________________
Let us see what Sir Isac Newton had to say about this ultimate particle of matter. He said, "the elements that moved in this world were material particles small, solid and indestructible, out of which all matter was made." The matter was atomistic but the atoms differed from the modern notion of atoms in that they were all thought to be made of the same material substance. Newton explained the difference between one type of matter and another not in terms of atoms of different weight or density but in terms of more or less dense packing of atoms. According to him, the basic building blocks of matter could be of different sizes but consisted of the same 'stuff'. He further elaborated that the motion of particles was caused by the force of gravity which acted instantaneously over a distance. The particles and the forces between them were of a fundamentally different nature, the inner constitution of the particies being independent of their mutual attraction, Newton saw both the particles and this mutual attraction as created by God and gave up further probing declaring that they were not subject to further analysis. To him the 'how' was known but not the 'why'. Though both Physics and chemistry held so long after Newton that different types of atoms depending upon their density, the New Science of to-day initiated by the epoch-making discoveries and formulations of Albert Einstein have proved Newton's concept of atom to be true at least in the aspect of its being the same 'stuff' and that is exactly the position of Jainism in its theory of atoms as explained by Tirthankaras since unknown time. Now the atom is no longer the last particle. Its constituents, the electrons, protons, neutrons, positrons. hadrons and now quarks are themselves units of matter, very abstract entities having a dual aspect, appearing sometime as waves and sometime as particles even depending upon the consciousness of the observer. They are still paramanus' of Jainism. At sub-atomic level, matter does not even exist with certainty. It has only tendencies to exist. An atomic event can never be predicted with certainty, only the likelihood of its happening can be predicted. To-day, the matter is not the isolated, fragmented, dead pieces of mere 'stuff' whose behaviour is governed by nature's iron-clad laws but something
83
