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Comment by Koshkin | Hacker News Reader

What's interesting is that the Ancient Greeks "knew" this but it took two thousand years to actually prove it. Now the question is: how long can it take to confirm one of the quantum gravity theories? (Quantum gravity remains the biggest unsolved problem in fundamental physics today.)

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This is survivorship bias. They 'knew' it only retrospectively, they also 'knew' a lot of different incorrect theories. In some sense one could argue that Aristotle halted the progress of physics for about a thousand years (not related to atoms, but a general comment of what the Ancient Greek 'knew')

If the progress in physics really was halted for a millennium (actual physics was not moving that fast beforehand), any blame must rest with the intellectuals of that time.

I fully agree, I'm not blaming him.

It is interesting though that maths was taught for a 1000 years from Euclid's Elements, Euclid living approximately at the same time as Aristotle, and it is still as valid today as it was 2000 years ago but physics was taught from Aristotle's teaching and it was just bonkers. Took 1000 years for someone to finally say 'wait, something's not right'

You are right to put "knew" in quotes, as Democritus' speculation had no more support than Thales' "all is water", the four elements, the bodily humors or the celestial spheres. Knowledge lies at least as much in the justification of a fact as it does in the proposition itself.

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