’s mechanical atomism was perceived as successful in explaining the
behavior of heat and gas.
e. He realized that gases combine to form compounds in definite ratios, and he
inferred from this that they must consist of discrete particles, thus robustly joining
speculative atomism with a quantitative and empirical methodology
f. He identified the atomic weights of several types of atoms
g. The Five Principles of Dalton’s Atomic Model:
i. All substances are composed of tiny, indivisible particles called atoms
ii. All atoms of the same element are identical.
iii. Atoms of different elements have different weights.
iv. Atoms combine in whole number ratios to form compounds.
v. Atoms are neither created nor destroyed in chemical reactions
20)James Clerk Maxwell (1831 – 1879)
a. He further strengthened the case for chemical and physical atomism with his work
on the kinetic theory of gases
b. Electromagnetism
21)GJ Stoney (1826 – 1911)
a. He introduced the term “electron” as the “fundamental unit quantity of electricity”
b. His research into the electron laid the foundations for the eventual discovery of the
electron by JJ Thomson
22)JJ Thomson (1856 – 1940)
a. A very personal faith, an Anglican, we think he read scripture and prayed every
evening before retiring
b. His cathode ray tube experiment confirmed the existence of electrons
c. He developed what has been named the “plum pudding” model for the atom that
envisioned that atom as a tiny cloud of massless, positive charge sprinkled with
thousands of negatively charged electrons
d. Determined a charge/mass ratio for the electron
23)Hantaro Nagaoka (1865 – 1950)
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a. He rejected Thomson’s plum pudding model and proposed an early planetary
model of the atom, with a positively charged center surrounded by a number of
revolving electrons (he used Saturn and its rings as an analogy)
b. His model made two predictions:
i. A very massive nucleus
ii. Electrons revolving around the nucleus, bound by electrostatic forces
24)Robert Millikan (1868 – 1953)
a. He devised the famous “oil drop experiment” that allowed him to determine the
charge on individual electrons (1.6 x 10-19 C)
i. He was able to adjust the voltage between two charged plates to get oil
droplets to hover, and then calculated that each had a charge on it that was
a multiple of 1.6 x 10-19 C, which he deduced must be the charge of an
electron
b. Using Thomson’s charge/mass ratio for the electron, he was able to calculate the
mass of the electron (9.1 x 10-31 kg)
c. A preacher’s kid, he thought that “the combination of science and religion provides
the soul basis for rational and intelligent living
d. He saw no conflict between religion and science but rather saw them as “the two
great sister forces which have pulled and are still pulling the world onward and
upward.”
e. He liked to speak of the “immanence of God,” and believed that the laws of the
universe and the processes of the universe were part of the activity of the
indwelling Mind of God. (neo-Platonic)
f. He rejected the mechanists of his time, saying that the universe was not so much a
machine as an Idea in the mind of God
g. He thought of God as working in, through, and with the laws and processes of
nature, not contrary to them
h. To him, the natural processes of the universe were the evidence of God, not some
alleged setting-aside of these laws or “miracles.”
i. After the Scopes trial he compiled a little booklet consisting of statements by
eminent scientists and clergymen on the harmony of science and faith
j. He liked to quote Newton’s words: “The main business of [science] is to deduce the
causes from effects till we come to the very first cause, which is certainly not
mechanical.”
k. He thought that science should be guided by concern for the common good
25)Ernest Rutherford (1871 – 1937)
a. One of JJ Thomson’s students at Cambridge
b. In his now famous “gold foil experiment,” he discovered the existence of the atomic
nucleus—that is, unlike Thomson’s idea that the positive charge in atoms was
spread throughout, Rutherford determined that it must be concentrated into a
very small region
c. His atomic model:
i. The positive charge in atoms is concentrated in a tiny region in the center of
the atom, which he called the nucleus
ii. Atoms are mostly empty space
iii. The electron, which contain the atom’s negative charge, are outside the
nucleus
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d. Rutherford was the first to “split” an atom by firing alpha particles at nitrogen
atoms. This work led to the discovery of the positively-charged protons.
e. While working with Niels Bohr, he postulated the existence of neutrons, which
were later discovered by his associate, James Chadwick
26)HGJ Moseley (1887 – 1915)
a. His work in X-ray spectra proved that the atomic numbers of elements were not
arbitrary or even dependent upon atomic mass, but rather they have a firm
experimental basis from the physics of their X-ray spectra
b. Thus he began the “correction” of Mendeleev’s Periodic Table
c. He thus also provided the first experimental evidence in favor of Bohr’s atomic
model, which proposed that the atom contains in its nucleus a number of positive
nuclear charges that is equal to its atomic number in the periodic table
27)Niels Bohr (1885 – 1962)
a. He proposed the planetary solar system model of the atom:
i. Electrons orbiting the nucleus in discrete orbits according to their energy.
ii. These electrons were held in orbit by their electrostatic attraction to the
positively-charged nucleus.
iii. If an electron absorbs additional energy, it will move to a higher energy
orbit, and vice-versa
iv. Although Bohr’s planetary model is not physically accurate, it serves as a
good heuristic tool to describe electron energies
v. Does not appear that he believed in a personal God
28)James Chadwick (1891 – 1974)
a. Studied under Rutherford
b. Discovered the neutron
29)Louis de Broglie (1892 – 1987)
a. Postulated the wave nature of electrons and suggested that all matter has wave
properties
b. Catholic
30)Erwin Schrodinger (1887 – 1961)
a. Made famous by his wave equation, he is known as the father of quantum
mechanics
b. A probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics
31)Werner Heisenberg (1901 – 1976)
a. Known for his uncertainty principle, he rejected Bohr’s model of electron orbits,
stating that we can never know exactly where an electron is, only describe its
location with a 3-D probability distribution function