A Brief History of
Atomism
The earliest philosophers faced a major problem trying to
invent a natural science. How could
they find ultimate causes if matter is always changing itself? All
societies in that era accepted
that everything deteriorates. The first philosopher, Thales,
suggested that water could turn into earth or air.
Therefore, water was the cause of all change, the arche, the
beginning, the first principle of all things. Heraclitus reasoned that
everything was changing, a
balanced state where things changed together. He thought that fire
caused these changes.
Parmenides argued that
if everything is changing, philosophers could never arrive at a valid
theory. If matter changes itself, what is true today would become false
later. He proposed that all
change is a delusion; nothing really changes or moves. This radical
proposal forced the other
philosophers to find something about matter that was changeless.
Anaxagoras suggested
that the elements are made of tiny parts. Our bodies break up bread
into its
parts and rearrange them into bones and flesh. He thought that bones
are made of two parts earth,
two parts water and four parts fire (energy). He theorized that the
elements (earth, water, air and
fire) cannot change into each other.
Democritus smelled
freshly baked bread and reasoned that invisible bits of bread must have
traveled to his nose. Matter must be made of tiny particles that were
atomos, indivisible. If you
stop your ears with your fingers, you still hear muffled sounds.
Therefore, solid objects must
contain a vacuum in which atoma are free to jostle about. Lucretius reasoned that
atoms must
move rapidly since there is no resistance in the void. Material things
consist of atoms
colliding and interacting with each other. The atoms themselves do not
change, yet all matter
changes and wears down with old age because the motions and
arrangements of the indestructible bits of matter keep on changing.
Plato rejected the idea
that beauty and order could come from atoms crashing into each other.
He
reasoned that all matter was built of solid, triangular building blocks
that fit together into four
regular solids. When the building blocks changed their arrangements,
the elements changed into
different substances. Although Plato permitted matter to change, he
argued that a parallel
universe of Ideas (the Form of all physical things) does not change.
Aristotle rejected atomism.
He had a simple solution to the
problem of matter changing itself. He
argued that we must assume that the properties of matter are fixed. He
insisted that we build all
knowledge on changelessness - even though none is observed. For
centuries, educated Christians
followed Plato's philosophy. Then around the year 1200, some Catholic
scholastics discovered
Aristotle's books. One of them, Aquinas, diligently
promoted and
interpreted Aristotle's system. This
resulted in the European universities teaching Aristotle's system along
with the Bible for several
centuries. Eventually the Europeans discovered errors in Aristotle's
physics. By then his
assumption that the properties of matter are not emergent was firmly
established in the West.
The earliest Western
scientists, because they were Aristotelean, rejected atoms. Eventually
some
Catholic scholars discovered books on Greek atomism, especially
Lucretius' On the Nature of
Things. By the early seventeenth century a few important
scientists began imitating the ideas of
the ancient atomists. Galileo
suggested that matter is made of many small particles interwoven
with tiny bits of vacuum. Descartes
thought that a body was hard because its miniature particles
were at rest. Gassendi
thought that hardness came from particle shapes. (Water was fluid
supposedly because its particles were round.) Hobbes suggested that
hardness came from the
internal pressure of rapidly moving particles.
The most important difference between
Western and ancient atomists is: does matter
normally change as it ages? Aquinas, Aristotle's
interpreter,
allowed for every kind of change
except for changes in being. According to Aquinas, substance could only
change its essence
when it was destroyed. Aristotle thought there were only four elements:
earth, water, air and fire
whose properties were fixed. Many
early scientists were alchemists. An alchemist was not rebelling
against Aristotle's assumption that the properties of matter are fixed.
Aristotle thought metals were compounds,
combinations of sulfur and
mercury. Liquid mercury amalgamates with metals
changing their color and
properties. An alchemist who fired cinnabar with lead was trying
to find the right ingredients to manufacture what they imagined was a
gold compound, not an unchanging element.
