Episode 119 - Letter to Herodotus 8 - More On Perception Through The Atoms
Date: 04/30/22
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2472-episode-one-hundred-nineteen-letter-to-herodotus-08-more-on-perception-through-t/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 119 continues through the Letter to Herodotus, with Martin reading sections 53–57 covering Epicurus’ explanations of hearing and smell as atom-particle transmissions, the critical assertion that atoms possess only shape, weight, and size while all other qualities belong to contextual arrangements, and the limits on atom sizes. Joshua shares a story from the British television show QI about Guglielmo Marconi’s belief that sound never truly disappears — imagining a “Museum of Lost Sounds” from which one could hear the Sermon on the Mount — and Martin adds his own account of a research project that attempted to recover speech from patterns etched into ancient clay pots. The panel gives extended attention to section 54 — atoms have no color, taste, heat, or any perceptible quality — illustrated by Democritus’ famous formulation “by convention sweet, by convention bitter… in reality atoms and void,” and Cassius explores the philosophical danger of treating “conventional” qualities as inferior to atomic “reality,” arguing this is the road to nihilism and Stoic detachment. The episode closes with section 56’s upper limit on atom size and a discussion of George Berkeley’s inconceivability argument, the creationist peanut-butter-jar argument against evolution, and the contrasting ability of science versus religion to assimilate new information.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to episode 119 of Lucretius Today. This is the podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote On the Nature of Things, the only complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. I’m your host Cassius, and together with our panelists from the EpicureanFriends.com forum, we’ll walk you through the ancient Epicurean texts and discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. We encourage you to study Epicurus for yourself, and we suggest the best place to start is the book Epicurus and His Philosophy by Canadian professor Norman DeWitt. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where you’ll find a discussion thread for each of our podcast episodes and many other topics. Today we continue our review of Epicurus’ Letter to Herodotus and move further into fundamental physics and the atoms as means of perception. Now let’s join Martin reading today’s text.
Martin:
“Moreover, hearing too results when a current is carried off from the object speaking or sounding or making a noise or causing in any other way a sensation of hearing. Now this current is split up into particles, each like the whole, which at the same time preserve a correspondence of qualities with one another and a unity of character which stretches right back to the object which emitted the sound. This unity is what in most cases produces comprehension in the recipient, or if not, merely makes manifest the presence of the external object. For without the transference from the object of some correspondence of qualities, comprehension of this nature could not arise. We must not then suppose that the actual air is moulded into shape by the voice which is emitted or by other similar sounds, for it will be very far from being so acted upon by it; but that the blow which takes place inside us when we emit our voice causes at once a squeezing out of certain particles which produce a stream of breath of such a character as to afford us the sensation of hearing.
“Furthermore, we must suppose that smell too, just like hearing, would never bring about any sensation, unless there were certain particles carried off from the object of suitable size to stir this sense organ, some of them in a manner disorderly and alien to it, others in a regular manner and akin in nature to it.
“Moreover, we must suppose that the atoms do not possess any of the qualities belonging to perceptible things, except shape, weight, and size, and all that necessarily goes with shape. For every quality changes, but the atoms do not change at all, since there must needs be something which remains solid and indissoluble at the dissolution of compounds, which can cause changes — not changes into the non-existent or from the non-existent, but changes affected by the shifting of position of some particles and by the addition or departure of others. For this reason it is essential that the bodies which shift their position should be imperishable and should not possess the nature of what changes, but parts and configuration of their own. For thus much must needs remain constant. For even in things perceptible to us which change their shape by the withdrawal of matter, it is seen that shape remains to them, whereas the qualities do not remain in the changing object in the way in which shape is left behind, but are lost from the entire body. Now these particles which are left behind are sufficient to cause the differences in compound bodies, since it is essential that something should be left behind and not be destroyed into the non-existent.
“Moreover, we must not either suppose that every size exists among the atoms, in order that the evidence of phenomena may not contradict us, but we must suppose that there are some variations of size. For if this be the case, we can give a better account of what occurs in our feelings and sensations. But the existence of atoms of every size is not required to explain the differences of qualities in things, and at the same time some atoms would be bound to come within our ken and be visible, but this is never seen to be the case, nor is it possible to imagine how an atom could become visible. Besides this, we must not suppose that in a limited body there can be infinite parts or parts of every degree of smallness; therefore we must not only do away with division into smaller and smaller parts to infinity, in order that we may not make all things weak, and so in the composition of aggregate bodies be compelled to crush and squander the things that exist into the non-existent, but we must not either suppose that in limited bodies there is a possibility of continuing to infinity in passing even to smaller and smaller parts.”
