Lucretius

Infrared radiation was discovered by Herschel [58] in 1800, using a mercury thermometer to detect sunlight dispersed by a prism. However, the Latin poet Lucretius in his De rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things, about 50 BC) clearly showed a clear feeling of the infrared radiation. Of course Lucretius s terminology was far from the modern one, and he had no thermometer at his disposal ... 

Science is largely about the world around us, about reality insofar as we can grasp it. But since the days of Euclid, and particularly since Lucretius, scientists have constructed models - that is, scientists have made simulacra, either conceptual or physical, in an... 

The fundamental difference between ancient and modern science is not at all in the field of theory. Sir William Thomson was just as metaphysical as Pythagoras or Raymond Lully, and Lucretius quite as materialistic as Ernst Haeckel or Buchner. 

So much may be obtained by changing only the component arrangement) (Titus Lucretius Caro On the nature of Things )... 

Lucretius, De Rerum Natura. [English translation The Nature of Things], W.W. Norton Co., New York, 1977. 

GEN.55.1. Prigogine, I. Stengers, et S. Pahaut, La dynamique, de Leibniz a Lucrece (Dynamics, from Leibniz to Lucretius), Critique 35, 35—55 (1979). 

GEN.84. I. Prigogine and I. Stengers, Dynamics from Leibniz to Lucretius (Dynamics, from Leibniz to Lucretius), postface to the book Hermes of M. Serres, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1982, pp. 137-155. 

Snch was once the good fortnne of the atom. There were secret bonds and nnclear wedlock, and behold The whole history of time is thrown open for all to see. Lucretius sings once more and snpemovas burst out laughing in the face of the Universe. 

Do what we will, we always, more or less, construct our own universe. The history of science may be described as the history of the attempts, and the failures, of men "to see things as they are." "Nothing is harder," said the Latin poet Lucretius, "than to separate manifest facts from doubtful, what straightway the mind adds on of itself."... 

Only fragments of the writings of the founders of the atomic theory have come to us. The views of these philosophers are preserved, and doubtless amplified and modified, in a Latin poem. Concerning the Nature of Things, written by Lucretius, who was bom a century before the beginning of our era. Let us consider the picture given in that poem of... 

Lucretius pictured the atoms of things as like the things perceived by the senses he said that atoms of different kinds have different shapes, but the number of shapes is finite, because there is a limit to the number of different things we see, smell, taste, and handle he implies, although I do not think he definitely asserts, that all atoms of one kind are identical in every respect. 

Lucretius pictured a solid substance as a vast number of atoms squeezed closely together, a liquid as composed of not so many atoms less tightly packed, and a gas as a comparatively small number of atoms with considerable freedom of motion. Essentially the same picture is presented by the molecular theory of to-day. 

To meet the objection that atoms are invisible, and therefore cannot exist, Lucretius enumerates many things we cannot see although we know they exist. No one doubts the existence of winds, heat, cold and smells yet no one has seen the wind, or heat, or cold, or a smell. Clothes become moist when hung near the sea, and dry when spread in the sunshine but no one has seen the moisture entering or leaving the clothes. A pavement trodden by many feet is worn away but the minute particles are removed without our eyes being able to see them. 

The ancient atomists distinguished the essential properties of things from their accidental features. The former cannot be removed, Lucretius said, without "utter destruction accompanying the severance" the latter may be altered "while the nature of the thing remains unharmed." As examples of essential properties, Lucretius mentions "the weight of a stone, the heat of fire, the fluidity of water." Such things as liberty, war, slavery, riches, poverty, and the like, were accounted accidents. Time also was said to be an accident it "exists not by itself but simply from the things which happen, the sense apprehends what has been done in time past, as well as what is present, and what is to follow after."... 

Lucretius. On the Nature of the Universe. Harmondsworth Penguin, 1970. ) Lulle, Raimundus. Opera. Strassbourg, 1651. 

The dissertation begins with an appropriate quotation from Lucretius and a review of the researches of Black and of Cavendish on fixed air. Rutherford then described his own experiments in which he had found that a mouse, left in a confined volume of atmospheric air until it died, had consumed Via of the air, and that treatment of the remaining air with alkali had caused it to lose one-eleventh of its volume. He found... 

Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Caras, 99 BCE - 55 CE) of Rome wrote a poem, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) (24) in which he described the atomic theory of Epicums of Samos (342-271 BCE). For Epicurus, atoms were indivisible, invisible, and indestmctible, and they differ in size, shape and weight. He believed that a void exists because there can be no motion of the atoms without it. The motions of atoms included the downward motion of free atoms because of their weight, swerve, the deviation of atomic motion from straight downward paths, and blow, which results from collisions and motion in compoimd bodies. Lucretius called atoms poppy seeds, bodies, principals, and shapes (25). 

In the early fifteenth century (1417 CE), De Rerum Natura by Lucretius was rediscovered. It was printed fifty-six years later in 1473 CE reintroducing the Epicurian concept of the atom and void to the western world (55). 

There s nothing facetions in the way that Lucretius Imagined the chaos to quiver ... 

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