Democritus: Biography
- Democritus was an ancient Greek philosopher best known for his influence on modern science.
- He was also known as the “Laughing Philosopher", for his tendency to mock fellow citizens for their follies.
- Said to have been born around 460 BC in Abdera, Greece.
- After his father's death Democritus took off traveling in search of experience and wisdom.
- He traveled to Babylon, Egypt, Ethiopia and perhaps India as well using up his inheritance.
- He was a disciple of Leucippus and carried his atomistic thought further developing it rather extensively.
- Democritus held that nothing could come from nothing, that everything is already in the world and it is merely a matter of combination and re-combination of eternal bits of atoms.
- He also supposed that the solidness of any given material was dependent upon the shapes of these atomic bits.
- Different from today's understanding of atomic structure, Democritus and other 'atomists' thought that atoms were indivisible and infinite in size and shape as well as firm and completely solid.
- These atoms, then, existed in a void moving about combining and recombining.
- This necessitated the existence of nothing, or a void with Democritus saying when naming 'nothing' as a no-thing, that the one (nothing) no more exists than the other (thing).
- However, atoms did not make up just everyday objects for Democritus, but influenced his thoughts on sight, senses and souls.
- After returning to his native land he occupied himself with natural philosophy.
- He traveled throughout Greece to acquire a knowledge of its culture.
- Democritus died at the age of 90, around 370 BC
- He taught that everything in the world is composed of minute bits of matter, which he named atoms, and that all events could be explained by the motion of the atoms in space.