Concept of the Atom, Atomic Structure of Matter and Origin of Chemistry 79
ideas, never very popular, were rejected by Plato and Aristotle outright,
because they involved the concept of a void. The Greek philosopher
Epicurus adopted the atomists’ point of view as the basis of his system of
thought. The Latin poet Lucretius preserved the teachings of Epicurus
through his epic poem, De Rerum Natura (On The Nature of Things). It
was through this work that the thinkers of the Renaissance became
acquainted with the ideas of the atomists.
This ultimate stock we have devised to name
Procreant atoms, matter, seeds of things,
Or primal bodies, as primal to the world.
(Proem — Book I of On The Nature of Things)Perhaps the most influential Renaissance supporter of atomism was the
English philosopher and scientist Francis Bacon (1561–1626), the great
proponent of the empirical approach. He was the first to suggest that the
heat of a body is a result of the internal motion of its atoms. The atomism
of Bacon was identical to that of the Greeks in all its details except for
one point, which reflected the growing rationalism of Bacon’s time. The
Greeks believed that the combining and recombining of the atoms was a
random process governed by chance whereas Bacon and his followers
believed that this process was governed by rationalistic law. The
mechanical nature of these atomic processes was emphasized by the
English physicist and chemist Robert Boyle (1627–1691). He discovered
that for a given quantity of gas at a fixed temperature the pressure is
inversely proportional to the volume. Although this result can be derived
theoretically from an atomic picture of gases, Boyle discovered his law
through experimentation. Other physicists such as Hooke, Galileo, and
Newton also believed in the existence of atoms.
In opposition to the view of the modern atomists were the Cartesians
who adopted the view that matter was continuous and could be divided
and subdivided an infinite number of times without ever reaching an end
to the process. Part of the Cartesians’ objection to atomism was their
opposition to the concept of a vacuum. They believed that even if one
could remove all the air from a tube using a pump, that aether would
remain to fill the empty space. They believed also that the space between
the heavenly bodies was also filled with aether, a point of view that
survived until Einstein’s relativistic interpretation of the Michelson-
Morley experiment, which we will discuss in Chapter 13.