LEDERMAN: Do you think we've gotten rid of superstition now? Have you met our creationists? Our animal rights extremists?
DEMOCRITUS: Here at Fermilab?
LEDERMAN: No, but not far away. But tell me, when did this earth, air, fire, and water idea come in?
DEMOCRITUS: Hold your horses. There were a couple of other guys before we get to that theory. Anaximander, for one. He was a young associate of Thales' in Miletus. Anaximander also earned his spurs doing practical things, such as constructing a map of the Black Sea for Milesian sailors. Like Thales, he sought a primary building block of matter, but he decided it couldn't be water.
LEDERMAN: Another great advance in Greek thinking, no doubt. What was his candidate, baklava?
DEMOCRITUS: Have your laugh. We'll get to your theories soon enough. Anaximander was another practical genius and, like his mentor Thales, he used his spare time to join in the philosophical debate. Anaximander's logic was fairly subtle. He saw the world as being composed of warring opposites—hot and cold, wet and dry. Water puts out fire; the sun dries up water, et cetera. Therefore the primary substance of the universe cannot be water or fire or anything characterized by one of these opposites. No symmetry there. And you know how we Greeks loved symmetry. For example, if all matter was originally water, as Thales said, then heat or fire could never come into being, since water does not generate fire but obliterates it.
LEDERMAN: Then what did he propose as the primary substance?
DEMOCRITUS: He called it the apeiron, meaning "without boundaries." This first state of matter was an undifferentiated mass of enormous, possibly infinite, proportions. It was the primitive "stuff," neutral between opposites. This idea had a deep influence on my own thinking.
LEDERMAN: So this apeiron was something like your a-tom—except that it was an infinite substance as opposed to an infinitesimal particle? Didn't this just confuse things?
DEMOCRITUS: NO, Anaximander was on to something. The apeiron was infinite, both in space and time, but it was also structureless; it had no component parts. It was nothing but apeiron through and through. And if you're going to decide on a primary substance, it had better have this quality. In fact, my point is to embarrass you by noting that after two thousand years, you are finally coming around to appreciating the prescience of my crowd. What Anaximander did was to invent the vacuum. I think your P. A. M. Dirac finally began to give the vacuum the properties it deserved in the 1920s. Anaxi's apeiron was the prototype of my own "void," a nothingness in which particles move. Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell called it aether.
LEDERMAN: But what about the stuff, matter?
DEMOCRITUS: Listen to this [pulls a parchment roll out of his toga, perches a pair of discount MagnaVision reading glasses on his nose]: Anaximander says, "It is neither water nor any other of the so-called elements, but a different substance which is boundless, from which they come into being all the heavens and the worlds within them. Things perish into those things out of which they have their being ... opposites are in the one and separated out." Now, I know you twentieth-century types are always talking about matter and antimatter created in the vacuum, also annihilating...
LEDERMAN: Sure, but...
DEMOCRITUS: When Anaximander says opposites were in the apeiron—call it a vacuum, or call it the aether—and were separated out, isn't that something like what you think?
LEDERMAN: Sort of, but I'm much more interested in what made Anaximander think these things.
DEMOCRITUS: Of course he didn't anticipate antimatter. But in a properly endowed vacuum, he thought that opposites could separate: hot and cold, wet and dry, sweet and sour. Today you add positive and negative, north and south. When they combine, they cancel their properties into the neutral apeiron. Isn't that neat?
LEDERMAN: How about democrat and republican? Was there a Greek named Republicas?
DEMOCRITUS: Very amusing. At least Anaximander attempted to explain the mechanism that creates diversity out of a primary element. And his theory led to a number of sub-beliefs, some of which you might even agree with. Anaximander believed, for example, that man evolved from lower animals, which in turn were descended from creatures in the sea. His greatest cosmological idea was to get rid of not only Atlas but even Thales' ocean that held up the earth. He knew you didn't need to hold up the earth. Picture the thing (not yet given spherical shape) suspended in infinite space. There is no place to go. Totally in accord with Newton's laws if, as these Greeks thought, there was nothing else. Anaximander also figured there had to be more than one world, or universe. In fact, he said there were an unlimited number of universes, all perishable, following one another in succession.
LEDERMAN: Like alternate universes on "Star Trek"?
DEMOCRITUS: Hold your commercials. The idea of innumerable worlds became very important to us atomists.
LEDERMAN: Wait a minute. I'm remembering something you wrote that gave me shivers in light of modern cosmology. I even memorized it. Let's see: "There are innumerable worlds of different sizes. In some there is neither sun nor moon, in others they are larger than in ours, and other worlds have more than one sun and more than one moon."
DEMOCRITUS: Yes, we Greeks held some ideas in common with your Captain Kirk. But we dressed a lot better. I'd rather compare my idea to the bubble universes that your inflationary cosmologists are publishing papers on these days.
LEDERMAN: That's really why I got spooked. Didn't one of your predecessors believe that air was the ultimate element?
