Redefining Reality - The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science

Although physicists at the end of the 19 th and the beginning of the 20 th
centuries were comfortable with the atomic hypothesis, chemists
were not. Physicists since Newton had used the concept of a point
mass, and atoms seemed to be a realization of it. For chemists, in contrast,
the idea that matter is composed of invisible little balls seemed to take
chemistry away from its place as a proper empirical science. By the start of
the 20 th century, the observable evidence, however, forced chemists to agree
that matter is made of atoms.
The story of the atomic hypothesis at the turn of the 20 th century is
communities with contrasting paradigms.
Physicists are famous for their simplifying assumptions. This is not
a weakness in physics but a necessity.
When we think of two things bouncing off each other, say,
billiard balls on a pool table, the case is complicated if the
ball has shape and size, especially if the shape is not perfectly
round. Thus, physicists begin by considering the object as a
point mass, that is, a thing with no shape and all of its mass
focused at a single dimensionless point. Once that case is
understood, the mass is given a shape, generally, a sphere.
Because the point mass is a standard way of thinking in
physics, physicists were naturally comfortable with the atomic
hypothesis—that the world is, at its most basic level, just a
collection of joined point masses.
Chemists, in contrast, largely hated the idea of atoms, in part
because of the historical link between chemistry and the practice
of alchemy.
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