Where did atom bombs come from?

Two of the most amazing things about the late, great twentieth century were:

• someone learned how to split the atom;
• someone else invented atom bombs!

Even more amazing - all this atom business started off with a mate of - guess who?

-Heraclitus, Anaximenes and Empedocles!

So hello to Democritus!

Well, he was born a while later than them, but he cerainly knew about them and was very interested in their ideas.

he agreed partly with Empedocles. Nothing really changed, he thought, because the stuff that things are made up of, is always the same. But he also disagreed partly with Empedocles. He said, "No, everything is not made up of Earth, Air, Fire and Water mixed together. Everything is made of tiny invisible blocks! Things come and go, but these tiny blocks are around forever!"

Guess what he called the tiny invisible blocks? Exactly! Atoms!

Did you know that the word 'atom' means 'uncuttable' in Greek?

Do our senses tell us lies?

Parmenides, who lived around 540BC, did not trust his senses.
He did not believe that things in the world around him were really what they looked, or felt, or tasted like.
He thought long and hard about how we could really find out about what was in the outside world.
After all - you might have seen a ghost - lots of people have - but does that mean there was really one there?
You may hear someone shouting your name - you turn round and find your hearing has let you down - they'd been shouting to someone else.
Parmenides decided that you had to trust REASON, not your senses. The Ancient Greek philosophers had a word for reason. It was LOGOS. Some of them thought that LOGOS guided the whole world.
Parmenides was the first rationalist (rash-on-a-list) philosopher. This is someone who thinks you can use pure thought, or reason, to work out how things really are. If it doesn't fit with what you see - then what you see is wrong!
He tried to prove that change is impossible - things only look as though they change. He said that if you can think of something that will exist in the future, or has existed in the past, then it also exists in your mind now. So coming into being and passing away are illusions - really everything is changeless and eternal.
But what is the difference between existing in the world and existing in the mind? Think of a dragon. Does you thinking about it make it exist now, in the past, or in the future? Parmenides thought it did, in a way, because 'Nothingness is not possible' and 'For it is the same thing to think and to be.'
This may sound a bit woolly now but fair play to Parmenides - he set western philosophy lots of questions about existence, and change, and logic which have been debated ever since.
What do you think? If you think something, do you make it 'be'? Do you believe in the evidence of your senses? Are the past, present and future really all one?
Great ideas you set for us Parmenides.
Much much later - in the 17th century- the French philosopher Descartes became famous for saying 'I think therefore I am'. He was another rationalist philosopher who said that we should not believe in what our senses tell us - we could all be the victims of a great lie by an 'evil genius' and nothing might be as it seemed. The only thing I can really know to be 'real' is my own thought that I am having at this moment. And as I am thinking a thought, I must exist. I think Descartes was influenced just a little bit by Parmenides here!
Can you think of any science fiction films that have Parmenidean type themes? That the world around us is not what we think it is? That we are being tricked? There's a lot of philosophy in science fiction.

More Cracking Conclusions!

More cracking conclusions from Heraclitus and his ancient acquaintances!

Choose one of these for a philosophy group or just to chew over on your own!

I'll tell you my favourite at the end.

Much learning does not teach one to have intelligence.

(Heraclitus)

I've always thought schools were a bit overrated.

It is easier to guard against an enemy than a friend.

(Alcmaeon of Croton)

Hmmm...I happen to trust my friends. Yours sound a bit risky Alcmaeon.

The body is earth but the mind is fire.

(Epicharmus of Syracuse)

That famous French philosopher Descartes thought he'd invented the mind-body problem - but no - Epicharmus, you got there first. So are the mind and the body really two different things...?

The best men choose one thing rather than all else: everlasting fame. The majority are satisfied, like well fed cattle.

(Heraclitus)

So it's OK to want to be famous after all? But famous for what?

All things that come into being and grow are earth and water.

(Xenophanes)

Still looking for that elusive 'substance of which all things are made' I see.

In the same river we both step and we do not step, we are and we are not.

(Heraclitus)

You were thinking that everything changes all the time, that nothing stays the same even for a second...even the water in a river is constantly changing, so you can't step into the same river twice. Things only seem to look the same. Now science seems to be backing you up Heraclitus!

And as for certain truth, no man has seen it.

(Heraclitus)

Well, that could be true...

And what on earth gave Anaximander of Miletus this idea?

The earth is like a stone column!

So now we come to my own favourite:

The fairest universe is but a dust-heap piled up at random!

