Matter

From Epicurus Wiki

Epicurus and his followers believed that all matter consisted of atoms; this, of course, is now a fundamental assumption of modern physics. The (classical) Epicureans' position was (though Epicurus allegedly denied it) built on a 100-year-old tradition of atomism that commenced with Leucippus and Democritus. It is based on the postulate that, while any physical object can be cut, broken, or otherwise partitioned into smaller-sized objects, this was in fact a finite process that would eventually yield that which cannot be cut any further, i.e. literally, the atom.

Matter thereby exhibited the principle of conservation: matter can neither vanish into nothing, nor can it be created out of nothing. This offered a somewhat fanciful, yet not altogether untrue corollary to universal mortality, i.e. that some things must perish and disintegrate in order to thus yield, or recycle the matter of which they had previously consisted for the benefit of other, new things, yet to emerge.

According to Epicurus and his followers, the universe consisted of matter and void; the latter was the absense of the former, a "negative matter", or "non-matter" of sorts. The density of e.g. solid objects, Epicureans believed, was due to the fact that they contained more matter than void; the thinness and lightness of gases, on the contrary, was due to the fact that those contained more void than matter. Naturally, liquids stood somewhere in between, as they contained sufficient void for them to change shape and form in their fluid state, yet also sufficient matter for them to be far heavier than gases.

Bearing in mind the chronology of Epicurean observation of and speculation on the nature of matter, millennia before its famed correlation with energy, Epicurean theory is plausible.