Episode 165 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 19 - Chapter 9 - The New Physics 01
Date: 03/18/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2948-episode-165-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-19-chapter-9-the-new-physics-01/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”This episode begins Chapter 9 of DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy, “The New Physics,” opening with DeWitt’s statement that in the Epicurean scheme of knowledge, physics takes precedence over ethics because it furnishes the major premises from which the nature of the world is deduced and the proper conduct of life is formulated. Martin notes that modern philosophy erred in strictly separating science from ethics; Epicurus motivates ethics through physics rather than deriving one logically from the other. The is-ought problem — Hume’s guillotine — is discussed: Joshua explains Hume’s position that no set of factual premises can logically entail a moral conclusion, while Cassius argues that the facts of the universe (such as the existence or non-existence of a supernatural God and afterlife reward-and-punishment) are precisely what must be settled before one can determine how to live. Joshua sketches Augustine’s licensing of heresy-hunting (the state may not allow the sale of poison bread, so the church may not allow the spread of heretical ideas), explains Pascal’s Wager and its flaws (one cannot choose what to believe; the Wager assumes only Christian theology), and quotes Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration on faith as “inward and full persuasion of the soul” — genuine conversion cannot be coerced. Cassius notes that Epicurus’s first two Principal Doctrines concern the nature of the gods and the denial of punishment after death, establishing the naturalistic foundation before any ethical conclusion is drawn. The episode then covers DeWitt’s reconstruction of Epicurus’s Twelve Fundamentals (p. 156): matter is uncreatable; matter is indestructible; the universe consists of solid bodies and void; solid bodies are either compounds or simple; the multitude of atoms is infinite; the void is infinite in extent; atoms are always in motion; the speed of atomic motion is uniform; motion is linear in space, vibratory in compounds; atoms can swerve slightly at any point in space or time; atoms are characterized by three qualities — weight, shape, and size; and the number of different shapes is not infinite. Critically, none of these is directly observable — all are deductive conclusions reached from observable evidence, not empiricist generalizations. Callistheni raises Carl Sagan’s Cosmos episode 7, “Backbone of the Night,” which demonstrates how an ancient siphon-jar device showing air pressure could have contributed to atomist intuitions; Joshua adds the worn foot of a statue on the Camino de Santiago and the Lucretian argument from cave stalactites as observable evidence for atomic structure. Aristotle’s “nature abhors a vacuum” and the fish-nosing-through-water theory of motion displacement are covered as the anti-atomist position Epicurus was overturning. The episode covers two more DeWitt subheadings: “Attributes and Accidents” — Cassius explains the distinction, with Lucretius Book I line 449, between properties (weight of a stone, heat of fire, fluidity of water — essential and unchanging) and accidents (slavery, poverty, riches, liberty — changing while the thing remains); Martin explains that the unchanging properties of atoms are precisely what give atomism its explanatory power for the repeatability of phenomena; and “Gradations in the Atoms” — the number of kinds of atoms must be innumerable but not infinite, lest upward gradations reach planet-sized atoms never observed. Cassius recommends John Tyndall’s Belfast Address and quotes George Santayana’s Three Philosophical Poets (1910): “all we observe about us, and ourselves also, may be so many passing forms of a permanent substance — perhaps the greatest thought that mankind has ever hit upon.” The episode closes noting that the swerve and atomic motion will be the focus of the following episode.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to episode 165 of Lucretius Today. This week we start chapter 9, entitled “The New Physics.” Before we get into it, we should recap where we are in the basic scheme of the book. Maybe the best way to do that would be to take a look at DeWitt’s very first paragraph, where he says: “In the Epicurean scheme of knowledge, the physics takes precedence over the ethics because it, the physics, furnishes the major premises from which the nature of the world is deduced and the proper conduct of life is formulated. The sensations, anticipations, and feelings — that is the canon — are not represented as furnishing the content of knowledge but as being instruments of precision by which the certainty of knowledge is tested at all times.”