Cassius:
Martin, thank you for reading that text for today. It looks like we basically have two major sections to talk about. The first, up through about lines 54–55, continues to talk about the use of atoms moving through the air and how we perceive things through that mechanism. And then after that, we have observations about the size of atoms — including their limits, how big they can be and how small they can be — and there are definite philosophical controversies that those issues address.
But before we get to that, let’s continue with a discussion of hearing, which occurs according to Epicurus when a stream of particles — Bailey uses the word “current” — is carried off from the object making a noise. That current is split up into particles, each like the whole, which preserve a correspondence of qualities that stretches back to the original object which emitted the sound. His point in section 53 being that without the transference from the object of some correspondence of qualities, there’d be no way for us to comprehend what we’re perceiving. And then we turn to smell right after that. The general issue still under discussion is that perception occurs through the movement of particles from place to place.
Joshua:
The idea is that, like with the images we talked about, there are particles from the object streaming off it constantly. In the case of images, we have these films of atoms streaming off. Now with hearing, it’s the same kind of thing — you’ve got a current of particles streaming out of the object making the sound or speaking. That’s what I’m gathering here.
Martin:
The current is split up into particles — yes. It seems, as I said already, that the correct idea is that we are modulating the air, and he is rejecting that one. But nevertheless, his take is a natural explanation. So for the consistency of his own theory it does matter which model is more accurate — it’s just that he has a working model.
Joshua:
Before we started recording today, I mentioned a story I heard on the British television show QI, hosted by Sandi Toksvig. It’s a wonderful show — if you haven’t seen it, it’s all over YouTube. In a particular episode I was watching, they were talking about the invention of the radio by Guglielmo Marconi. What was interesting about Marconi — two things. One, when he invented the radio and received the Nobel Prize for it, he frankly admitted he had no idea how it worked and couldn’t give an explanation for the mechanism. He had created this thing but wasn’t quite sure himself how it actually functioned, which is kind of wonderful. But the other interesting thing about Marconi is that he had this idea about how sound worked at the most fundamental level. He thought that sound never went away — it just got quieter and quieter over time. And so that all around us, if we could only hear it, is the vestige or impression of every sound that ever was, and every word that was ever spoken. He had this idea that if you could create something that could listen in on what one article in The Atlantic calls the “Museum of Lost Sounds,” you could hear human speech from millennia ago. We could hear Epicurus teaching in his garden, as it were, if we could just isolate that one signal from all the noise that surrounds it. He had this idea that he wanted to listen to Jesus delivering the Sermon on the Mount. Of course he never successfully constructed a device that could do it — because what we now know about sound is that it’s a form of energy that gets absorbed as it passes through objects, so there is no trace of ancient speech available to us. But he had the interesting idea that there was.
Martin:
And another thing complementary to this — I heard there used to be a research project where someone tried to detect whether potters who formed clay pots by turning them on a wheel might have modulated the clay with the sound of their speech. He thought that when they did the pattern on the pot, the chisel may have been modulated by the speech, so he tried to extract sound information from this modulation to hear what the potters talked about while they were making the pot. Unfortunately he didn’t get any result from that — apparently the imprint was too weak to be recovered.
Cassius:
I can’t remember whether I’ve heard that myself, Martin, or whether it’s just a brilliant thought — but just like these old gramophones, which reproduced sound by etching into some other object. It would be wonderful if we could eventually find something which had recorded ancient Latin or Greek speech. A mystery of the ages is how Latin and Greek really sounded.
And just to make sure I understand — Martin, you said Marconi didn’t really understand what he’d invented. Is there a simple way to explain what radio is? What’s the right explanation of what it’s doing? Is it actually transferring something from one place to another, or is it just sympathetically vibrating in some way that induces a reaction — like tuning forks?
Martin:
What you need is a radio transmitter that emits electromagnetic radiation. In order to make this into a radio carrying human speech, we modulate either the amplitude, the frequency, or something that will in some way affect the signal — we modulate this onto the electromagnetic wave. Then at the receiving side, you have a receiver which decodes that information. So something is traveling from place to place: electromagnetic waves, which are equivalent to photons. Because at that scale, normally the wave picture is the most adequate, but there are actually areas where even at these relatively low frequencies you can operate with the photon picture, like in NMR. But as a corresponding thing, it’s of course a rather long-wave electromagnetic radiation compared to light.
