A-Tomos

A-tomos, or by Democritos in-divisible. Really? When "yes", when "no"?
"A-tomos" comes from Greek philosopher, Democritus, and stays for a possible answer, if the matter can be divided in an infinite manner or not.

Apart from being in-divisible, Democritus' atom had other features, like movement, ability to form assemblies (we would call them molecules today).

The concept of atom first gained its existence in chemistry (chemical compounds are always formed in constant proportions - Dalton's law). In Physics, at the beginning of XX century even Einstein dreamt about measuring "real dimension of atoms" [1]. Perrin won Nobel prize for a simple experiment with an oil drop.

einst perrin
But exactly at the same time, so-called (now) nuclear radiation and other components of atom, like electrons were discovered. Half a century later it turned-out that even components of the nucleus (proton, neutron) have smaller objects inside, called quarks.

So atom would be everything, apart from being indivisible.
Unless we remember than in Modern Greek, a-tomos means also a person, in-dividual.
This, human meaning brings back the original idea of Deomocritus.



[1] Über die von molekularkinetichen Theori der Wärma gefordert Bewegung von in ruhenden Flüssigkeiten suspendierten Teilchen, Annalen der Physik 17 (1905) 549-560 [About thermal movement of the particles in non movemenent liquids on base of the molecular thermal theory]

The idea of this story came from Avv. Mario Fedrizzi






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