Part of the distinction he’s making there is that the chapter we’ve just gone through is a discussion of how we test our conclusions. The physics is going to be the foundational knowledge that we obtain by use of the sensations, anticipations, and feelings, and we test the conclusions we reach about the physics through that method. It’s interesting, isn’t it, that the physics takes precedence over the ethics? I don’t know if that’s really the way other philosophies look at it. But it does make sense — you have to know what kind of cosmos you’re living in before you can make decisions about how you should live.
Martin:
Yes, exactly. And this is the thing where I think modern philosophy got it completely wrong. I understand why it happened — part of the truce between the church and science was that science would no longer bother with issues the church was dealing with, and the church would no longer interfere with science. Part of that agreement was that from science you cannot deduce ethics. And in a strictly conclusive sense, this is correct — there is no way in a purely logical sense to get conclusively from science to an ethics. But Epicurus doesn’t apply strict logic here; he motivates his ethics by physics. And I think that is really the good approach.
Cassius:
Yes, Martin — there’s the phrase that you can’t derive what ought to be from what is, or the is-ought problem. Joshua, you’ve talked about that before, right?
Joshua:
Yeah, this is typically called Hume’s guillotine. Essentially what he says is that there’s no description of how things are that can tell you how they ought to be.
Cassius:
And I would reply to Mr. Hume that if I was sure that I was going to burn in hell for an eternity if I did certain things that are wrong, or if I was sure the facts were that I would live in heaven and bliss for eternity if I did another set of things, I don’t care what Mr. Hume thinks about his guillotine — I would do certain things based on what I perceive to be the truth of the universe. I know that he’s much deeper than that and I’m being superficial in the way I’m making that comment, but it certainly always makes sense to me — just like Martin said — that there are going to be certain facts about the universe that you have to take a position on to decide how to live your life. The whole question about whether there is a supernatural God who has a list of things you’re supposed to do is critically important, because if that’s true and it does exist in that way, then presumably most sane people are going to follow those orders in order to be rewarded and avoid being punished. Why would that not be where you start — deciding whether there’s a supernatural God and reward and punishment after death — in order to determine what to do?
Joshua:
Part of the issue with Hume — I’m not very well versed in Hume — is that while he was very non-religious for his time, I don’t think he knew whether it was really possible to know whether the claims made about the afterlife were true. He has a book on miracles. He defines a miracle, I’m totally flying off the cuff here, as being a suspension of the natural order of things essentially. One classic example he gives is the conception of Jesus in Mary by God, and he reduces it to a simple question: which is more likely, that the laws of nature are suspended in a way favorable to what you believe, or that a married woman should tell a lie?
He says that if a reasoner only has access to non-moral and non-evaluated factual premises, the reasoner cannot logically infer the truth of moral statements. You can make moral claims, but you can’t defend them as being absolute. I don’t think that Hume was taking the position that just because we can’t make absolute moral claims by starting with facts about nature, we should just do whatever we want. What we know just from the facts is that people don’t abandon morality just because they’ve stopped believing that morality comes from on high.
Cassius:
We talk about this regularly, but it bears repeating that while Epicurus is famous for his suggestions about pleasure being the goal of life, the very first two of his Principal Doctrines at the top of his list of major things he taught were directed towards the existence and nature of supernatural gods, and the existence and nature of life after death — which he denied occurs. All of the rest of his philosophy derives from his basic fundamental conclusions that the universe is essentially natural and not run by supernatural forces. One of the things you derive from your observation of the universe is that things that come together ultimately split apart, and after a long chain of reasoning he derives the conclusion that there is no immortal soul that can survive death and suffer punishment or receive reward. So whatever you’re going to base your life’s decisions on in Epicurean philosophy, you’re not going to base it on the expectation of living after death, or on the expectation of being under the thumb of supernatural gods.
Joshua:
I just want to pick up on something you said about if the claims made about the afterlife were true, you’d have to think about changing your ethical approach. St. Augustine took that further. He said that because he thought he knew that the claims made by Christianity were true, and that people if they were convinced to reject Christianity would spend their eternities in hell, he said he had the obligation — just like the state has the obligation not to allow the sale of poison bread — to not allow the circulation of bad ideas. That is how he licensed heresy hunting. That is one implication of the subject.
