Democritus of Abdera ruled in the 5th century BC. C. that in the Universe, atoms and vacuum were everything. The rest, he added, was just opinion. Those indivisible corpuscles were strikingly similar to those that, more than two millennia later, John Dalton would postulate in modern atomic theory as a solution to the problem of conservation of mass and the constant proportions in which the newly discovered elements were combined in other puzzles . How did the Greek find out by himself what others only came up with after countless failed experiments and wrong theories in long waking hours? Easy. He did not find out. You guessed it.