Isaac Newton was an alchemist,
yet he clearly presumed that matter does not change as it ages. He
claimed that "absolute,
true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows
equably, without relation to anything external." You
cannot define a linear time
without
presuming that clocks are made of matter that is NOT gradually changing
itself. If all matter changes
itself, all pendulum clocks, falling apples, planet orbits and planet
rotations would
gradually change in unison.
Newton's concept of invariant time
allowed him to formulate laws of
motion and a new
mathematic because he presumed that the properties of matter are fixed.
Newton believed that matter
and light are made of particles. A contemporary, Robert Boyle, used
simple experiments to show that heat, colors and odors had reasonable
atomic explanations. Boyle, like Democritus, sometimes used smell to
detect invisible atoms. He added water to
something that had no smell, which produced a fragrance. He argued that
the properties of matter
arise from the internal nature of material atoms.
In the early eighteenth
century, John Dalton proposed that
chemical reactions were combinations
of identical atomic elements that combined according to weight ratios.
He listed a number of
basic elements, not just the four accepted by the Greeks. Chemists soon
discovered that with just
a few chemical elements, they could create many different compounds. By
the late
1800's, chemists could
predict many chemical reactions with the notion of valences. They
reasoned that since gases pass
through membranes and mix together, they must be aggregates of many
colliding atoms. They
discovered that elements and compounds, when heated, shine with unique
spectra. They found
that electric currents could break some compounds into elements (by
electrolysis). They
discovered that radioactive matter could expose a sealed photographic
plate. With microscopes,
they noticed that tiny particles suspended in an emulsion jerked about
in random directions. They
reasoned that this was the visible effects of collisions with invisible
atoms.
At the beginning of the 20th
century, Rutherford
conducted experiments with radioactive particles
that shot right through a piece of gold foil. Only one in 20,000
particles deflected more than 90
degrees as it passed through the gold. The Greeks had been correct,
whatever matter is, it is
mostly empty space. Rutherford proposed that atoms contain a tiny,
heavy nucleus surrounded by
a distant cloud of electrons. Matter's chemical properties and
impenetrability comes from the
cloud of electrons. Bohr
suggested that electrons orbit the nucleus, held by electric
forces like planets held by the Sun's gravity.
Bohr's model was replace
with quantum explanations - that electrons jitter between various
states related to the wavelengths of light. A series of single
particles passing through two slits
produces a wavelike pattern on a photographic plate. No observer has
figured out how this
happens because the instant they begin to observe how a particle
moves, the wavelike phenomena stops. A particle
suggests a tiny bit of solid stuff, something that resides in one
place. Yet 'particles', under
certain conditions, demonstrate non locality. Non locality is the
phenomena where one
"particle" instantly affects a remote relative. Scientists built huge
accelerators for smashing
atomic 'particles.' However, they did not find indestructible bits of
solid matter, as the Greeks
imagined. Instead the collisions produced showers of 'particles', often
more 'massive'
than the colliding 'particles'.
The 'particles' rapidly changed into flashes of light. They
even collided two beams of
high frequency light and produced electron and positron 'particles'.
Colliding high speed
electrons and positrons could also revert back to light. Light is
evidently associated with atomic
'particles', 'charges', 'magnetism' and motions.
When
Elohim created the heavens and the earth, at first the transitory thing
(mayim) was tohu
bohu: formless, empty. Elohim moved over the face (paniym) of the
primordial abyss (tehom)
and commanded light (owr) to be. It was then that all matter in the
universe was actualized by
light and received its form. Matter is a dynamic relationship with
light. It is not static substance.
Light is never inactive, it always moves at the fastest known speed. In
Job 38:19 - 21, the LORD
mentions the mysterious paths of light in its house, a house of great
age. Darkness resides in the
house of light, a place with a border. Perhaps the biblical name for
atoms is: "houses of light." If
matter is a relation with light, then quantum weirdness is not so
strange. Indeed it would be
expected if the properties of matter are intimately associated with
internal and external light.