(Heraclitus)

Good to repeat this to yourself on a bad day. Could the universe really be a random pile of dust? Perhaps Heraclitus should have been having a duvet day when he wrote that.

But wait a minute - he says 'the fairest universe'. Did he think there's more than one universe then? Now that's interesting. And we thought multiverse theory was modern!

All of these early philosophers lived between about 580BC and 500BC. These are just fragments from their writings. Even so, we see the seeds of later philosophy: the search for basic substances, the problem of change, the apparent distinction between mind and body, the idea of truth, the difference between knowledge and wisdom, order and disorder in the universe, and ethics - how to be good, or happy.

Western Philosophy's weird beginnings

THALES, PYTHAGORAS AND HERACLITUS - BEST AND MOST ANCIENT

There was once a very ancient philosopher called THALES. He was born in Miletus, in modern Turkey. He was fascinated by water. He saw that water can be a solid, a liquid and a vapour. He worked out that all life needs moisture, and probably decided that the world's basic substance is water, or that 'all things are water'.
Why 'probably'?
- Because he lived in the seventh century BC and only a few fragments are left of his writing. People have guessed a lot of things about him, and have even forged ideas and claimed them to be his. He comes to us through a watery haze of time. But we think he was thinking about cause and effect, as well as looking for a basic substance that everything is made of.
Did he do experiments with water, like changing states?
-We don't know.
According to another ancient guy called Aetius, Thales said that 'god is in all things'.

What could he have meant by this? What do you think?

About fifty years later along came PYTHAGORAS, who lived on the Greek island of Samos. He founded a school so he could teach his ideas to a select little band of followers.
Do you like eating beans?
-Then you would not have wanted to go to his school. Beans were off the menu permanently. Pythagoras liked them too much to eat them.
In fact he had to pay his first pupil to attend!
But if you like maths then you would have learnt a lot there. Pythagoras thought the world is basically mathematical. He said, 'Everything is number' and 'Numbers are in everything'. Everything in nature changes, he reasoned, but numbers never change. He investigated patterns and relationships between numbers and shapes. He especially loved geometry and is famous for 'Pythagoras's Theorum' -although the Babylonians had probably worked this out before him.

Pythagoras said that numbers can't be seen or touched, but are always there.

What do you think?

An ancient guy called HERACLITUS also lived around these times. He had an unusual habit.
He would lie on the floor with one foot in the air.
He would move his foot around until the sun was quite behind it. When he got it right, he couldn't see the sun any more (a bit like a foot eclipse).
After a lot of thinking, this is what he said:

'The sun is as big as a foot!'

He could practise this party trick a lot (if he wanted to) because the sun shines fairly often in Ephesus, the place in Turkey where he came from.

DID YOU KNOW THAT...

In these ancient days there was no such thing as science?

You could say that these first philosophers were proto-scientists, or near-scientists because they were carrying out observations and then making up a theory to fit the observations. Some of them were doing investigations.

Good for you, guys! It's just a pity, Heraclitus, that you hadn't worked out that things look smaller as they get further away. Then you could have modified your theory a bit!

I use 'Ancilla to the pre-Socratic Philosophers' (by Kathleen Freeman) to get my facts right. This snazzy book tells me exactly what fragments of writing survive from these ancient times. We don't have any original writings from Pythagoras - but he talked a lot, and his ideas were passed on.

Pre-Socratic means 'the times before Socrates'. We'll come to Socrates himself later on.

The Little ebook of Big Ancient Ideas

Copyright 2009 J V Bews. All Rights Reserved.

eWARNING!

If you think philosophy will give you all the answers to life's big questions, think again! If you think you might be better off feeding the cat or kicking a ball against your garden wall - well, so did the French philosopher Voltaire. He said - after a lot of thought - 'il faut cultiver le jardin' - we should all stop thinking so much and do sensible practical things like digging the garden.

He didn't follow his own advice though!

But if you want to know about some ancient ideas right at the beginnings of philosophy, then here's the place to begin.

Philosophy is something that, once started, you can't help doing. It's like peeling layers off an onion bulb - each layer taking you deeper down to layers and depths you hadn't known were there.

It's like eating a peach, and each bite takes you nearer to the stone, which is the absolutely brilliant, astounding thought or idea that makes your brain tingle with excitement.

It's like a space voyage, guided by the rules and knowledge of the known universe, heading towards the vast, tremendous unknown...

The Ancient Philosophers started us off on our exciting journeys of the mind, and this little ebook is dedicated to them.