FUTURE SHOCK THE THIRD WAVE

THE THIRD WAVE

 

defined as a line that had been chopped into such short segments that it could no longer be subdivided. In India, too, the theory of the atom or irreducible unit of reality cropped up not long after the time of Christ. In ancient Rome the poet Lucretius expounded the atomist philosophy. Nevertheless, this image of matter remained a minority view, often derided or neglected.
It was not until the dawn of the Second Wave era that atomism became a dominating idea as several streams of intermingling influences converged to revolutionize our conception of matter.

In the middle of the seventeenth century a French abbe” named Pierre Gassendi, an astronomer and philosopher at the Royal College in Paris, began arguing that matter must consist of ultra-small corpuscula. Influenced by Lucretius, Gassendi became so forceful an advocate of the atomic view of matter that his ideas soon crossed the English Channel and reached Robert Boyle, a young scientist studying the compressibility of gas. Boyle transferred the idea of atomism from speculative theory into the laboratory and concluded that even air itself was composed of tiny particles. Six years after Gassendi’s death, Boyle published a treatise arguing that any substance—earth, for example—that could be broken down into simpler substances is not, and could not be, an element.

Meanwhile, Rene” Descartes, a Jesuit-trained mathematician whom Gassendi criticized, contended that reality could only be understood by breaking it down into smaller and smaller bits. In his own words, it was necessary “to divide each of the difficulties under examination into as many parts as possible.” Side by side, therefore, as the Second Wave began its surge, philosophical atomism advanced with physical atomism.

Here was a deliberate assault on the notion of oneness—an assault promptly joined by wave after wave of scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers who proceeded to break the universe into even smaller fragments, with exciting results. Once Descartes published his Discourse on Method, writes the microbiologist Rene Dubos, “innumerable discoveries immediately emerged from its application to medicine.” In chemistry and other fields the combination of atomic theory and Descartes’s atomic method brought startling breakthroughs. By the mid-1700’s the notion that the universe consisted of independent separable parts and subparts was itself conventional wisdom—part of the emerging indust-reality.

 

 

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