Cassius:
There’s always been this tension between whether the universe is sort of solid and whether what’s happening is a transfer of vibrations all along a chain without the individual links of the chain moving — or whether something is actually traveling. With tuning forks, for example: you start one vibrating, and another one tuned to the same frequency will start vibrating some distance away. Is the first one causing the second to vibrate by vibrating the air between the two? Or is there something traveling?
Martin:
This is practically a demonstration of how we hear something when someone talks. One tuning fork excites, and then in our ear we have different resonators for different wavelengths. The one with the right frequency gets excited — and that is the same thing. So the air pressure gets modulated by the fork which originates the sound, and when it reaches the other fork it gets excited to mechanical vibrations accordingly. Air is a fluid, which means the atoms — rather, the molecules — are bouncing around all the time, and this pressure modulation is like a water wave. If you have a wave in water, the individual water molecule doesn’t travel all the way across the ocean like the wave does — it moves approximately in a circle, but the signal travels across the whole ocean.
Cassius:
And in the Epicurean material, the issue of images traveling from the space between worlds where the gods supposedly live — I know there’s another example where images of those who are long dead and whose bones are moldering in the ground still seem to be visible. I think the idea is not that images are coming from the coffins underground but that older images of those people when they were walking around are still floating through the air — Marconi-like — to be seen later on.
Joshua:
I am familiar with that idea as well. One other thing I learned from QI: the first on-hold music was created accidentally when a factory owner named Alfred Levy discovered a problem with the phone lines at his factory — there was a loose wire touching a metal girder on the building, which turned the building itself into a giant receiver. There was a radio station right next door, so when they were putting people on hold on the phone, what they heard was the interference from the radio station playing over the line — completely accidental. I’d never heard that story either.
Cassius:
Well, quickly — it looks like there’s just one sentence on smell: “we must suppose that smell too… would never bring about any sensation, unless there were certain particles carried off from the object of suitable size to stir this sense organ.” Martin, on smell there’s no doubt but that particles move from the flower to our nose, right?
Martin:
Yes — exactly. In this case molecules actually come to us, and so this model was pretty much correct.
Joshua:
Which is why a lot of what we’re talking about seems to depend on the ability of the sense organ and how finely tuned it is. Think about how dogs have an extremely well-attuned sense of smell — there was this idea for a long time that if you wanted to smuggle cocaine through customs and avoid the sniffer dogs, you would surround the cocaine with coffee grounds, and the dogs would just smell the coffee. What we know is that dogs have the ability to isolate different smells coming into a mixture at the same time and say: this one’s the cocaine, this one’s the coffee, this one’s the grass outside. There’s also the mantis shrimp, which apparently has such an extraordinary range of rods and cones in its eyes that it can see colors that humans can’t see at all — an astonishing range of colors. So the sense organ that perceives these qualities changes the discussion a little bit about what those qualities actually are.
Cassius:
Now, I made a significant mistake when I introduced today’s episode, because my eye now catches on section 54 — it’s not just a matter of going from hearing and smelling up to the sizes of the atoms, but I think section 54 is really one of the most important observations in Epicurean canonics. Here he’s talking about “we must suppose that the atoms do not possess any of the qualities belonging to perceptible things” — and here’s the list of what atoms do possess: shape, weight, and size, and all that necessarily goes with shape. And then: “for every quality changes, but the atoms do not change at all.” This is the issue of properties versus qualities that I think is described in Lucretius in Book 1 — there’s a discussion of Helen of Troy and the Trojan War that covers this as well. But it’s a pretty important thing for us to discuss: the atoms have eternal reality that does not change at an atomic level, but everything made of atoms — which is everything — does not have an eternally unchanging characteristic. Everything has characteristics that are contextual according to how the atoms are arranged and moving.
The classic example would be color: atoms do not have color themselves, but we observe color because of the context in which we observe the bodies made of atoms. Let me read a quote from Democritus: “By convention sweet, and by convention bitter, by convention hot and by convention cold, by convention color — but in reality, atoms and void.” Precisely what he’s been saying: the atoms have only very few physical characteristics, and everything else that we perceive about matter comes either from a combination of atoms or from some other source.
