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Tallis in Wonderland

Atomism & Smallism

Raymond Tallis wonders what the world is made from.

There is a much-quoted passage near the opening of Richard Feynman’s famous Lectures on Physics (1963):

“If in some cataclysm all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms – little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.”

These ‘little particles’ have undergone some strange transformations in the last century, not least as a result of Feynman’s own work. They have become ever more ethereal, ceasing to be self-standing nanoscopic corpuscles bumping into one another. According to the interpretation now accepted by many physicists, they are quantized waves in fields of force that spread out through space and time. At any rate, atoms seem no longer to be discrete solid entities, separated by what Democritus, the first atomist, called ‘the void’.

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