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11
ATOM IN MODERN SCIENCE
harmony and 'the opposite tension' of the opposites constitutes the unity of the one He believed in perpetual change That all things are in a constant state of flux, this flux being due to an everlasting conversion of matter into energy and energy into matter, everywhere over the vast stretches of the material universe
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At this point let us pause for a while and compare the findings of the ancients with the modern Firstly, the problem whether the primary substance can be one of the known substances or must be something essentially different, occurs in a somewhat different form in the most modern part of atomic physics The physicists today try to find a fundamental law of motion for matter from which all elementary particles and their properties can be derived mathematically This fundamental equation of motion may refer either to waves of a known type to proton and meson waves or to waves of an essentially different character which have nothing to do with any of the known waves of elementary particles In the first case it would mean that all other elementary particles can be reduced in some way to a few sorts of 'Fundamental' elementary particles In the second case all different elementary particles could be reduced to some universal substance which we may call energy or matter, but none of the different particles could be preferred to the others as being more fundamental The later view of course corresponds to the doctrine of Anaximander and in modern physics this view is perhaps the correct one
Next, Heraclitus holds that the change itself is the fundamental principle and is represented by FIRE as the basic element which is both matter and a moving force Modern physics is in some way extremely near