Joshua:
I think the right word here is “qualities,” and this is also where I get into the issue of the word “accident” in Lucretius — some translators say that the color is “accidental,” but I think the Latin word in Lucretius is actually eventum — “event” — which is a better word, because it’s not random or arbitrary. It is tightly controlled by the combination of atoms and the shape and how they’re moving. So the color of an object in a particular context is not an accident — it’s an event that is not eternally the same, not part of an eternal property of that atom or combination of atoms.
Martin:
Color may boil down to a spectrum of a molecule — it may be modulated by all kinds of things — but let’s take the more simple case. As long as this molecule exists, it will have that color. So the color is associated with this particular molecule, and all other molecules of the same type and composition will have the same color under the same circumstances. So it doesn’t simply go away — it’s a property of this type of molecule. Though if you have a matrix, the matrix may change the color impression — it can get more complicated. For example, when gold particles are finely dispersed in glass, you get a red color, and depending on size you can get different colors. When many molecules come together into a mass, the ways they’re packed together may have different effects on the color. But if we just look at a molecular gas, the color of an assembly of that type of gas will always, under the same conditions, have the same color.
Cassius:
I always find a Stoic hiding under every bed, and I’m always sniffing out problems. So Joshua knows where I’m going with this. Martin used the term that using modern technology we can give a more “objective” description of colors — we can measure them in a way we didn’t have before. And when I hear that an objective description of color is better, is superior, is in some way more important than a subjective measure — I hear this resonance of almost mysticism, almost religious awe, almost a superiority of a level of existence. And I want reality, I don’t want mere convention.
You can use any word you want for the color of your room, but an objective description of color is better — that’s what I’m hearing in the Democritus formula as well. “By convention color, but in reality atoms and void.” That word “reality” suggests that we don’t really care what you and Martin think about the color, because convention is inferior. I’m of course being somewhat sarcastic, but I’m trying to make the point that at least in certain philosophical traditions, convention is something less desirable than objective reality. And I think this leads to a question: if there’s really nothing real in the world but atoms, then everything in our own existence is by convention — which implies, to certain minds, a Stoic position. If everything we think about and deal with in reality is just by convention, then I ought to be able to control those things by willpower, by bringing my mind into tune with the universal convention. Am I going too far? Doesn’t the word “conventional” itself have a negative implication in many ways?
Joshua:
For me the big issue here is almost entirely in the ethics. Certainly there are people who think that an ethic or a morality derived from human convention or that is subjective or relativistic is inferior to one that is objective — in their minds, absolute, as one handed down by God. But if I’m going to paint my room, I just want to paint it in a color that I like. It doesn’t have to be the most objectively beautiful color in the world. It just has to be a color I like or that goes with my things. The idea that there is an objectively beautiful color is itself a question. If I say to you, “That’s a very conventional poem,” that’s not high praise. It means you’ve met the minimum standard, you’ve done a competent job — adequate, but nothing more.
Cassius:
You’ve made a good point. And I’ll tell you where my programming comes from — I think it’s Galatians 4:9, in the King James Version: “But now, after ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage?” That sets me off. That is an argument that people who were brought up in a Christian background need to have an understanding of — where they’re coming from and what the proper response to it ought to be. Because paying attention to the supposedly “weak and beggarly elements” does not, in fact, make you a slave — it is the truth of the way the universe operates.
Earth Day was the other day, and one of the things that always comes up is the phrase “Mother Earth” — Lucretius justifies that usage because the earth gives rise to all things, not that we should worship her, but just as a poetic appellation. But certain Christians are really set off by that. They don’t want to hear about Mother Earth — earth is a fellow creation from the Father, not the Mother. And so you’ve got this absolutist claim on the one hand, and human convention on the other. I don’t think we’re going to get around the Galatians 4:9 problem.
Joshua:
I think the key response is this: even though there’s no universal God describing one particular color as objectively the most beautiful in the world, it is still possible to generalize as human beings about the type of things we’re going to find pleasing and displeasing. Pain and pleasure work largely the same way with most people. You can speak in general terms, and I think when we talk about human convention in ethics and morality — apart from absolutist claims — we’re still talking in terms that are general to most people. Most law codes throughout human history going back 3,000 years have usually included advice not to murder other people. You can almost make a general statement about the applicability of that moral argument to the broadest number of people, and most people are going to agree with it.
