Today’s, students in 3-D philosophy spent some time thinking about metaphysics - what matter is, how small it can get, and whether we will ever find “the smallest thing” in the universe?
 
The class were told that the Ancient Greek philosopher Democritus said an atom is ‘the smallest thing that exists.’ Then, that scientists in the 19th century discovered what they believed was the smallest thing to exist, and following Democritus, named it ‘an atom’. However, in the early 20th century, scientists split the atom, showing that it was made of smaller things.
 

I asked: When scientists split the atom, did they prove that Democritus was wrong?
 
Some of the students said that because the scientists had found something smaller than an atoms – protons, neutrons and electrons – Democritus must have been wrong to say an atom is the smallest thing that exists. Others pointed out that since Democritus lived in 450 B.C., his concept of an atom couldn’t have referred to ‘the thing the scientists in the 19th century found,’ and that instead Democritus was talking about something theoretical, not something that had been discovered.

The conversation moved to the idea of whether ‘the smallest thing that exists’ is an object that can be found ‘once and for all’, or whether it just refers to ‘the smallest thing that we know about at a particular time in history.’ Is it the case that improved technology will one day reveal an object that is ‘the smallest thing’? If so, does that mean there can be nothing smaller, or just that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to discover with human observation?