Abstract
At the beginning of his famous play Faust, Goethe expresses what drives his protagonist: it is the search for knowledge. The question of what holds the world together at its innermost core had already been posed by the pre-Socratic philosophers 2,500 years ago. They were the first to doubt that the events in nature can be explained by the will of a few gods.
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Notes
- 1.
It is unclear whether Zeno really was Leucippus’ teacher. According to other sources, Parmenides was the teacher of both Leucippus’ and Zeno.
- 2.
The reflections of Zeno and his contemporaries on the summation of infinitely many terms of infinitesimal sizes has long since become obsolete. Modern mathematics has no difficulty showing that such infinite series can converge to finite quantities.
- 3.
Interestingly, physicists know today that much of the mass of an atom consists in the binding energy of the quarks in its nucleus, and not the “bare” quark masses themselves.
- 4.
These are the tetrahedron (bounded by four equilateral triangles), the hexahedron (the cube bounded by six squares), the octahedron (bounded by eight equilateral triangles), the dodecahedron (bounded by 12 equilateral pentagons), and the icosahedron (bounded by 20 equilateral triangles).
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Jaeger, L. (2018). Contradictory Atoms: Philosophical Problems with the Smallest Building Blocks of Nature. In: The Second Quantum Revolution. Copernicus, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98824-5_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98824-5_5
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