History of the Atom

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Indian Atomism and Quantum theory by P. Priyadarshi

interesting article that challenges commonly held ideas about the history of the atom

Traditionally, the western authors have been reluctant to accept ancient Indian achievements in science and hence they hold that Democritus was writing physics but the same thing if written by an Indian was metaphysics. (4) This prejudice has been so high that Park sums up, “The Upanishads refer to an imaginary symbolic cosmos. Democritus was talking about the way things really are or (better) might be. These are different worlds of discourse. They cannot be compared.”(5)

Democritus used a naïve logic that you cannot go on cutting something forever and therefore there must be atoms at the end, which you cannot cut any further. On the other hand, the Indians gave a much better logic, “Take a mountain and a molehill, they said. Which has more particles? The mountain, obviously. That means you cannot cut forever, that there is a finite, uncuttable particle. If the particles were infinitesimal, the mountain and the molehill would have equal number of particles, and they would lose any real meaning—again, an assumption but, in a way, more hard minded than Democritus’s guess. And the Indians, unlike Democritus, displayed a rudimentary understanding of infinite sets.” (6) Moreover Indian atomism was older than the Greek atomism, because there is evidence that Pakudha Katyayana, an older contemporary of Buddha taught atomic theory much before the earliest Greek atomic theory. (7)
 
What is the point??? Europeans were and are much more aware of ideas from ancient Greece than from ancient India.
 
they were all wrong when they said that "you cannot go on cutting something forever", because if there was a fundamental particle that everything consists of, the question arises: what is that particle made of?

there is as many particles in a drop of water as there is in our galaxy because both have infinite (zero) particles. things can't be made of anything but nothing because there are only two things: thing and nothing. a thing can't be made of another thing (because the question arises: what are things made of?), so it must ultimately be made of nothing.

matter is made of words like molecules, atoms and energy.
 
Neither the ancient Greeks nor the ancient Indians did much of anything with their scientific ideas. Nor did the medieval Arabs who kept Greek learning alive while Europe descended into the Dark Ages. I don't mean to gainsay the accomplisments of all three nations in math, which Fibonacci and others used as steppingstones to modern math. But math is a tool of science that deals in abstractions, it is not science. For all practical purposes, modern, organized, methodical science--an integrated body of disprovable theories to explain observations of the physical universe--arose in Europe as a key component of the Enlightenment.

This could not have happened without Greek/Indian/Arabic mathematics. But it would have easily happened without the handful of scientific principles they discovered first. Nonetheless I'm all in favor of putting Eurocentrism in context and giving the world's other civilizations credit for their many accomplishments. All of them except the Incas independently developed the most important technology since agriculture and metallurgy: written language.
 
they were all wrong when they said that "you cannot go on cutting something forever", because if there was a fundamental particle that everything consists of, the question arises: what is that particle made of?

there is as many particles in a drop of water as there is in our galaxy because both have infinite (zero) particles. things can't be made of anything but nothing because there are only two things: thing and nothing. a thing can't be made of another thing (because the question arises: what are things made of?), so it must ultimately be made of nothing.

matter is made of words like molecules, atoms and energy.

You are contradicting yourself.
If everything is ultimately made of nothing, the fundamental particle is made of nothing, right ?
Nothing is undividable (to be ironic) :p
 
they were all wrong when they said that "you cannot go on cutting something forever", because if there was a fundamental particle that everything consists of, the question arises: what is that particle made of?
at this point, empiricism leaves the arena ....
there is as many particles in a drop of water as there is in our galaxy because both have infinite (zero) particles.
then what's the difference between a drop of water and the atlantic ocean if they both contain the same number of particles?
things can't be made of anything but nothing because there are only two things: thing and nothing.
actually there are only three things
constant things
temporary things
imaginary things

all of which involve "something"
a thing can't be made of another thing (because the question arises: what are things made of?), so it must ultimately be made of nothing.
or alternatively, the question what things are made of has not been properly addressed yet ...

matter is made of words like molecules, atoms and energy.
sticks and stones make break my bones but words can only flatter me
:bawl:
 
Eurocentric history is heavily biased against other non-Western history.....

Democritus was around the 5th century BCE while the Upanishads were around at least 9th century BCE, the Bhagavad Gita around the 3rd Century BCE, the mahabharata around 1200 BCE, etc...most pre-dating Democritus by 100s of years...
 
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So what. European history was not heavily influenced by non-western history, untill the colonial age started.

Neither "Theories" have anything to do with modern atomic theory. We should not put to much into it. Pakudha Katyayana seems to be almost contempoary to Democritus. The idea may just have moved slowly to Greece, and Democritus picked it up and took it further.
 
Atomic theory began with John Dalton in the early 1800s. Everything before that was just non-scientific guessing and phiosophy, with no evidence to back it up.
 
So what. European history was not heavily influenced by non-western history, untill the colonial age started.
Yes it was...for instance the base 10 numeric system comes from ancient India, along with trigonometry, algebra, the first heliocentric theory, etc...

