Lucretius was a Roman poet and philospher born in 94 BC. He wrote a six volume work called De Rerum Natura or On the nature of things, written in dactylic hexameter and known to detail the main tenants of Epicureanism. It’s Book II has this passage in a section known as ‘The Dance of Atoms’.
All bodies of matter are in motion. To understand this best,
Remember that the atoms do not have a place to rest,
And there’s no bottom to the universe, since Space does not
Have limits, but is endless. As I have already taught
And proved with reason irrefutable, it opens wide
And far in all directions, measureless on every side.
And therefore it is obvious no respite’s ever given
To atoms through the fathomless void but, rather, they are driven
By sundry restless motions. After colliding some will leap
Great intervals apart, while others harried by blows will keep
In a narrow space. Those atoms that are bound together tight,
When they collide with something, their recoil is only slight
Since they are tangled up in their own intricate formation:
Such are the particles that form the sturdy roots of stone,
And make up savage iron and other substances of this kind.
Of the other particles drifting through the vast deep, we find
A few leap far apart and bounce a long way back again,
Providing us with thin air and the shining of the sun.
And many more besides stray through the void, either out cast
From combinations, or which alliances could not hold fast
In harmonious motions.
There’s a model, you should realize,A paradigm of this that’s dancing right before your eyes -
For look well when you let the sun peep in a shuttered room
Pouring forth the brilliance of its beams into the gloom,
And you’ll see myriads of motes all moving many ways
Throughout the void and intermingling in the golden rays
As if in everlasting struggle, battling in troops,
Ceaselessly separating and regathering in groups.
From this you can imagine all the motions that take place
Among the atoms that are tossed about in empty space.
For to a certain extent, it’s possible for us to trace
Greater things from trivial examples, and discern
In them the trail of knowledge. Another reason you should turn
You attention to the motes that drift and tumble in the light:
Such turmoil means that there are secret motions, out of sight,
That lie concealed in matter. For you’ll see the motes careen
Off course, and then bounce back again, by means of blows unseen,
Drifting now in this direction, now that, on every side.
You may be sure this starts with atoms; they are what provide
The base of this unrest. For atoms are moving on their own,
Then small formations of them, nearest them in scale, are thrown
Into agitation by unseen atomic blows,
And these strike slightly larger clusters, and on and on it goes -
A movement that begins on the atomic level, by slight
Degrees ascends until it is perceptible to our sight,
So that we can behold the dust motes dancing in the sun,
Although the blows that move them can’t be seen by anyone.
Translated by A.E. Stallings, in the Penguin edition (2007).
Writing about science always is a delicate balance between skipping over details to romanticize physics versus getting too technical. I suppose that can be said about a lot of science writing. I remember loving the vague imagery of The arrow of Time from Stephen Hawkings books or the Rolled Up Dimensions in Brian Greene’s demonstrations. But now I found most of those descriptions vague and sacrosanct. Its rare to find a piece of science writing that I would enjoy both as a child and now.
Intriguingly, some say that this last section implies Lucretius observed Brownian motion, the phenomenon when seemingly random life-like movements of pollen grains in water (or any small object in liquid). Here, Lucretius describes as dust lazily drifting in the sunlight. Certainly a prettier picture than a muck of pollen grains. But I feel that this poem also holds some gems that we can appreciate, albeit anachronistically. There’s something about
atoms moving on their own… thrown into agitation by unseen atomic blows
that feels like a prophecy of quantum fluctuations we study today.
[M]ovements that [begin] on the atomic level, by slight Degrees ascends until it is perceptible to our sight
feels like a glimpse into the modern phenomenon of Emergence, popularized by Anderson’s piece More is Different. Some days I wish that my day-to-day literature reading included such vivid and exciting imagery.
Maybe I should start reading more Epicurean poetry.
Maybe I’ll put it in my papers.
A great posting about it that brought this to light and its relation to Brownian Motion can be found here