Cassius:
Right, and that’s probably as far as we ought to take that today. Let’s move to section 55 and then 56. In section 55, the point is that when matter is withdrawn from a body — when you cut away and cut away — the shape remains, even as the qualities are lost.
Joshua:
If you were to take a block of cheese, for example, and cut away and cut away and cut away, the shape is always changing, but it always has a shape. But eventually you’re going to get down to a level — at the atomic level — where you’ve taken so much away that you start to lose qualities like the ability to smell it or to detect visible color. But as you keep pulling away, there’s always, always going to be a shape. So this is an argument that while atoms don’t have color, don’t have sweetness or bitterness, they will always have shape. And he says elsewhere that water atoms are smooth so they glide over each other and that’s why water is liquid, and steel atoms might have hooks in them so once locked into a rigid structure they vibrate but don’t move much. I think he says spicy food has spikes that strike the tongue. So it’s the shape of things that remains when all other qualities are gone.
Cassius:
I think what you said is a good interpretation. Maybe I should use an apple as the example: you start out with red, and then as you take stuff away it starts to turn pale, and eventually when you get down to the atomic level there’s no color at all — which relates to the issue of is there “yellowness” inside something that’s yellow? Is there yellowness at all? Plato would assert that there is, and even Aristotle as I understand it would say there is an essence of yellow within certain things. Epicurus is insisting there is no “ness” of things within the atoms when you divide them down.
Joshua:
Is that homoiomeria? Or something like that?
Cassius:
Yes, I think something like that — the idea that bread is made of bread atoms. The counter-argument would be that you strike fire out of wood — it’s not that there’s fire particles in the wood. The atoms are more or less the same in wood and fire and cheese and apple. Maybe the most important illustration of this is intelligence: there are not intelligent particles. Whether something is yellow or red is one thing, but ultimately this comes back to the issue of whether living things are made of living particles or not — and Epicurus would pretty clearly say not. There’s not an essence of life in the sense of a living particle. There’s just particles that come together and have an emerging quality of life when combined in certain ways. This is ultimately his argument for why there’s no eternal life or why there’s no soul that can exist outside the body — and also why we know that when the atoms in your body at some future date reconstruct into a similar form, it still won’t be you, because when they dissolved you were gone.
Cassius:
Moving on to the issue of the size of atoms: section 56 says “the existence of atoms of every size is not required to explain the differences of qualities in things, and at the same time some atoms would be bound to come within our ken and be visible, but this is never seen to be the case, nor is it possible to imagine how an atom could become visible.” It sounds like he’s combining two separate proofs here. Number one: it’s never seen to be the case. But then there’s this additional argument: it’s not possible to imagine how an atom could become visible. That second one is always more difficult for me, because the word “imagine” tends in my mind to be something unlimited. So why is it impossible to imagine how an atom could become visible?
Joshua:
I want to raise the inconceivability argument here, which I believe comes up in the Hicks translation as: “which is never observed to occur, nor can we conceive how its occurrence should be possible.” I think there’s an Epicurean pattern of referring to conceivability that’s why I raised the question. But let me also raise the philosopher George Berkeley — B-E-R-K-E-L-E-Y, though in America we pronounce it “Barkley.” His main objective in what’s called the inconceivability argument is to show that material substances cannot exist without the mind and are therefore mind-dependent. He believed the only things that exist are minds and what is in them — ordinary objects are only collections of ideas which are mind-dependent. There are no material substances; there are only finite mental substances and one infinite mental substance, which is God. Berkeley lived 1685–1753 — so around the John Locke era — and he was somebody who, if you were researching these issues, you would want to read to understand his objections to materialism, since he ends up as far from Epicurus as you can possibly be.
Cassius:
Which is why it’s good to know what somebody like that says, so you can have an answer to it. And now everybody listening is thinking of The Princess Bride.
Joshua:
Inconceivable! Yes — the Sicilian villain in that movie uses that word constantly, and then finally someone says: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Cassius:
Does it mean you can’t imagine it? I think that’s the difficulty of what we’re talking about here — he seems to be linking it to both “you’ve never seen it to be the case in the past” and “it’s not possible to imagine,” as though these are two separate but reinforcing arguments. The distinction matters because just because you haven’t seen it in the past or present doesn’t necessarily tell you whether it can happen in the future. So when he starts to say it’s not possible to imagine or conceive, that seems like a separate, stronger argument — and I’m not able to give a good explanation for it. It would be something of an inductive argument: no matter how hard we look, we’ve never seen an atom big enough to be visible to the human eye, therefore we imagine we’ll never see one.
