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The discovery of the atom was more than1000 years journey that hasn't reached an end, so far!
Around440 BCE—that’s over2,450 years ago—Greek philosophers tried to understand the nature of the universe. They didn’t do much in the way of experiments, but they did ask a lot of questions and debate answers. Two of these philosophers, a man named Democritus and his teacher, Leucippus, asked what would happen if you cut a block of silver in half, then cut the half in half, and just kept doing this. They thought that eventually you would get to the smallest particle of silver, which couldn’t be cut anymore, and they called those particles atoms.
Atom is Greek for something that cannot be divided.
They also said that those atoms are always moving, and because they need space to move in, there must also be empty space, or a void. So far, so good. But according to Democritus and Leucippus, there was an infinite variety of atoms, so a tree was made of completely different stuff than air.
Of course, not everyone agreed with them.
Aristotle was a brilliant Greek philosopher who contributed much to scientific understanding, but he got some things wrong too when it came to atoms. He said that if you kept dividing silver, you would never finish, so there couldn’t be any such thing as an atom.
He and other Greek philosophers developed the idea that all matter was made of four elements—earth, air, water, and fire—and these elements could be changed from one into another. Even though Aristotle had the number of elements wrong (4), he had the right idea about a relatively small number of elements combining in different ways to make up all matter.
More than1000 years later! These3 (not4 elements!) turned out to be electrons, neutrons & protons!
Special and general relativity, the electric engine and many more.
There are many examples to show that discovery of a theory took a long time to find its application.
Electromagnetism, electromagnetic induction, etc., took a long time to produce electric motor and generator.
