
Is atomic theory the most important idea in human history? - oska
https://aeon.co/essays/is-atomic-theory-the-most-important-idea-in-human-history
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imranq
"If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and
only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what
statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it
is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it)
that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in
perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart,
but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you
will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just
a little imagination and thinking are applied."

\- RP Feynman, Vol I FLP

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sfilargi
I think in that event, teaching them how to fish would be more important than
giving them a fish.

My suggestion would be something that would promote free thought. "All men are
equal and thought, ideas, and speech should never be punished" or something
along these lines.

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riffraff
while I obviously agree those are important ideas, a lot of our knowledge in
"science" was done during times when this didn't apply, so I feel like free
thought/equality is something that arises naturally as science marches on.

Other than the already mentioned experimental method, IMO the most efficient
idea (which also would end up encouraging free thought) would be: "spread
knowledge, build libraries, and don't burn books".

~~~
elihu
Perhaps simply the idea that knowledge could be transcribed onto physical
objects and conveyed to other people across intervening time and distance
would be a good candidate as the most important idea in human history?

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austinl
I just read two books that I thought would be unrelated, but ended up being
very related in a way that was fascinating to read the two in tandem — The
Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt, and The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard
Rhodes.

The Swerve is about Epicurus and Lucretius — who both helped popularize
atomism 2000+ years ago. I never thought much of the philosophical
implications of the world being made of up small, somewhat interchangeable
parts — but this idea was at the core of Epicureanism, and had many
implications.

If you're interested in learning more about the history of atomic theory, I'd
highly recommend The Making of the Atomic Bomb.

It goes through the general history of science from the 1890s to the 1950s.
There are brief biographies of people who played an important role — Ernest
Rutherford, Enrico Fermi, Niels Bohr, and Albert Einstein (to name a few).
Those were exciting times to be a physicist.

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13707734-the-
swerve](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13707734-the-swerve)

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16884.The_Making_of_the_...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16884.The_Making_of_the_Atomic_Bomb)

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stcredzero
_The Making of the Atomic Bomb_ by Richard Rhodes.

A very, very good book. Also, mention should be made of Leo Szilard who was
the first person that we know of to be aware of the nuclear chain reaction.

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rahelzer
The general principle that any problem you face, no matter how big, can be
broken down into smaller and easier to solve problems, recursively, is the
most important idea in human history.

Atomic theory is just a special case of this insight.

~~~
Slackwise
More succinctly, this is Reductionism:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism#Theory_reductioni...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism#Theory_reductionism)

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rahelzer
There is a subtle difference between this and reductionism. Suppose your big
problem is you are hungry. You could break this big problem into little
problems in many different ways, e.g. [drive to McDonalds, get food], or [go
to fridge, eat leftovers], etc.

Either way, you have _solved_ your original problem, but you haven't _reduced_
your original problem. Your original problem was not that you had to go to
Mcdonalds, nor was it that you had to got o the fridge. Your original problem
was that you were hungry, which is distinct from the solutions.