Joshua:
This takes us back to a skeptical argument too. Just because you haven’t seen Jesus rise from the dead after three days doesn’t mean he’s not going to do it tomorrow. Just because it hasn’t happened before, does that mean anything is possible tomorrow? Martin, what’s the proper response to “just because it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen”?
Martin:
It’s just unlikely to happen — so why should I worry about it or even consider it?
Cassius:
I guess it comes down to how we evaluate things we have not personally experienced and what credibility we give to different types of evidence. There was a creationist who had this stage prop where he would open peanut butter jars to try to disprove the theory of evolution. The idea being: every time I open a peanut butter jar, there could be life spontaneously forming in the peanut butter — but I’ve never seen it, therefore it’s never going to happen. Well, nobody’s claiming that life is going to spontaneously generate in a peanut butter jar. That’s not what the theory of evolution claims. It doesn’t even make a claim of abiogenesis — and even if you were making that claim, you don’t have to think that a complex multicellular animal should spawn spontaneously in a peanut butter jar. This stems from a failure to understand the basic principles of how these theories work. And defining the parameters of the argument is really important. In criminal cases in the United States, the judge will tell the jury that you must find a person guilty beyond a reasonable doubt — and sometimes they explain that phrase: a doubt for which you can give a reason. It’s not sufficient to simply say “it’s possible” — because anything’s possible. You always have to give a reasonable explanation for your projection of something that could happen. You can’t just say anything’s possible. That’s not a reason.
Joshua:
One thing I would add to that is that the scientific community is uniquely poised to accept new information that comes in, and the religious theological community is uniquely badly positioned to accept new information. The argument that some new discovery is going to rock the foundation of science — that’s not going to happen, because science is built around taking in new facts and assimilating them into what we already know to come up with a broader or more nuanced understanding. Whereas new facts like the existence of Australia and its unique animals is a real problem for Noah’s Ark — how did the kangaroos get there? The discovery of the New World and peoples who had existed for millennia without ever being evangelized was a huge problem for Christianity. And if we discover life on other worlds, that will be a huge problem for Christianity but not for the scientific community. The ability to assimilate and reach out and collect new information, and to be amenable to this new information and prepared to analyze it dispassionately, is going to be very important for your mental health if you’re really interested in these things.
Cassius:
And that’s what I heard you say a moment ago — that it’s important for your mental health to have a balanced understanding of these things. Just because atoms and void are the only things that are eternally the same doesn’t mean you should throw yourself off a cliff because you don’t have the eternal truth of religion to cling to. Rather than go further into infinite divisibility today, let’s leave the discussion focused on this question of what’s reasonable to consider as possible — and what it means to live a balanced, happy life knowing that the atoms are, as Paul called them, the “weak and beggarly elements.” That’s a mischaracterization, of course. Paying attention to these elements is not slavery; it’s the truth of the way things are.
Rather than pin down Martin with a final comment, let me go to Joshua for closing thoughts.
Joshua:
Always when we read these texts and get really drilled down into the meaning of not just paragraphs but sentences and words, at some point it’s important to step back and take in the whole view and ask what Epicurus was trying to achieve when he wrote this letter. Even about the size of atoms and the function of smell — he expected that this information would liberate people from their fear of death and from their fear of the gods. For that reason, even though some of this might seem very dry, I don’t think it seems dry to me, but I can see people finding it impenetrable or boring — the deeper purpose of it all is very interesting and very important.
Cassius:
I would add to that: it’s important because you’re not just some chemist or young scientist on a desert island studying chemistry and physics. The people Epicurus was talking to were interested in practical ways to make life better, but they were living in a world in which these ideas were being debated for their philosophical implications. Again, I’m looking back at Galatians 4:9: “how is it that you are turning back to those weak and worthless principles? Do you wish to be enslaved by them all over again? You are observing special days and months and seasons and years.” This letter to Herodotus is intended to provide a basis for deep thinking, not just chemistry. That’s why Epicurus wrote it — so we can have a basis for responding to people who consider the study of the elements to be slavery. I don’t consider it to be slavery.
All right, now I’m rambling for sure. So hearing nothing else, we’ll come back next week and continue to talk about the sizes of the atoms and what their implications are for day-to-day life. Thanks for your time today, we’ll be back next week.
Martin:
All right, bye.