Atomic Timeline Webquest

Susan Chai, Michael Ginevsky, Candy Li, Clara Tsui

Indivisible, solid sphere model

Greek thinker Leucippus and his pupil, Democritus, were the first people to define an atom. Their philosophical concept of an atom stated that an atom is “solid, small, and impenetrably hard”. They are described as “indivisible” (the Greek word for ‘uncuttable’), “eternal, homogeneous and identical in substance” and there are a “finite” amount of types. The atoms have difference shapes and have different behavioral properties so the world as we know is a result of the “collisions” of such atoms. The atoms were believed to have traveled in a void and moved independently. The theory was also known as ‘atomism’, and although it was accepted for a time Aristotle and Plato rejected the idea of the existence of the void and “self-moving [atoms]”, although the idea that the atom exists as the smallest particle of matter was undisputed by Aristotle.