Cassius:
Joshua, what is Pascal’s wager? I’m just putting you on the spot this morning, but isn’t there something known as Pascal’s wager which is also related to this subject?
Joshua:
Yes. He came up with this idea — he was French — and the idea is you kind of break it down into a diagram. There’s: if you don’t believe in God and you’re right, nothing happens when you die. If you don’t believe in God and you’re wrong, you burn in hell for all eternity. If you do believe in God and you’re wrong, nothing happens after you die. If you do believe in God and you’re right, you will have paradise — eternal bliss — for all eternity. On the basis of this, he said the only reasonable thing to do is to believe in God, because if you’re wrong nothing happens, you’re just dead — but if you’re right that’s the only ticket into heaven.
Pascal’s wager is problematic for a number of reasons. One of them is I don’t think people can choose what they believe — I think people are persuaded to believe something by the balance of the evidence, and it’s an involuntary process. Also, his wager is built around Christian theology, but what if you listen to Pascal and choose to believe in the Christian God — and it turns out Islam is actually right? If that’s the case, you’re going to be punished anyway.
There’s a quote by John Locke in his Letter Concerning Toleration, published anonymously in Latin in the Netherlands, in which he says that religion consists of the inward and full persuasion of the soul, and that faith is not faith without believing. This is the problem with Pascal’s wager — he thinks you can choose what to believe. Locke is admitting that it’s not a choice — people who are forced to convert to a religion on pain of torture, death, or social stigma haven’t genuinely converted, because you haven’t convinced them that what you’re saying is true. He extends that to every case except one: people who deny the being of God altogether. For those people, he just doesn’t want to deal with the problem.
Cassius:
The way you’ve talked about whether you can choose to believe it reminds me — I think Frances Wright addressed that issue in A Few Days in Athens. She discussed it briefly as being an issue she wasn’t going to try to resolve in her book, because it’s very difficult to decide how it comports with determinism. You get to the position of arguing what you just said means absolute determinism — which is certainly not what Epicurus says, based on the swerve and that people do have a degree of agency. But the issue of whether you’re going to believe what’s right in front of you, and whether you have a choice not to believe it — things that are right in front of you, like the sky being blue — can you really choose to believe anything other than what’s in front of your eyes?
What Epicurus says particularly about death, in the Letter to Menoikeus, is “accustom yourself to believe that death is nothing to you.” It doesn’t just tell you to believe it — it’s something you have to think about. You have to put different kinds of evidence in front of your eyes and that’s what’s going to change your mind. You can’t just flip a switch and change your mind.
Not trying to go too far off on a tangent, but trying to hammer home the importance of coming to a foundation for your beliefs — especially on the issues of life after death, and whether there’s a supernatural God — you’ve got Augustine taking the position that it should be basically illegal, that it should be persecuted out of existence, to take a position other than the orthodox view on religion. You’ve got people who might not want to kill you but will come up with elaborate logical arguments, like Pascal, as to why you should believe in God even if the evidence really isn’t there. So you’ve got a key question of evidence — what evidence are you going to accept, what evidence is persuasive — and you’ve got the canonical issue of how to think and how to evaluate evidence, and together with it the question of what is the evidence that you’re then going to evaluate.
An understanding of how the universe operates is basically the only way you’re going to have confidence in a conclusion one way or the other about these really key issues. Even though we’re going to eventually conclude through this process that pleasure is the goal of life, if we don’t go through this process we’re going to not be as confident as we should be. We’ll constantly be plagued by doubt and uncertainty that maybe we’ve totally got everything messed up about the way the world works, and everything we’ve done has been a waste of time. The process of understanding the way things are is largely a process of looking at the nature of the universe and deriving conclusions about the way it works.
