Stephen Hawking and Democritus

We view men like Stephen Hawking are the future, as pioneers for our world. Men like Hawking are ever pressing the bounds of science by using Inductive reasoning to work through problems that we simply cannot know at our current level of technology. In this weeks reading we're faced with a Stephen Hawking about 2400 years early, Democritus.

Democritus is trying to figure out the world and starts talking about this crazy idea called Atomism. Democritus believes that the world is comprised of an infinite number of atoms that comprise everything from the visible, like bodies, to the invisible, like souls. If this, idea that everything is comprised of "innumerable elements in perpetual motion" which cannot be combined nor further divided, is your starting point then you're are faced with the question of how the larger parts are made. Now we, with our modern science and high power telescopes, understand electrons and attractions and how these form molecules, but with no such equipment Democritus derives a rather workable notion that the atoms are comprised differently, being hooked, angled, convex, concave, thus allowing them to connect together physically and be broken apart if "some stronger necessity comes...and scatters them apart."

Again, looking back this idea seems rather ludicrous, we know atoms (and their smaller parts) are attracted to each other because of innate charges. We have discovered this through the scientific process, gaining empirical evidence to support our created theories. Democritus didn't have the resources available to follow the scientific process and instead he relied on inductive reasoning to come up with a nearly workable system to explain the questions raised in his world.

Today we can look back on Democritus inductive reasoning and wonder how our own thinkers will look in two millennia.