Abstract
At the turn of the century there were two opposing points of view in physics, the atomists and the antiatomists. The latter camp believed in the continuity of nature and saw no reason why matter should stop being divisible at the level of the atom and should, they reasoned, continue indefinitely to smaller and smaller scales. The atomists, on the other hand, with the successes of the periodic table and the kinetic theory of gases, had Boltzmann as their chief proponent. Boltzmann was such an extreme atomist that he did not even accept the continuity of time. In his St. Louis lecture in 1904 he stated [1]:
Perhaps our equations are only very close approximations to average values that are made up of much finer elements and are not strictly differentiable.
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West, B.J., Bologna, M., Grigolini, P. (2003). Fractional Dynamics. In: Physics of Fractal Operators. Institute for Nonlinear Science. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-21746-8_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-21746-8_3
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