Epicurus’s longest work was “On Nature.” Lucretius’s poem is titled On the Nature of Things. And as for the three letters of Epicurus — the very first is the Letter to Herodotus, which talks about these general topics we’re discussing today. Followed by the Letter to Pythocles, which is sort of an extension of the Letter to Herodotus out into the sky and the universe. Only then — after that — is the Letter to Menoikeus, which starts with the conclusion that there’s not a supernatural God and that pleasure is the goal of life, and only then talks about how to implement that. So where DeWitt goes next is pointing out that you can look at the Letter to Herodotus and the Letter to Pythocles and compare the presentation of physics in those books to what is stated in Lucretius in the first several books of his poem, and you can see the pattern of basically the same sequence of observations and conclusions in both.
DeWitt points out that there was another book listed among Epicurus’s works called the Twelve Fundamentals — or Twelve Simplifications — and it is thought by a certain number of scholars, including Diskin Clay in an article, to have presented twelve key points of physics. DeWitt lists on page 156 his reconstruction of the twelve:
Number one: matter is uncreatable. Number two: matter is indestructible. Number three: the universe consists of solid bodies and void. Number four: solid bodies are either compounds or simple. Number five: the multitude of atoms is infinite. Number six: the void is infinite in extent. Number seven: the atoms are always in motion. Number eight: the speed of atomic motion is uniform. Number nine: motion is linear in space, vibratory in compounds. Number ten: atoms are capable of swerving slightly at any point in space or time. Number eleven: atoms are characterized by three qualities, weight, shape, and size. And number twelve: the number of the different shapes is not infinite.
Maybe the first point I’d like to make about that list is this: we just spent a chapter talking about how the senses are the basis of everything. Well, it’s obvious that we do not see atoms. We do not touch atoms. Every one of these conclusions is not empirically verifiable by directly observing this atomic level of existence and activity. So it’s important to understand that what Epicurus has done here is start with observation — as he insists we need to do — but what he’s started with is observing those things which are observable and then deducing conclusions about what must be going on underneath, at a level that is not observable. That gets into the question of whether observation is all we have and whether we ever deduce conclusions about things which are not observable. Well, anybody who wants to say that Epicurus deduces only about things that are observable needs to understand that the whole atomic structure of the universe is not directly observable — it is a deductive conclusion based on reasoning about things which we do observe.
Callistheni:
Something that we don’t really understand is that there were observations of things which could have led to the idea of atoms. I first saw this in an episode by Carl Sagan — he was talking about some ancient device, a kind of siphon or jar with holes. If you put your finger over one side it somehow siphons up the water, and when you remove your finger all the water pours out the end. This got people to thinking about what’s going on with air. I think this could have been an actual observation that contributed to the theory of atoms — and this type of device was apparently invented much earlier than Epicurus, possibly five hundred years before his time.
Cassius:
We’ll have to look up that jar device later — that’s very interesting. One of the problems you immediately bump up against when you start talking about what is nature is: what is it made of? This is probably the most ancient question in philosophy. It starts with really the earliest Greek philosophers — you have Thales and the idea that everything ultimately is made of water; the idea that everything is made of the four classical elements; there was homeomerie, the idea that everything was made of a smaller bit of itself — bone was made of tiny little bits of bone, fire of little bits of fire, wood of little bits of wood.
Joshua:
The evidence for an atomic structure was really all around them once they had gotten to that hypothesis. If you go to some churches — there’s a famous pilgrimage route in Europe called the Camino de Santiago, the Way of Saint James, and it ends at a church where you rub the foot of the statue of Saint James. Well, that part of his statue is rubbed smooth, and all the other parts are weathered. Every time someone puts their hand on it, they take a few atoms off with them, and that process over centuries has led to a very significant difference. This was already going on in the ancient world — statues erected outside of city walls, people at the end of a long journey touching the statue for good luck. So that’s one way you could see atomism at work.
It’s also the source of Lucretius’s argument that predates the discovery of Brownian motion. There was also the observation made in caves: when you see stalactites hanging from the ceiling, you can see there are deposits left by sedimentary rock from water seeping through the walls of the cave. The walls of the cave are stone — they appear to the eye so impenetrably solid that nothing could get through. But actually water and sediment do get through. And so that tells you that even though you can’t see them, there are empty spaces in things that other things can pass through. Ideas like that can furnish the evidence you’re looking for — probably after you’ve already deduced the conclusion that the world’s made of atoms, but they confirmed it.
