Lucretius, Man Of Modern Mystery

[Meshuga]

I heard this piece today on NPR's morning edition:

...One day, {Stephen Greenblatt} was standing in the campus book store, and there, in a bin, selling for ten cents (good price, even in 1961) he noticed a thin, little volume called On the Nature of Things, by a Roman writer named Lucretius.

When he opened it, he found a description of how the universe came to be. Because Lucretius lived a couple of generations before the birth of Jesus, Stephen was expecting a tale of how gods, goddesses, earth, air, fire and water and an assortment of miracles created everything we see, but as he turned the pages, he says "his jaw dropped" and "his head began to burst open," because Lucretius' creation story doesn't feel remotely ancient. First of all, it's a radically secular account, ignoring gods, goddesses, heaven, hell, life after death, and intelligent design, but more surprising, its logic is eerily, almost spookily modern.

As Greenblatt describes it, Lucretius (borrowing from Democritus and others), says the universe is made of an infinite number of atoms "moving randomly through space, like dust motes in a sunbeam, colliding, hooking together, forming complex structures, breaking apart again, in a ceaseless process of creation and destruction. There is no escape from this process. ... There is no master plan, no divine architect, no intelligent design.

All things, including the species to which you belong, have evolved over vast stretches of time. The evolution is random, though in the case of living organisms, it involves a principle of natural selection. That is, species that are suited to survive and to reproduce successfully, endure, at least for a time; those that are not so well suited, die off quickly. But nothing ... lasts forever. Only the atoms are immortal."

It's worth a listen by going to:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/09/19/140533195/lucretius-man-of-modern-mystery?ps=cprs

[rug]

1. De Rerum Natura is available online.

http://classics.mit.edu/Carus/nature_things.html

[pansypoo53219]

2. AHA! i was right. i smelled democritus.

and NO, i never took a philosophy class, i was just astounded by him when i read his bio in my 1891 encyclopedia britannica(GREAT bathroom reading!) and later found him mentined in my 1912 children's book of knowledge book(1 of 20+). YES. I HAVE TOO MANY BOOKS. but i find them for great prices at estate sales. now, how am i gonna find this one?

[Odin2005]

3. That's one of my favorite classical texts

[tama]

4. Ancient atomists

Democritus, Epicuros, Lucretius. Modern science would identify indivisible atoms of Greek atomists as Planck scales or quanta. Greek atomists answered to the body-mind problem by saying that mental movements consist of finer grade atoms than material movements. Maybe that could be interpreted as the "Other side" of Planck barrier of measurability?

No matter what (pun intended), it still seems to me that Plato has the final say, "atoms" are just mathematical formulations and their statistical interactions ("shut up and calculate") - and still no idea how mass emerges and what is gravity (at least in the mainstream science, who knows what's happening in the fringes), how to put together atomistic quanta and continuum, question that bothered Einstein to no end (cf. Achilleus and tortoise etc.).

Point is, the underlying philosophical problems of modern science are still very much the same ones that Greeks had.