I didn’t realize the religious movements of Epicurus and Christ got started at essentially the same time. It makes me wonder what was going on in India where the similarly humanistic, inward-looking movement of Buddhism got underway 500 years earlier.

I’m super impressed that Democritus and Epicurus considered matter to be “quantized,” as it were, in the form of atoms, (now particles) centuries before these materialistic quanta could be verified . . . and very impressed they understood that without the “swerve of atoms,” as they put it, nothing at all could “happen” (or, change). I’m sure it felt extraordinary to have such thoughts at that time! One can’t help but see a parallel to the past ninety years in which we consider a similarly quantized space to host those same particles, and I sure hope it won’t take another twenty centuries before we can positively confirm or reject this idea.

Thanks, Steve, for another thought-provoking piece.