Over the last few
centuries, scientists built a system of measuring on the ancient Greek
assumptions. By the middle of the 20th century, scientists
changed their operational definitions of
matter and time to use atoms as
measuring standards. They made the cesium atomic
clock the
primary scientific standard. By definition, a count of 9,192,631,770
microwave pulses from
cesium 133 is a second. Most scientific measuring units depend on this
primary standard. For
example, scientists believe that light travels 299,793,458 meters in a
second (the symbol c).
However, this is both a measured and a defined speed. It is a defined
speed because they defined
the length of a meter as the distance light travels in 1/299,793,458 of
an atomic second (1/c).
Modern scientists measure things with
atomic perpetual motion standards, since they
defined invariant seconds and other units with their assumption that
atoms do not change with
age. It is understandable that
scientists measure perpetual
motion atoms with their atomic version
of time. If matter were changing
relationally, the scientific units would shift with the changing
atoms. If atoms were changing relationally, even the instruments and
the mathematical formulas
would all shift together. Such a system could only work in nearby
spaces and times. It would be useless for decoding earth-history.
A truth seeker should
carefully test for the existence of perpetual motion atoms. The
universe is
so vast that we can see the past with optics all the way back to the
creation era. Hundreds of
billions of primordial galaxies gleam from the ancient universe. Not a
single one of them gleams
with the light spectra of local atoms. In general, the older the light,
the
more its frequencies are
minuscule ratios of the light from modern atoms.
So how do scientists
account for the visible evidence that all atoms accelerate their clock
frequencies throughout cosmic history? Scientists believe that the
longer the
light travels through the
void, the more space-time allegedly adjusts its frequencies. Yet no one
ever detected any space
time or light changing frequency as it passes through a void. The scientific universe is 99%
invisible, filled with undetectable matter and unobservable,
vacuous forces to preserve
the scientific presumption that atoms do perpetual motion.
Biblical physics is based on what the Bible
states about material reality. Biblical physics does not
depend on mathematics or measuring things with perpetual motion
standards. The first principle
of biblical physics is that the creation is in bondage to phthora,
fundamental change. Biblical
physics is confirmed with sight. We see billions of ancient galaxies
gleaming with the light
emitted from countless houses of light. We easily see that atoms
continue to change their
properties throughout cosmic history. We confirm this because the
earliest galaxies were naked
and packed with tiny stars. At many ranges, we observe that those dense
primordial galaxies
spread out into galaxy clusters and huge, dusty growth spirals.
Galaxies could not grow unless
the properties of matter continually change. We see that every clock,
atomic and orbital, always
accelerates as the universe ages. Biblical physics allows one to accept
what is visible as fact, the visible history of the cosmos.
Lift up your eyes and look
at the heavens, the raqiya - the spreading out place. The heavens teach
knowledge to anyone in any language (Psalms 19). According to Isaiah,
God continually calls the
stars to come out. He continually spreads out the heavens. We confirm
with optics how the stars
spread out, moved out, accelerated out, took up more volume as the
properties of all matter
continue to change throughout visible cosmic history.
Because science was
built
on the assumption that the properties of matter are not emergent,
scientists are forced to fill the universe with invisible matter and
never detected processes. Scientific cosmologies are the most mythical
of
all stories about beginnings. Scientists often explain that a tiny bit
of
vacuum exploded and
created everything out of nothing. Even on the surface of our planet
they
invent subduction to explain away the simple, visible evidence that the
earth was once a
minuscule body that grows year by year. The continents fit back
together only on a tiny
globe. The undisturbed, soft sediments in the "subduction trenches"
clearly show that subduction
is another scientific myth.
Look at the heavens. With
optics we see creation as it happened long ago. How completely the
words of the Bible will vanquish science, the system of measuring and
reasoning built on a
carefully protected assumption from a pagan Greek.
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Last modified on January 16, 2009