I mean, that whole difference, by the way, between Democritus and then Thomas Norton is a couple of thousand years is because the great experts of the day, the original groves of academe, were Plato and Aristotle, and they had a different theory. And so as he explained, all matter was eventually reducible to discrete, small particles or atomos.įLATOW: And Thomas Norton, he wrote a book called "Ordinal of Alchemy" in 1477. And there was a brilliant philosopher named Democritus, and he proposed the Greek word atomos, which means uncuttable. And you know, Sir Isaac Newton thought it was a Phoenician named Moses the Phoenician from the 13th century B.C., who we(ph) also link to the real Moses or the Moses of Charlton Heston fame.īut when it comes to the word atom, we have to go to ancient Greece of 400 B.C. Now, there are some people who think that Indian Jainism clerics may have come up with the idea of indivisible units comprising matter. MARKEL: Well, in the English - before the English language, it's actually a Greek term. Not the guy Adam, but the concept, atom.įLATOW: Or in New York we'd spell it A-D-E-M here.įLATOW: Who first coined the word atom in the English language? Markel is professor of the history of medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and director of the Center for the History of Medicine there. With these 26 magic symbols, however, millions of words are written every day.Īnd that can only mean it's time for this month's episode of Science Diction, where we talk about the history of scientific words with my guest, Howard Markel. Unidentified Man: The alphabet has only 26 letters.
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