The Basics

After craning their necks for decades and taking in the stars and sun and moon and wondering about them, early scientists began to look closer to home. They became curious about much smaller things than the glorious celestial objects. Ancient Greek philosopher Democritus was ahead of his time when he theorized that despite how homogenous matter appeared to be it was probably formed from small separate particles which he dubbed "atoms." Democritus named the small particles "atoms" which translated to "indivisibles" because he believed that these tiny atoms could not be further reduced. On that part, he was wrong but he was right that those small particles that he dubbed atoms were everywhere and that they were the basic building blocks of the entire universe.

Democritus was wrong about something else. He thought all atoms were the same. His colleague, Empedocles, differed and thought there were different...