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Updated: June 4, 2025
When experiment shall have demonstrated that the Daltonian atom is a compound, and that in truth there is but a single true atom, which, combining with its fellows perhaps in varying numbers and in different special relations, produces the Daltonian atoms, then the philosophical theory of monism will have the experimental warrant which to-day it lacks; then we shall be a step nearer to the atom of Democritus in one direction, a step farther away in the other.
So, too, of the atom of silver, or zinc, or sodium in short, of each and every one of the seventy-odd elements. There are, indeed, as we shall see, experiments that suggest the dissolution of the atom that suggest, in short, that the Daltonian atom is misnamed, being a structure that may, under certain conditions, be broken asunder.
All the true atoms making up that element may then properly be said to have the same quality, but none the less will it remain true that the combinations of that element that go to make up the different Daltonian atoms differ from one another in quality in precisely the same sense in which such tangible substances as gold, and oxygen, and mercury, and diamonds differ from one another.
If any such change did actually take place it would mean that the conception of the Daltonian atom as the ultimate particle of matter is definitively challenged from a new direction. This is precisely what has taken place. In July of 1903 Sir William Ramsay and Mr.
It owed a debt of gratitude to Democritus for supplying it the word, but it somewhat overpaid the debt in too closely linking the new meaning of the word with its old original one. For, let it be clearly understood, the Daltonian atom is not precisely comparable with the atom of Democritus.
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