Besides influence doesn't matter in history, what comes first, past events, that's what history really is...there is no European history or non-European history, just actual history...if ancient Indians had something first then it should be known as first...

Atomic theory began with John Dalton in the early 1800s. Everything before that was just non-scientific guessing and phiosophy, with no evidence to back it up.
That's what a theory is...it doesn't have to be based on empirical evidence to be a theory...
 
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VitalOne,

Some of it you're probably right, but this is turning into a contest of "mine is bigger than yours". The 10 numeric system came to europe from the arab world, who learned from the indians. That has been know for ages.
However, it does not matter if the ancient indians came first with a heliocentric theory, if the europeans never heard of it, and came up with the same idea at a later time. Science is more or less independent of culture, so that the earth orbits the sun will be discovered sooner or later.

Also, it would actually be nice to see the ancient texts analysed critically. How much of it is interpretation, biased by our own knowledge of the world. Ancient texts always have an element of interpretation.

So basically, one needs to to investigate that the ideas from india came to the west in a direct if not fast line of communication. But now we are ,moving from science to history.
 
That's what a theory is...it doesn't have to be based on empirical evidence to be a theory...
I'm pretty sure that theories are supposed to explain empirical phenomenon. Dalton's atomic theory explained a lot of previously-unexplained observations. What empirical phenomenon were the ancient philosophers trying to explain?

It's true that there was some genuinely impressive science that went on in ancient times (Eratosthenes, for example) - but there was also a lot of random guessing. When you have lots of different ancient philosophers all spouting different ideas about things, a few of them are bound to be correct through luck. It doesn't mean that the few who happen to guess correctly are especially clever.
 
But now we are ,moving from science to history.
That's okay. It's on topic since the title of the discussion is "History of the Atom." And the history of science is certainly fair game for SciForums and the GS&T subforum.
That's what a theory is...it doesn't have to be based on empirical evidence to be a theory.
No, that's not quite right. "Theory" means different things in different disciplines of course. In mathematics theories are provable precisely because they're based on abstractions and logic rather than empirical evidence. In police detective work a theory can be based on a hunch and then must explain the empirical evidence to be proven true, but only "beyond a reasonable doubt." In the "soft sciences" like psychology and linguistics, theories are really just glorified models that merely organize empirical evidence in the hope that they can be used to make sense of it and predict future behavior. These theories usually cannot be proven but they are also not always subject to disproof; they merely accrete an ever larger number of exceptions.

But in "hard science" a theory is indeed supposed to be a response to empirical data, an attempt to organize and understand it so well as to inspire a consensus of confidence that future evidence will never contradict it. Scientific theories are constantly tested by new data and can be disproven, but they can never be proven. Only in layman's language do scientists talk about "truth," and then they are implicitly using the police detective's definition: "true beyond a reasonable doubt."

That's the difference between science and crackpottery. Many crackpots have a decent scientific education and utilize some scientific techniques. But they diverge from the scientific method in their very first step. They develop a theory that they like for unscientific reasons. Perhaps it conforms to their religious beliefs, or builds upon the work of a friend, or will make them famous if it's true. Or even something loftier, maybe it will bring peace to humanity if only humanity can be made to believe it. (It's important for us to understand that not all crackpots are jerks and should not automatically be treated like pedophiles.) Their goal is not to find a theory that explains empirical observations. As often as not, they go off looking for empirical observations that are consistent with their theory.
It's true that there was some genuinely impressive science that went on in ancient times (Eratosthenes, for example) - but there was also a lot of random guessing. When you have lots of different ancient philosophers all spouting different ideas about things, a few of them are bound to be correct through luck. It doesn't mean that the few who happen to guess correctly are especially clever.
The scientific method seems so straightforward to us, it's not "rocket science," as it were. A person of average intelligence and education can easily comprehend it, and he probably doesn't even need to be that well qualified if he's interested. Yet it was not developed until the Enlightenment. Everything that we regard as science in the ancient and medieval world was not performed according to the scientific method.

To rephrase what you've said, their theories were not rigorously peer reviewed--not subjected to intensive attempts at disproof. Many of them, such as Archimedes' Principle of buoyancy, were largely mathematical. Since we have the good fortune to live in a universe that is both Euclidean and (at least at our human scale) Newtonian, pure mathematics can go a long way toward developing the science of physics based on only a few primitive empirical observations. But it's fairer to say that those guys were good mathematicians rather than early scientists. They just got lucky with physics, that's all. Not to mention astronomy, which predates science's key tool: written language! But their concurrent attempts to establish the other sciences that are less dominated by math were generally complete failures, e.g., the "Four Humors" theory of chemistry.
 
To rephrase what you've said, their theories were not rigorously peer reviewed--not subjected to intensive attempts at disproof.
Well, that's true - but that's not really what I take issue with. The problem is that many of the ancient "theories" that turned out to be more-or-less correct (like Democritus's atoms) were based on nothing more than random speculation without a single shred of empiricism, and only turned out to be correct through sheer luck. Then modern people say "Wow, he figured that out back in whatever B.C.! That's amazing!"

