What superior knowledge did the Greeks have to "hypothesise" about matter being comprised of atoms?

Question

How could Ancient Greeks know that Atoms exisisted and what atoms were made out of without the use of electron micorscopes? Some famous Ancient Greek philosophers documented what atoms were made from(electrons neutrons etc).

Answer 1

They didn't know, and it certainly was not completely accepted. Democritus guessed it by doing the "thought experiment": if you take some paper and cut it in half, and cut it in half again, and again, and again... Can you continue to do this forever, or at some point will you reach a point where it cannot be cut? He decided that there was a minimum size beyond which it could not be cut.



So actually, his experiment would have found molecules rather than atoms. They did not know anything about electrons and neutrons, in fact the word "atom" is from Greek meaning "indivisible", they believed the atom was the smallest thing and could not be split.



And, we did not need electron microscopes to understand atoms, they were understood using cloud chambers and cyclotrons long before electron microscopes could see anything so small.

Answer 2

Your question appears to be a crazy-quilt of 1000 fragmentary half-formed inquiries, that has no precise summary or focal point. So, I'll just pick out something that's sort of like your question, write it down for you, and then try to answer it as best I can. Question: Where would your consciousness be if the genetic shuffle that makes you up had come out different? Answer: If you aren't you, then the concept of "your consciousness" becomes meaningless. "your" can't be a random variable. This flows from Ayn Rand's Principle of Identity A=A The word "you" denotes a specific particular entity, not a variable that can be millions of possible different entities. So, if A=A then A=X must not be true If A is a specific designator (You) then is cannot also be X a random variable (any one of a number of possible people or Someone). You is what in logic we call a specified noun -- like Socrates. An unspecified noun might be "someone". So if I say Socrates ate the apple (or A ate the apple) that is quite different from saying Someone ate the apple. (X ate the apple) "Someone" could be anybody, but Socrates is unique -- he is just Socrates. (A=A -- the Principle of Identity -- or as Popeye might put it "I am what I am", or as God would say I am I am, God was a big fan of the Principle of Identity, He was the one that taught it to Ayn Rand, though she never admitted that, and claimed the idea as her own, and Aristotle's [Editorial Note: some Rabbis have God saying "I am that I am" which would be more like an assertion of self-causation than like the Principle of Identity, anyhow, if He's the only one around, it works out about the same]). "You", for purposes of this question is more complex than your physical body anyway. The "you" that can manifest a self is a process, and not merely a collection of atoms. Specifically it is a process of experience, memory, and awareness, which in psychophysiology is called brain synaptic connections patterning. How the pattern of synaptic connections is patterned in your brain is not just a function of your DNA, it is also a function of the nature, quality, and extent of your experiences -- which collectively are called your nurture (or, for behaviorists, your conditioning, or for cops, your personal history and background). Nurture shapes patterning. DNA also shapes patterning. Patterning is what your "self" is made of. So the "you" that you are talking about is Unique, and is specific, and is nature shaped, and nurture shaped. Short answer: Your question contains a logical contradiction (a specific noun is presented as a random variable noun). When the contradiction is removed, it becomes clear that "you" is only partially a function of matter and atoms anyway, and is partly a matter of experience, memory, and patterns formed between synapes based on unique paths that you have walked. So the really short answer is nowhere -- all the imagined alternative "you's" were never potentially "you" anyway. The only "you" that can be verified and counted now abides as the actual you. The rest are non-Being (i.e.wholly imaginary). I hope you will pardon me for answering this like a mathematical logician. Being a mentat is an always-on function. I'm sure other people will give you answers far more filled with "feeling" and "emotion", probably far more personally satisfying than this.

Answer 3

There is no historical record of how the Greeks concocted the concept of an atom, but the most plausible cognitive mechanism is analogical abduction, a process in which puzzling facts are explained by using analogies to generate new hypotheses [Thagard (1988, pp. 60–63)]. For example,the Greeks appear to have arrived at a wave theory of sound by noticing analogies between the propagating and reflecting behavior of sound and the behavior of waterwaves.



The Greek concept of atom was clearly very different from modern theories of atomic structure, and the Greeks had nothing like ourcurrent concepts of Molecule and Element. The most common view was that everything consists of combinations of four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. For the atomists, these “elements” were themselves constructed out of different kinds of atoms.

Answer 4

About 25 centuries ago, a greek philosopher Leucippus, wondered how small a fragament can be broken down into something smaller. His student, Democritus, came to the conclusion that eventually a fragment of matter becomes so small as to be unbreakable. He called those fragments atoms.

That led to everything we know about chemistry and physics today.

Answer 5

They had no special knowledge or any proof either.



They had an atomic theory, but no good description of the size properties, or constituitents of atoms



btw



You can't see an atom with an electron microscope. The only "pictures" of atoms come from xray diffraction studies, and show them as fuzzy balls