The Man Who Laughed at Everything

Democritus of Abdera proposed, around 400 BC, that all matter in the universe was composed of tiny, indivisible particles moving through empty space. He called them atomos. He had no microscope, no laboratory, no experiments. He worked it out by thinking.

He was right. It took twenty-four centuries for anyone to prove it.

In the meantime, he laughed. At funerals. At elections. At men scrambling for money and power and fame. He laughed so constantly, and at such a wide range of human activity, that his fellow citizens concluded he had gone insane and summoned Hippocrates — the most famous physician in the ancient world — to come and cure him. Hippocrates examined Democritus, listened to his reasoning, and reportedly concluded that the citizens were the problem, not the philosopher.

He once visited Athens, the intellectual capital of the world, and later remarked that nobody there knew who he was. Plato, who almost certainly read his work, never mentioned him by name. Plato did, however, try to have his books burned.

Time finished what Plato started. Every word Plato wrote has survived intact for over two thousand years. Of Democritus's seventy-three works, not one remains whole. A few hundred fragments. That's all.

The man who correctly described the structure of all matter left us almost nothing.

Except the atoms.