He didn't figure it out - he just made a random guess and got lucky. Dalton actually figured something out.
 
The problem is that many of the ancient "theories" that turned out to be more-or-less correct (like Democritus's atoms) were based on nothing more than random speculation without a single shred of empiricism, and only turned out to be correct through sheer luck. Then modern people say "Wow, he figured that out back in whatever B.C.! That's amazing!"
This is why we have to be careful when subduing crackpots. We say, "Cite one bona fide scientific theory that was developed without rigorous application of the scientific method." They start naming people who lived 2300 years ago. We have to make it clear that we mean, "When the scientific method was in existence, so not all of the energy of the most brilliant minds went into guesswork."
 
I personally date the rise of the modern scientific method and practise to the 19th century. Certainly Bacon and various Greeks get a look in, and the Royal Society helped, but it wasn't until the 19th century that things relaly got organised properly.
 
You guys have your definitions wrong, instead of using the common dictionary definition of the word "theory", you use your own personal definitions in order to discredit non-Western history and favor Eurocentricism...

theory:
- a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world; an organized system of accepted knowledge that applies in a variety of circumstances to explain a specific set of phenomena; "theories can incorporate facts and laws and tested hypotheses"; "true in fact and theory"
- hypothesis: a tentative theory about the natural world; a concept that is not yet verified but that if true would explain certain facts or phenomena; "a scientific hypothesis that survives experimental testing becomes a scientific theory"; "he proposed a fresh theory of alkalis that later was accepted in chemical practices"
- a belief that can guide behavior; "the architect has a theory that more is less"; "they killed him on the theory that dead men tell no tales"
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=theory
 
You guys have your definitions wrong, instead of using the common dictionary definition of the word "theory", you use your own personal definitions in order to discredit non-Western history and favor Eurocentricism...
This is a science website. We use the definition of "theory" that is in universal use in the science community in all nations, not the definition in a dictionary for laymen. As has been explained in numerous discussion on SciForums, the word means different things in different disciplines, even perfectly respectable disciplines.
theory:
- a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world; an organized system of accepted knowledge that applies in a variety of circumstances to explain a specific set of phenomena; "theories can incorporate facts and laws and tested hypotheses"; "true in fact and theory"
The first definition is a decent explanation of the concept in layman's language, but it is not workable for the scientists, future scientists, and science groupies who populate SciForums. Scientists are loth to use the word "fact." We talk about "observations."
- hypothesis: a tentative theory about the natural world; a concept that is not yet verified but that if true would explain certain facts or phenomena; "a scientific hypothesis that survives experimental testing becomes a scientific theory"; "he proposed a fresh theory of alkalis that later was accepted in chemical practices"
This comes closest to the academic definition but it is recursive, incomplete, and still incorporates laymen's language. Scientists never call their theories "true" except outside the academy, such as when testifying as expert witnesses in a trial. That is a key difference between science and other disciplines: our theories can never be proven true. Also, a theory must survive peer review, not just experimental testing.
- a belief that can guide behavior; "the architect has a theory that more is less"; "they killed him on the theory that dead men tell no tales"
Sure. And police detectives have theories that guide their behavior in a way that is anathema to science: they look for empirical observations that support the theory, rather than attempting to disprove it in a destructive test. Anyone in our community who treated his pet "theory" so lovingly would be a textbook case of a crackpot, not a scientist.

Oddly enough, this dictionary overlooks the definition of a theory in mathematics. Math theories are based entirely on abstractions and reasoning, and unlike scientific theories, they can be proven true.

I'm sorry if the definition of "science" that is actually used in science appears Eurocentric, but science as it is universally practiced throughout the world did in fact originate in Europe as a byproduct of the Enlightenment. Of course we owe a debt to other cultures. Our mathematics came from Arabia and India, our technology of written language was developed by the Sumerians and refined by the Phoenicians. Our entire civilization spread out from Mesopotamia, one of the six places on earth where civilization sprang up independently. But the scientific method, which is the essence of the science that has become a major force in civilization over the past several centuries, was invented in Europe.

To reiterate: This is a science website and, speaking on behalf of the moderators' community, we are in the process of cleaning it up and stressing its role as a meeting place for scientists, future scientists, and people interested in science. Note that Free Thoughts has been demoted to the bottom of the directory so the first thing people who stumble in here find is a scientific discussion, not a poll about the inconsolably sad life of single, healthy, prosperous young men with no responsibilities. We have also been cracking down on the trolls, flamers, crackpots and pseudoscientists. And... we expect the scientific method to be respected in the science subforums, and at least not flouted in the others. We have an obligation to present science to the inquisitive young minds who come here looking for it. If they come to a science website looking for world history, they should be astute enough to navigate to our History subforum, or better yet, look for a forum that does not have the word SCIENCE in its URL.
 
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