Estella asked:

How does contemporary theory about the ultimate nature of reality compare with the theory of
Democritus and the atomists?

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You know, it's minor pet peeve of mine; the idea that some people (I'm not saying you) have that the
Greeks did it all, that "all philosophy is a footnote to Plato" or whatever, and that we're just sort of
sorting it out or elaborating on it. No. There is basically noresemblance at all between Democritus'
idea of "atoms" and the contemporary idea, now current, that "strings" or even that "elementary
particles" are fundamental to physical reality.

First, what you have to remember, is that the ancient Greeks spoke and mostly thought in, yes,
ancient Greek. What was the Greek word that Democritus used that could be translated "atom"? Here
are some possibilities, all of which might translate as "atom" in some sense or context: athroisma,
eidos, phusis, kataxaino, sphairion, suntribo, schema,and schematismos(as we would spell them in
our Latin alphabet).

Democritus believed that people were made of very small globules of fire, and I believe that
"sphairion" was probably the term he employed. Why fire? Well, the elements were, roughly, earth,
air, fire and water. Humans, according to him, were fire. What was fire, for Democritus? Probably
something vaguely like our conception of a glowing hot gas. So human "atoms" were little globular
bits of hot gas, roughly speaking. But remember, they did not separate the "physical" and the
"mental" as we do, nor make any number of other distinctions that we are not even conscious of, until
they are brought rather forcibly to our attention. He did not, most emphatically, see, think, react to the
same world as we do. A globule of "fire", for Democritus, had both of what we would now term
physical and mental attributes, and there were no connotations of oxidation, chemical reactions, the
nature of heat as motion, and so forth and so on. Therefore, does his conception resemble an atom in
contemporary physics? An electron, etc.? Well, we can make nice metaphors if we want, but
otherwise, no.

The Greeks (some few of them) were, in the West, the pioneers of rational thought. They spun off
some brilliant ideas in attempts to go beyond the religious and cultural "explanations" of the time for
various phenomena. Those explanations consisted mostly of stories, myths, parables, mostly verbal,
intended to instruct people in what their culture wanted them to learn about the world, about morality,
about how to act in various situations. A remarkable set of efforts, and it is amazing that more of them
weren't executed by their societies, like Socrates. But it's one thing to try, however valiantly, to
institute reasoned explanations as a reaction to learning sets of precepts and stories, and another
thing entirely to get those explanations right.

Steven Ravett Brown