This post is an introduction to the Roman poet Lucretius’s De rerum natura, which I feel will help prepare the discussion in my next post, which will present the atomism in Galileo’s Two New Sciences.
On page 17-18, Lucretius says ‘and thus, beside the inane and bodies, is no third nature amid the number of things’, because ‘nothing exists per se except atoms and the void’, that there can’t be a third thing between matter and the void; but then, on page 20-21, he says that ‘nature knows no wholly full nor void’, as if he is thinking more like Heraclitus, that there is a only this sort of interplay between matter and void.
Perhaps the reason that no writings of Democritus exist, is because Plato vowed to burn any of Democritus’s books that he could find. I guess he did a good job of that.
With respect to Heraclitus, Lucretius ridicules the idea that all of Nature comes from fire. If we understand Earth as solid, Water as liquid, Air as gas, and Fire as plasma, and that an estimated 99% of matter in the universe is in the plasma state, maybe Heraclitus had a point. But we are getting ahead of ourselves, I have yet to write about electricity.
It is the thunderbolt that steers the course of all things.
On page 17-18, Lucretius says ‘and thus, beside the inane and bodies, is no third nature amid the number of things’, because ‘nothing exists per se except atoms and the void’, that there can’t be a third thing between matter and the void; but then, on page 20-21, he says that ‘nature knows no wholly full nor void’, as if he is thinking more like Heraclitus, that there is a only this sort of interplay between matter and void.
Perhaps the reason that no writings of Democritus exist, is because Plato vowed to burn any of Democritus’s books that he could find. I guess he did a good job of that.
Looking forward to your next post.
With respect to Heraclitus, Lucretius ridicules the idea that all of Nature comes from fire. If we understand Earth as solid, Water as liquid, Air as gas, and Fire as plasma, and that an estimated 99% of matter in the universe is in the plasma state, maybe Heraclitus had a point. But we are getting ahead of ourselves, I have yet to write about electricity.
It is the thunderbolt that steers the course of all things.
τὰ δὲ πάντα οἰακίζει Κεραυνός
― Heraclitus, Fragments