When Sophie got home from school the following day, there were several more
pages for her in a big brown envelope. She took them upstairs to her room. She could
not wait to read them, but she had to keep her eye on the mailbox at the same time.
THE ATOM THEORY
Here I am again, Sophie. Today you are going to hear about the last of
the great natural philosophers. His name is Democritus (c. 460-370 B.C.) and
he was from the little town of Abdera on the northern Aegean coast.
If you were able to answer the question about Lego blocks without
difficulty, you should have no problem understanding what this philosopher’s
project was.
Democritus agreed with his predecessors that transformations in nature
could not be due to the fact that anything actually “changed.” He therefore
assumed that everything was built up of tiny invisible blocks, each of which
was eternal and immutable. Democritus called these smallest units atoms.
The word “a-tom” means “un-cuttable.” For Democritus it was all-
important to establish that the constituent parts that everything else was
composed of could not be divided indefinitely into smaller parts. If this were
possible, they could not be used as blocks. If atoms could eternally be broken
down into ever smaller parts, nature would begin to dissolve like constantly
diluted soup.
Moreover, nature’s blocks had to be eternal—because nothing can come
from nothing. In this, he agreed with Parmenides and the Eleatics. Also, he
believed that all atoms were firm and solid. But they could not all be the same.
If all atoms were identical, there would still be no satisfactory explanation of
how they could combine to form everything from poppies and olive trees to
goatskin and human hair.
Democritus believed that nature consisted of an unlimited number and
variety of atoms. Some were round and smooth, others were irregular and
jagged. And precisely because they were so different they could join together
into all kinds of different bodies. But however infinite they might be in number
and shape, they were all eternal, immutable, and indivisible.
When a body—a tree or an animal, for instance—died and disintegrated,
the atoms dispersed and could be used again in new bodies. Atoms moved
around in space, but because they had “hooks” and “barbs,” they could join
together to form all the things we see around us.
So now you see what I meant about Lego blocks. They have more or
less the same properties as those which Democritus ascribed to atoms. And
that is what makes them so much fun to build with. They are first and foremost
indivisible. Then they have different shapes and sizes. They are solid and
impermeable. They also have “hooks” and “barbs” so that they can be
connected to form every conceivable figure. These connections can later be
broken again so that new figures can be constructed from the same blocks.
The fact that they can be used over and over is what has made Lego so
popular. Each single Lego block can be part of a truck one day and part of a
castle the day after. We could also say that lego blocks are “eternal.” Children
of today can play with the same blocks their parents played with when they
were little.
We can form things out of clay too, but clay cannot be used over and
over, because it can be broken up into smaller and smaller pieces. These tiny