DEMOCRITUS: You're thinking of Anaximenes, a younger associate of Anaximander's and the last of the Thales gang. He actually took a step backward from Anaximander and said there was a common primordial element, as Thales did—except Anaximenes said this element was air, not water.
LEDERMAN: He should have listened to his mentor; then he would have ruled out anything as mundane as air.
DEMOCRITUS: Yes, but Anaximenes did come up with a clever mechanism for explaining how various forms of matter are transformed from this primary substance. I understand from my readings that you're one of those experimentalists.
LEDERMAN: Yeah. You got a problem with that?
DEMOCRITUS: I've noticed your sarcasm toward so much of Greek theory. I suspect your prejudice comes from the fact that many of these ideas, while plausibly suggested by the world around us, do not lend themselves to incisive experimental verification.
LEDERMAN: True. Experimenters dearly love ideas that can be verified. It's how we make a living.
DEMOCRITUS: Then you may have more respect for Anaximenes, since his beliefs were based on observation. He theorized that the various elements of matter were separated out of air via condensation and rarefaction. Air can be reduced to moisture and vice versa. Heat and cold transform air into different substances. To demonstrate how heat is connected to rarefaction and cold to condensation, Anaximenes advised people to conduct this experiment: breathe out with your lips nearly closed, and the air will emerge cold. But if you open your mouth wide, your breath will be warmer.
LEDERMAN: Congress would love Anaximenes. His experiments are cheaper than mine. And all that hot air...
DEMOCRITUS: I get it, but I wanted to dispel your idea that we ancient Greeks never did any experiments. The main problem with thinkers such as Thales and Anaximenes was their belief that substances can be transformed: water can become earth; air can become fire. Can't happen. This snag in our early philosophy wasn't really addressed until two of my contemporaries came along—Parmenides and Empedocles.
LEDERMAN: Empedocles is the earth, air, et cetera guy, right? Remind me about Parmenides.
DEMOCRITUS: He is often called the father of idealism, since much of his thought was picked up by that idiot Plato, but in fact he was a hard-core materialist. He talked a lot about Being, but this Being was material. Essentially, Parmenides held that Being can neither come to be nor pass away. Matter doesn't just pop in and out of existence. It's there and we can't destroy it.
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nbsp; LEDERMAN: Let's go down to the accelerator and I'll show you how wrong he is. We pop matter in and out of existence all the time.
DEMOCRITUS: Okay, okay. But this is an important concept. Parmenides was embracing an idea that was dear to us Greeks: oneness. Wholeness. What exists, exists. It is complete and enduring. I suspect you and your colleagues also embrace unity.
LEDERMAN: Yes, it's an enduring and endearing concept. We strive for unity in our beliefs whenever we can. Grand Unification is one of our current obsessions.
DEMOCRITUS: And, in fact, you don't just pop new matter into existence by will alone. I believe you have to add energy to the process.
LEDERMAN: True, and I have the electric bill to prove it.
DEMOCRITUS: So, in a way, Parmenides wasn't that far off. If you include both matter and energy in what he calls Being, then he's right. It can neither come to be nor pass away, at least not in a total sort of way. And yet our senses tell another story. We see trees burn to the ground. The fire can then be destroyed by water. The hot air of summer can evaporate the water. Flowers appear, then die. It was Empedocles who saw a way around this apparent contradiction. He agreed with Parmenides that matter must be conserved, that it cannot appear or disappear willy-nilly. But he disagreed with Thales and Anaximenes that one kind of matter can become another. How, then, does one account for the constant change one sees around us? There are only four kinds of matter, said Empedocles. His famous earth, air, fire, and water. They do not change into other types of matter, but are unchangeable and ultimate particles, which form the concrete objects of the world.
LEDERMAN: Now you're talking.
DEMOCRITUS: Thought you'd like that. Objects come into being through the mingling of these elements, and they cease to be through the separation of elements. But the elements themselves—earth, air, fire, water—neither come into being nor pass away but remain unchanged. Obviously I disagree with him as to the identity of these particles, but in principle he made an important intellectual leap. There are only a few basic ingredients in the world, and you construct objects by mixing them together in a multitude of ways. For example, Empedocles said that bone is composed of two parts earth, two parts water, and four parts fire. How he came up with this recipe escapes me at the moment.
LEDERMAN: We tried the air-earth-fire-water mixture and all we got was hot, bubbling mud.
DEMOCRITUS: Leave it to a "modern" to bring the discussion down a notch.
LEDERMAN: What about forces? None of you Greeks seem to realize you need forces as well as particles.
DEMOCRITUS: I have my doubts, but Empedocles would agree. He saw that you needed forces to fuse these elements into other objects. He came up with two: love and strife—love to draw things together, strife to separate them. Not very scientific, perhaps, but don't the scientists in your age have a similar system of beliefs for the universe? A number of particles and a set of forces? Often given whimsical names?
LEDERMAN: In a way, yes. We have what we call the "standard model." It holds that everything we know about the universe can be explained by the interactions of a dozen particles and four forces.