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kabdib
Microorganisms as a source of disease seems a pretty important concept; we
take it for granted now, but ignorance of this was a huge deal up until about
150 years ago.

~~~
igravious
I think you're right. I think that _is_ a more important concept.

Why?

Because it does many things at once.

1) Establishes natural biological causes for the transmission of diseases,
thereby supplanting all sorts of other theories like hex-casting, bad omens,
malevolent deities, and so on and so on

2) It says that there are things that can't be seen with the naked eye that
share our biology, which opens the door to atomism anyway

3) It says that biology shares a common substrate which is a useful concept in
itself

4) And practically speaking, if the information that microorganisms are
disease vectors is coupled with the knowledge that certain routines such as
cleaning and washing prevent said transmission and that other substances act
as anti-bacterial agents then human and animal welfare is promoted and
suffering is reduced allowing for more rapid societal progress

Therefore, I agree with you.

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johndoe4589
> That the world is not solid but made up of tiny particles

I'm not sure that's how most people understand it. "Tiny particles" still
maintains the notion for most of us of a physical / materialist world when
things truly exist, with some kind of an inner essence or structure or core,
which we would associate to these "particles".

Se we think that a tree, or a car, is a bunch of those particles. And that we
too are a bunch of particles. It doesn't shake the notion of physical
existence so it has no profound impact on the way we see ourselves and the
world and the way we behave.

It's very hard to let go of this view though. A very healthy and middle step
that I wish was taught everywhere is to start looking at the world as an
interdependent system, including us, and understand nothing truly exists in
isolation.

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pklausler
More important, I think, is the concept of objective, empirical, peer-reviewed
science. Democritus made up the concept of atoms, but it took 2,000 years
before science made them real in Einstein's paper on the Brownian motion.

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tabeth
I doubt anything will beat property ownership, agriculture, and money, in that
order. I reckon if you remove those these three things and wait a year and the
human race will be unrecognizable from a cultural point of view.

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kahrkunne
I think property ownership is an instinctive trait. Just like you don't have
to tell a cat to piss against all the trees to assert ownership, you probably
don't need to tell people about property.

I guess we could tell them "communism is bad" but that's a bit too cold war
even for me.

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tabeth
Is property ownership instinctive? I'd definitely agree that [usage] is
instinctive, in that one may want to use something without interruption or
threat of having it taken away during usage. However, the idea that one needs
to own something after it has been used, no longer needs to be used, or simply
is no longer in use seems interesting.

Maybe I'm too idealistic, but I could imagine a society where everything is
communal. I just think we started off in a way that would make it too
difficult to transition to that now (too many people have too much to lose).

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laughingman1234
Can we somehow tilt the balance by encouraging more Coops to form etc? I too
think society where everything is communal is a worthy goal

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stcredzero
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons)

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crottypeter
No. Toilets are the most important idea.

I am a physicist by education and value the subject highly but let's not take
things for granted. Where would we be without toilets? In the middle of a pile
of ...

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babyrainbow
Speaking of Toilets, I think all European closets can burn in hell.

Please give me back my Indian closet. Why o Why did this abomination of an
idea that is the european closet become so popular?

Is it just out of a need to feel "civilized" by sitting instead of squatting,
while taking a shit?

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iklos55
hahaha wtf

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babyrainbow
Do you know why European closets are better?

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iklos55
Well to me, your way of taking a dump seems backwards and barbaric. Does not
mean my way of doing is the correct one. I'm not insulting, just saying that
there are cultural preferences.

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raattgift
Durable information storage. Mass distribution of information. Universal
literacy.

Too little of what was written in antiquity was accessible to the vast
majority of people, and too much of it was lost.

We're left with fragments of early mathematical, literary, and historical
works and our attempts to figure out what ordinary people were up to are
almost stuck with just graffiti on the few hard surfaces that have survived.

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unknown_apostle
For all the greatness of Democrites in so many ways, I'm always a bit wary of
reading too much in classic thinkers predating what we now know about the
physical sciences. Without experiments, introducing the concept of atoms was
speculative. Conversely, even today an improved understanding of how matter
actually behaves at very small scales, still doesn't make the case for atheism
or materialism.

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hutzlibu
" Atoms are indivisible; they are the elementary grains of reality, which
cannot be further subdivided, and everything is made of them"

Well, it would be ironic, if human kind wipes itself out in a nuclear
holocaust (which means dividing too much "undividable" atoms) and future life
finds about our fate and our "most important idea"...

I would vote for Relativism instead.

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WalterBright
No. It's the scientific method - by which truth can be separated from crap.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method)

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timnic
An (maybe) interesting fact is, that in Germany the notion „scientific
method“, to my knowledge, is largely unknown. For example, there is no link in
the english wikipedia entry you have given to the german wikipedia. When I
studied physics in Germany no one ever used that term.

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di4na
Same in most place in Europe. This is mainly an American name. Because it is
_not_ how science works.

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tdfx
Could you elaborate? As an American who hasn't traveled as much as he should,
this came as a surprise to me. I always assumed the "scientific method" that
we were taught in school was some universal international standard.

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timnic
When I was in school "scientific method" wasn’t teached as a separate topic,
but more like the result of "osmosis": you are given many examples of how
science works and you somehow learn by this the process of science itself. Ok,
you are taught how do do proofs in maths and how to do experiments, but no
direct reference to a concept like the scientific method.

