Atomic Pioneers ----- From Ancient Greece to the 19th Century

Chapter - 4

LEUCIPPUS

Leucippus (loo-sip'us) was the world's first actual atomist. The date and place of his birth and death are unknown, but he flourished in Mietus and Abdera, Thrace around 450 b. C. 

Biographical Details 

Little is known of Leucippus. He probably studied under Zeno in Elea. Zeno presented Greek thinkers with paradoxes caused by the assumption that time and space were infinitely divisible. 

In trying to avoid these paradoxes, Leucippus and his pupils searched for the indivisibility of matter. They believed they found it in the idea of the atom, out of which all matter was composed. 

Leucippus founded his own school in Abdera.

 Scientific Achievement 

Called the inventor of atomism, Leucippus was the first to state the rule of causality: "Nothing happens without reason; everything has a cause is the result of necessity."

This principle of causation, a basic idea of physics, made possible the idea of a mechanistic world, where matter could be conceived in terms of simpler elements composed of atoms. 

Contribution if Atomic Science 

Leucippus' work was overshadowed by his students. It was Democritus who took these basic ideas and developed them into a consistent explanation of the physics.