Cassius:
Just one more point: I’m going to go very quickly to the third of his twelve elementary principles. The first two are basically that matter can neither be created nor destroyed — Lucretius says “nothing comes from nothing.” The third is that the universe consists of solid bodies and void.
There was a belief in the ancient world — Aristotle formulates it very famously when he says “nature abhors a vacuum” — that a vacuum was impossible in nature, that it couldn’t sustain empty space. Of course, that doesn’t work in an Epicurean universe, and Aristotle was criticized on that point by later Epicureans. The idea put forward to get rid of vacuums in nature was that with no empty space, when you move through nature you displace matter, which then displaces the matter to the side of you, which then displaces the matter behind you, so that everything is constantly filled in — like a fish nosing its way through the water, just pushing the water around it and behind it. That was the idea: everything is constantly filled in, no empty space. But of course this is not at all what the Epicureans thought.
Joshua, those are good points. Let me go back for a second to what Callistheni said a few moments ago. She’s referring to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series, episode number seven, entitled “Backbone of the Night.” We have a link to it on the forum — you can search YouTube and other locations to find it. It is an absolutely outstanding presentation of the background of atomism. Democritus, and perhaps even Leucippus before Epicurus, were first in the atomist game. Epicurus picked up what they did and expanded it with the swerve observation as well. I can’t recommend highly enough that episode seven of Cosmos. It is frustrating that it does not, if I recall correctly, mention the name of Epicurus. But if you simply accept that when Carl Sagan is talking about Democritus and atomism, he’s really talking about Epicurus as much as he’s talking about the others, Sagan does a brilliant job of setting up the problem — which was that the Platonic, Socratic view of the universe had swerved away from this earlier atomism of Democritus and into the idealism that Pythagoras and Plato are associated with, where they suggested that the universe was made up of ultimately mystical or otherworldly elements, indicating that there’s a man behind the curtain pulling the strings of the universe we see. Carl Sagan goes through this very well and just absolutely slams Plato especially for his idealism, which he says set back the world almost by centuries in terms of advancement. Episode seven also has the instrument Callistheni is talking about, where you can show that air pressure sustains water inside the device if you keep your finger on top, and when you let your finger out, the water falls once the air equalizes on both ends.
That’s really the point we want to hammer home with this chapter: it is not just a dry subject of science. There are dramatic implications for it. That’s why largely Epicurus came up with his philosophy — because he was reacting against those who said chaos came from nothing or through the creation of gods, and if you’re going to take the position that Plato and these idealists are wrong, you need your own position as to where the universe came from, what is behind it, and how it operates. And that’s what Epicurus was doing with these twelve fundamental principles.
DeWitt talks about how the majority of them ultimately contradict positions Plato had taken about the nature of the universe. The issues of uncreatability and indestructibility, no limit to the number of atoms or to the extent of the void, those are positions very contrary to a “God-created universe” position. And even the others that don’t seem so related to ethics — such as the speed of atomic motion being uniform — all of them together tend to produce the conclusions that many of us have absorbed in science today: that there’s nothing necessarily supernatural about the way the universe operates. The further you study science, the more comfortable you get that things happen in a mechanistic way. Of course, the difficulty you run into when you start talking about mechanism is free will, which we discussed earlier, and Epicurus resolved that with his observation about the swerve being sufficient to allow the free will that we observe. But the whole structure of Epicurean physics revolves around an understanding of the universe that gives us confidence that we’re not the playthings of some supernatural force.
Joshua:
And some of this is unusually forward-thinking. The conservation of matter — it doesn’t go so far as to describe the conservation of matter and energy, but it’s there. There’s also that classic example that if you drop a feather and a bowling ball in a vacuum they’ll hit the ground at the same time. And the idea of inertia — atoms when struck in a certain direction will carry on in that direction, apart from swerving at some indeterminate point. It’s the question of whether force equals mass times acceleration, or force equals mass times speed. Martin, you might be able to help me with this. Aristotle had the view that force equals mass times speed, I think?
