The History of Atomic Chemistry: Part 1

Today we are going to slightly veer away from biology, this year's scientific theme for the blog and talk about the history of the atom. The first people to think about atoms were the ancient Greeks, primarily a man name Democritus who lived around 460 BCE on the island of Abdera. He argued that nature was made up of tiny bits and pieces of incredibly tiny matter which he called "atomos," meaning uncuttable in ancient Greek. He argued that the "atomos" of different materials acted in different ways such as iron "atomos" being hard and stiff, cheese "atomos" being soft and filled with holes, and clay "atomos" being wet and sticky. His ideas, although somewhat inaccurate, were amazing for the science at the time. However many other philosophers and scientists living at the time believed in the five elements, an idea by the philosopher Empedocles. The philosopher Plato and his student Aristotle, took his idea further and proposed that the elements had their own geometric shapes associated to each. Fire was a pyramid, earth was a cube, air was an octohedron, water was a Icosahedron, and quistensence, the ultimate cosmic element was a dodecahedron.

Democritus kept his ideas to himself, since teaching new, scientific, "radical" ideas was banned in Greece and most of its colonies at the time. However in Abdera, free expression of ideas was allowed to the public. Many people followed him and found his idea of "atomos" a fascinating subject of debate. He also proposed that weather was not cause by angry gods, but by natural cycles, and that there were other worlds in the cosmos, being created and destroyed.

Hundreds of years later, his ideas found there way into the scrolls deep inside of the Great Library of Alexandria, for curious citizens to study and read aloud. However years passed and the library was vandalized, books were destroyed, and the entire building burned down. It was one of the worst cases of prejudice against knowledge and learning. Soon the scientific dark ages followed for nearly 1,000 years until quite by accident, an English scientist thought up the idea of tiny bits of matter.