Atoms and the Periodic Table
Who came up with atoms?
History is filled with recoded and unrecorded lives of remarkable people who learned and taught their ideas. At least one thousand years before Jesus was born in Bethlehem about 2007 years ago, people were recording their experiences and ideas so we can revisit them today.
there was a group of people who loved to exercise their minds. They built highly decorated, towering temples of smooth, shapely marble with hand tools. They made drama and plays, wrote stories and poetry without computers or television (Sophocles). One of them invented the beginning of calculus about 1,500 years before it was re-invented in Europe (Archimedes). A different man determined that a note one octave above another had a frequency that was twice as much(Pythagoras) - thousands of years before anyone invented a piano! They predicted eclipses (Thales) and could measure forces and power and found a way to make water flow uphill (Archimedes). One man calculated the circumference of the earth using shadows from the sun (Eratosthenes). One man They designed sunlight concentrating devices that could light an enemy ship on fire as it sailed toward a city to attack it and if the ship made it into port they built war machines large enough to lift enemy ships out of the water and destroy them. The developed "philosophy" which means "love for knowledge." One of their best teachers (Socrates) invented a method of teaching in which the teacher only asked questions. Questions helped the student improve his ideas and his ability to think.
Another of these fascinating men (Democritus) , using the teaching method of only asking questions, came up with this series of great questions:
• If you had a piece of wood and you cut it in half, would you now have two smaller pieces that are both wood? Yes.
• What if you cut them in half a again? Would the smaller pieces both be wood?
• How many times could you cut them in half and still end up with two piecs of wood?
• Is there a point or time at which you could not cut the wood anymore because if you cut it then the two pieces would not be wood anymore?
Democritus thought that there would be some point at which the material the wood was made from would not be wood anymore if you cut it small enough. He said, this level of "stuff" would be "atomus: indivisible particles."
Thousands of years after Democritus lived and asked his Great Question, and long after he was forgotten, people who loved to study and do experiments stumbled on atoms again.
Atoms rediscovered?
It was many years later that the idea of atoms surfaced again.