Martin:
This dispute was only resolved by Newton. At Newton’s time there were still scientists using the position of mass times speed — linear momentum. If you apply a force, then that changes the momentum, and in cases where the mass doesn’t change, you can take out the mass and just have acceleration. So mass times acceleration. But in the most general form, Newton’s law is the change of momentum over time.
Cassius:
I find all those details fascinating, but I suspect there’s some number of our listeners whose eyes are going to glaze over as we get so deep into the history of science there, so I’m going to try to pull us back out of that. Maybe one way to do that is to repeat that a lot of what we’re talking about right now is summarized in a very attractive form in Cosmos episode seven. We spent the first two years of our podcast going through Lucretius in detail and went week by week through many of the detailed arguments about atoms. We won’t try to repeat that now. If we live long enough I want us to go through Lucretius again and we’ll go back through all of that in as great a detail as we would like at that point. But for now what DeWitt is doing is giving us the implications of things rather than going into the details of the science.
One of his subheadings is entitled “What Constitutes the Universe” — I think we’ve basically been talking about that, about how the universe is natural and so forth. Let me skip over to the subheading entitled “Attributes and Accidents,” which I think will give us another important implication of the atomist foundation Epicurus was erecting.
Obviously some things recur, like the sun rising in the east in a largely mechanistic sequence. But other things change dramatically. Things can look a different color depending on what kind of light we’re looking at them in. So if Epicurus was suggesting that everything resolves down into unchanging eternal atoms, there’s got to be an understanding of why some things appear to change. Why does even the same thing appear different at different times and in different contexts? This discussion of attributes and accidents is part of that analysis. It’s in Lucretius under a discussion of the Trojan War, and it’s in the Letter to Herodotus. What it comes down to is that Epicurus talks about the difference between properties versus what we term either accidents or — my favorite word for this, from Bailey’s edition of Lucretius — eventum, or events. There are certain properties of things that are so tightly tied to their atomic structure that they never change. But there are other things that are changing, and if the atoms themselves are eternally the same, how is that change taking place?
Joshua:
This is an area in which I’m constantly out of my depth. Can you give me the overview one more time, Cassius? You said that certain aspects of things we observe are stable and bound within the structure of their nature, and certain aspects of what we see are changing. Last time we talked about this on the podcast, what I said was we need a Venn diagram of where all these things fit together — and I haven’t followed up on that. So give me your overview one more time.
Cassius:
Okay. If we go back to number eleven of DeWitt’s list — “atoms are characterized by three qualities: weight, shape, and size” — Epicurus was taking the position that an atom is eternally unchanging, and its unchanging properties are those three: weight, shape, and size. But there are many other things that an atom does not possess — for example, color. Atoms are colorless under this theory, but bodies which are made of atoms do have color, and that color can change under the circumstances in which we’re viewing them. So the emergent qualities or events of an atom when it combines into a body are constantly changing and basically innumerable in type. You’ve got a coexistence of things that are both permanent and immutable at the atomic level, but at the level of bodies — whatever you want to call it, the molecular level — where atoms have come together, you have all these other attributes that are not a part of the original atoms, but have arisen because of the way they’ve been combined with each other and with the void and their motions.
Lucretius also gives a list of things like war, peace, slavery, liberty — abstractions that are events of bodies. Whatever you want to call them — qualities or emerging properties — they are functions of changing positions of atoms, even though at the atomic level the atoms that compose them remain unchanging. That seems to me to be the key of his ability to explain both the regularity of things we see in the universe and the things that are changing — things that we do ourselves, that even to us are unpredictable. The swerve factors into that as well in terms of free will.
Lucretius uses the example of senators at a coliseum sitting under a red awning, and how the sun coming down through the awning casts a red glow upon them. That’s a function of a changing set of circumstances, explainable through atomic theory as an emergent quality that arises when atoms move in a particular way. I don’t know that we think today that’s such a big deal — we take it as a given that the atomic view is basically underlying everything. But if you’re being really rigorous about what’s going on in the world around you, and Plato and these other guys are saying that everything is being run by a supernatural being, you need a theory that explains how these changes are taking place.