DEMOCRITUS: There you go. Empedocles' world view doesn't sound all that different, does it? He said the universe could be explained with four particles and two forces. You've just added a couple more, but the structure of both models is similar, no?
LEDERMAN: Sure, but we don't go along with the content: fire, earth, strife...
DEMOCRITUS: Well, I suppose you have to show something for two thousand years of hard work. But, no, I don't hold with the content of Empedocles' theory either.
LEDERMAN: Then what do you believe in?
DEMOCRITUS: Ah, now we get down to business. The work of Parmenides and Empedocles set the stage for my own work. I believe in the a-tom, or atom, that which cannot be cut. The atom is the building block of the universe. All of matter is composed of various arrangements of atoms. It is the smallest thing in the universe.
LEDERMAN: You had the instruments necessary to find invisible objects in fifth-century-B.C. Greece?
DEMOCRITUS: Not exactly "find."
LEDERMAN: Then what?
DEMOCRITUS: Perhaps "discover" is a better word. I discovered the atom through Pure Reason.
LEDERMAN: What you're saying is that you just thought about it. You didn't bother to do any experiments.
DEMOCRITUS [gesturing to indicate the far reaches of the laboratory]: There are some experiments that the mind can do better than even the largest, most precise instrument.
LEDERMAN: What gave you the idea of atoms? It was, I must admit, a brilliant hypothesis. But it goes way beyond what went before.
DEMOCRITUS: Bread.
LEDERMAN: Bread? Someone paid you to come up with the idea?
DEMOCRITUS: Not that kind of bread. This was in the era before federal grants. I mean real bread. One day, during a prolonged fast, someone walked into my study carrying a loaf of bread just out of the oven. I knew it was bread before I saw it. I thought: some invisible essence of bread traveled ahead and reached my Grecian nose. I made a note about odors and thought about other "traveling essences." A small pool of water shrinks and eventually dries up. Why? How? Can invisible essences of water leap out of the pool and travel long distances like my warm bread? Lots of little things like that—you see, you think, you talk about it. My friend Leucippus and I argued for days and days, sometimes until the sun rose and our wives came after us with clubs. We finally decided that if each substance was made of atoms, invisible because they were too small for our human eyes, we would have too many different types: water atoms, iron atoms, daisy petal atoms, bee foreleg atoms—a system so ugly as to be un-Greek.
Then we got a better idea. Have only a few different styles of atoms, like smooth, rough, round, angular, and have a selected number of different shapes, but have an infinite supply of each kind. Then put them in empty space. (Boy, you should have seen all the beer we drank to understand empty space! How do you define "nothing at all"?) Let these atoms move about at random. Let them move incessantly, occasionally colliding, sometimes sticking and collecting together. Then one collection of atoms makes wine, another makes the glass in which it is served, ditto feta cheese, baklava, and olives.
LEDERMAN: Didn't Aristotle argue that these atoms should naturally fall?
DEMOCRITUS: That's his problem. Ever watch motes of dust dancing in a beam of sunlight that enters a darkened room? The dust moves in any and all directions, just like atoms.
LEDERMAN: HOW did you imagine the indivisibility of atoms?
DEMOCRITUS: It took place in the mind. Imagine a knife of polished bronze. We ask our servant to spend his entire day honing the edge until it can sever a blade of grass held at its distant end. Finally satisfied, I begin to act. I take a piece of cheese...
LEDERMAN: Feta?
DEMOCRITUS: Of course. Then I cut the cheese in two with the knife. Then again and again, until I have a speck of cheese too small to hold. Now I think that if I myself were much smaller, the speck would appear large to me, and I could hold it, and with my knife honed even sharper, cut it again and again. Now I must again, in my mind, reduce myself to the size of a pimple on an ant's nose. I continue cutting the cheese. If I repeat the process enough, do you know what the result will be?
LEDERMAN: Sure, a feta-compli.
DEMOCRITUS [groans]: Even the Laughing Philosopher chokes on a lousy pun. If I may continue ... Eventually I will come to a piece of stuff so hard that it can never be cut, even given enough servants to sharpen the knife for a hundred years. I believe the smallest object cannot be cut as a matter of necessity. It is unthinkable that we can continue to cut forever, as some so-called learned philosophers say. Now I have the ultimate uncuttable object, the atomos.
LEDERMAN: And you came up with this idea in fifth-century-B.C. Greece?
DEMOCRITUS: Yes, why? Your ideas today are so much different?
LEDERMAN: Well, actually, they're pretty much the same
. It's just that we hate the fact that you published first.
DEMOCRITUS: However, what you scientists call the atom is not what I had in mind.
LEDERMAN: Oh, that's the fault of some nineteenth-century chemists. No, nobody today believes the atoms on the periodic table of the elements—hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, et cetera—are indivisible objects. Those guys jumped the gun. They thought they had found your atoms. But they were still many cuts away from the ultimate cheese.
DEMOCRITUS: And today you have found it?
LEDERMAN: Found them. There's more than one.
The God Particle Page 6
