________________
با
-
ATOM IN
MODERN
SCIENCE
15
Plato (428-348 BC) who was not an atomist himself combined ideas that were near to atomism with the doctrines of the Pythagorean school and the teachings of Empedocles Pythagoreans had established the connection between religion and mathematics which ever since has exerted the strongest influence on human thought There was also much mysticism in the doctrines of the Pythagorean school which for us is difficult to understand But by making mathematics a part of their religion they touched upon an essential point in the development of human thinking
Plato knew of the discovery of the regular solids made by the Pythagoreans and of the possibility of combining them with the elements of Empedocles He compared the smallest parts of the element earth
with the cube of air with the octahedron, of fire with the tetrahedron and of water with the icosehedron and so on The common characteristics of the regular solids which represent the four elements and the atoms of Democritus was that both were indestructible But the smallest parts of matter were not the fundamental Beings as in the philosophy of Democritus but were mathematical forms Here it is quite evident that the form is more important than the substance of which it is the form
After this short survey of Greek philosophy we may come back to modern physics and compare our modern views on the atom with this ancient development Historically the word "atom' in modern physics ánd chemistry was referred to the wrong object, during the revival of science in the seventeenth century, since the smallest particles belonging to what is called a chemical element are still rather complicated systems of smaller units These smaller