Joshua:
Every time we have this conversation, I have the same problem, which is I don’t know which word is supposed to mean which thing. And it’s a problem primarily of loose language — we’re all very guilty of it, particularly on a podcast where we’re just talking. But it seems to me that the qualities are the unchanging characteristics of atoms, and then the accidents would be the changing characteristics. My question is: why do we have five or six words for this?
Cassius:
That’s basically right, and there are multiple ways to describe it. I sent Book One of Lucretius — around line 449 — which states: “For whatever things are named, you’ll find to be either properties linked to atoms and void, or you will see to be accidents of these things. A property is that which can in no case be disjoined and separated without utter destruction accompanying the severance, such as the weight of a stone, the heat of fire, the fluidity of water.” So we’re talking here about properties of bodies — water is fluid, and if you freeze it or evaporate it, it ceases to be water from our common understanding of it. Then it continues: “Slavery, on the other hand, poverty and riches, liberty, war, conquest, all other things which may come and go while the nature of the thing remains unharmed — these we are wont, as it is right we should, to call accidents.”
And here’s another relevant quote — Democritus, which seems to be always worthwhile: “By convention sweet, by convention bitter. By convention cold, by convention hot, by convention color. In reality, atoms and void.” All of these things — sweetness, bitterness, hot, cold, color — are not the permanent unchanging qualities of atoms. They are all the masks that atoms put on in different situations. And the unchanging qualities of atoms are basically three: their weight, their shape, and their size. That’s to the exclusion of everything else — they don’t have color, they don’t have smell.
Let me just say a sentence and you tell me whether you think it’s true or not: atoms and bodies have qualities. Some of those qualities are unchanging and we call them properties. Some of those qualities are changing and we call them accidents.
Martin:
I think it can be expressed something like that, yes. And coming back to the question of why this distinction matters: this is important for the explanatory power of atomism. In order to assign the reproducibility of things — the consistency in what we see in phenomena — we need to be able to use that as evidence for atomism. But that only works if there are fundamental properties of atoms which don’t change. If they could change, we would still have the problem of not being able to explain the repeatability of phenomena. But if there are these unchangeable properties attached to the atoms, then atomism gains its explanatory power for our phenomena.
Cassius:
No, I totally agree. What we’ve tried to be stressing in this discussion is not that we’re interested in atoms for the sake of being interested in atoms. We’re interested in atoms because of their explanatory power — to allow us to be confident that the universe is not operating because some god is creating either the consistency or the inconsistencies that we see. We have to have a theory that allows for both consistency and inconsistency without a supernatural dimension, and that’s what atomism provides.
Now, the next subheading that DeWitt picks out as significant is entitled “Gradations in the Atoms.” DeWitt says: “Once differences of size have been assumed, the question arises whether the differences in this regard are infinite or finite. If it should be assumed that the differences are infinite in number, then in the gradation downward from larger to smaller, the ultimate limit would be zero, which is equivalent to annihilation. If, on the contrary, in the gradation upward from smaller to larger, the differences should be assumed to be infinite, visible magnitudes would be reached. Even between these extremes, it is possible that the differences, if not infinite, should at least be innumerable.”
There are an infinite number of atoms, but an innumerable number of kinds of atoms. If you had an infinite number of kinds, you would have atoms so big that they would be the size of planets, and that’s a problem — no one has ever seen one. So there are gradations of size within limits, both small and large.
Let me also just mention — one of my favorite quotes on atomism from the ancient world. Before I get into it I have to say that John Tyndall’s Belfast Address goes into some detail on the history of these scientific issues and how they continued to inform the scientific debates of his own time in the nineteenth century. He gave a lot of credit to these early atomists for their proto-scientific endeavor and how it continued to bear fruit. Because they dealt with issues relating to religion, that lecture was highly, highly contentious and controversial in its own time. It’s certainly worth reading.