~~~
metaxy2
In the US we do teach _about_ the scientific method as an abstract idea,
especially in grade school and high school, but working scientists mostly
learn by osmosis here as well. I'd say it serves a role similar to the way
finance guys use math models, or musicians use advanced music theory: an
idealized description of the way things are done on the ground that you study
in school, but rarely use day to day.

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amelius
> Is atomic theory the most important idea in human history?

One might ask if the theory is a correct one though. If you look for something
hard enough, chances are you will find it. Perhaps a more realistic model for
the universe is as a continuous blob of stuff, with some more condensed clumps
that we now call atoms.

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lutusp
Given the presumed goal to convey as much as possible in as few words as
possible, to me it's a tie between atomic theory and evolution. Maybe we could
cram both into a carefully worded sentence.

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garyrob
If the human race ends in nuclear holocaust, then yes, it was.

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sauronlord
No, it is antibiotics and the germ theory of disease.

If it weren't for them, we wouldn't be here to ask the question.

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lngnmn
According to R. Feynman - yes.

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bobthechef
What an awful article, elementary school quality stuff drawn from mediocre
school texts. It is littered with historical inaccuracies, caricatures of
philosophical positions, and maudlin sentiments and hagiographic bromides that
contradict the very atomism that it celebrates (such at the addled paeans to
Epicurus or delusional hymns to some incoherent New Age-y "unity"). Democritus
himself was not blind to at least a couple of the problems with his atomism.
Why is there no mention of his own objections or the objections of others?
Furthermore, materialism and rationalism are a highly problematic positions
with serious objections against them. Quoting philosophical ignoramuses (and
that's putting it nicely) is doing this author no favors.

Atomism is NOT the most important idea in history. Try getting a real
education, dear author. You make a mockery of yourself.

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sunstone
Beyond animal instincts I would put language, money and the atmoic theory as
most important in that order.

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posterboy
tl;dr: no

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Fraterkes
I'm pretty sure love is.

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unixhero
I vote for the special and the general theory of relativity.

~~~
raattgift
> I vote for the special and the general theory of relativity.

Out of curiosity, why?

I can think of several possible reasons, but I'd like to know yours.

FWIW, I'm inclined to agree with Rovelli about atomism when "atoms" in the
most general sense of the smallest particles are like-for-like substitutable.
Following from that, the two theories of relativity set conditions on when
"like-for-like substitution" is exact and when it's approximate.

In other words, I think that atomism is more reductive than SR or GR even in
their modern formulations, and reductive materialism is a crucial tool in a
scientist's mental toolbox. (One could also snarkily say that atoms and
subatomic particles are the "material" without which SR and GR are effectively
useless and even justify that via the hole argument.)

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losteverything
To answer the question: not sure.

Given: an "idea" is stateless. It's any expressed human thought.

Thus, I would say "faith" is the single idea. E.g. faith in afterlife.

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debt
Quantum phenomena is definitely complex but idk if it's the most important
idea.

Human consciousness seems more interesting. Is consciousness related to
quantum phenomena or can be measured on that level at all?

~~~
erikpukinskis
I think it's about as important now as the clockwork was in the 19th, or the
computer was in the 20th century. We make these fundamental discoveries about
how the world works, and then there is a period where that metaphor is used to
gain subatantially new understandings in every field.

We are just starting to absorb quantum ideas: non-causality, waveform
collapse, etc. We'll spend the next decades seeing how those ideas can change
our understanding of all kinds of things. Then the metaphor will go in our
knapsack with all the others.

In that sense you are both right. He's right that the quantum metaphors are
very important right now. You're right that they are just some of many.

You're probably more right than he is though. Most important "of all time" is
almost certainly wrong.