There was another book published in 1910 by George Santayana, a professor of philosophy at Harvard, called Three Philosophical Poets, and one of the poets he gives most consideration to is Lucretius. That essay has some interesting ideas, but he has this to say about atomism: “This double experience of mutation and recurrence, an experience at once sentimental and scientific, soon brought with it a very great thought — perhaps the greatest thought that mankind has ever hit upon, and which was the chief inspiration of Lucretius: it is that all we observe about us, and ourselves also, may be so many passing forms of a permanent substance.” He thought that the idea of atoms being permanent and unchanging, yet making up everything we see in nature — which is constantly changing in a variety of ways — was the greatest idea that mankind has ever hit upon. That’s a bold claim, but one I think is worthy of consideration, because of so many of the implications that we’ve been describing — as compared with the implications that come from other philosophies. And that’s pretty much the message of Carl Sagan’s episode seven of Cosmos as well: the Democritean-Epicurean view of the universe as natural and arising from atoms is basically the ultimate dividing line between the idealists — people who think there’s a spirit entrapped within the body, that we’re at war with the material world — and the Epicurean-Democritean view, that we are all naturally part of this universe.
We’ll divide this chapter up into at least two sections and move next week into motion, and specifically address the swerve in some detail, since that’s such a famous aspect of Epicurean philosophy. Let’s bring today’s episode to a close. Martin, any thoughts from you as we wrap up today?
Martin:
I have nothing to add.
Cassius:
Callistheni, thanks for bringing up the issue of the Carl Sagan video, because that’s a great introduction for people who are new to this topic. Joshua, thoughts for today?
Joshua:
I agree with what you just said, which is that some of the conclusions you derive from this stuff — some of the stuff doesn’t seem important, but the implications of it are really important. And some of the things that Plato said don’t seem important, but the implications of it are really important. And when you look at the implications, it turns out that one idea leads down a very different path than another idea, and that can tell you how you evaluate these different claims. There’s real importance here. I can talk for hours about this stuff.
Cassius:
Following up on what Joshua said a minute ago — one way I look at these things too is I don’t like to think that my opinions are arbitrary or just my opinion versus somebody else’s opinion. I like the important positions I take in life to have the idea that they’re based on something that is relatively firm and that you can have confidence in, not constantly changing. If you’re confronted with the supernatural view of the universe that Plato and many religions today present, you don’t like to think that it’s just “well, that’s their opinion and you have your different opinion and we all go different ways” — because the issues involved are very, very stark. Life and death in many cases. If you make the wrong people mad at you you’re going to end up dead in a super-religious society, and the reverse is true as well — people fight wars about issues of religion and ethics all the time. You don’t need to just drift through and be blown by the wind in any direction. Epicurus talks about it in terms of peace of mind, but if you want to have confidence of any kind in what you’re doing, you have to have an understanding of the way things are working. The epistemology — the canonics we discussed in the chapters for the last several weeks — is combined with our observations about the way the world is to lead us to a set of conclusions. It can be very daunting to face a large number of people who tell you that there’s basically a mystical foundation for the universe, and if you’re going to be able to stand up and have confidence in your own response to those assertions, you have to have an understanding of the way things operate that’s consistent with it.
Joshua:
I want to take that one step further, Cassius, because I mentioned a quote earlier today in which Saint Augustine says that the church cannot allow the spread of heresies or ideas contrary to Christian doctrine for the same reason that the state cannot allow the sale of poison bread. If you don’t want to live in that world — the world of Augustine and his false certainty — then you have to know where you stand on these issues. And to do that, you have to trace these ideas to their origin and to their conclusion. It seems to me it’s so important to do this and to continue doing this throughout your life. It’s just — apart from being very interesting — also very important. In order to unwind the truth of any situation and to get behind these assertions that are in many cases superficial and obviously lies, you have to have an understanding of the way you think truth really operates. And without that kind of a foundation, you’re just going to constantly be torn by fear, uncertainty, and doubt that prevent you from living the kind of life that you otherwise could.
Cassius:
Okay, let’s come back in a week. Please join us at the forum if you get a chance to ask questions or make comments about our discussions. We appreciate all the input we get, and we’ll be back to go further into the new physics. Thanks and bye.