Materia – observaţii epistemologice cu prilejul aniversării modelului atomului al lui rutherford (I)
ABSTRACT. The reasons of this paper, presented in two issues, are two‑folds: to pass through the history of the concept of matter and to emphasise the episte‑mological significances of this history. Some characteristics of the philosophical theories and the scientific theories are underlined too. Indeed, our philosophy pays little attention to the concept of matter and thus to the changes within the scientific theories concerning the matter. Why this? On one hand, there is a strong enough tradition of the modern philosophy to leave this problem in charge of the science, and to focus on the being or on the second range episte‑mological interpretation of physics. On the other hand, it was difficult to treat the problem as such during Stalinism, and the philosophers preferred to gain respectability through other ones and through the substitution of the concept of matter with “reality” and “existence”.
The paper remembers the historical movement from the Greek ancient philosophy to the modern science of physics and chemistry and, in this framework, to Rutherford’s model of atom and beyond till nowadays. Philosophy is that separates, through intellectual means, the empirical evidence of reality from the concepts grasping the profound mechanisms of the existence. From this standpoint, the ancient Greek theories are discussed as illustrating a) the mater as concrete primordial element (Thales, Empedocles, Parmenides, Heraclitus), b) the matter as abstract concept (Anaximander, Antiphon, Zeno of Citium, Zeno of Elea), c) the matter as substance (Aristotle),
- the atomist theory of matter (Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus). The episte‑mological explanation of idealism concludes this first part.
The second part deals with the modern scientific theory and atomism: the constitution of atomism and the evolution from the “plum pudding” model of atom to the planetary model of Rutherford and its surpassing by the discov‑eries of sub‑atomic particles, Einstein’s theory of equivalence between matter and energy and the theory of wave particle duality.
The third part develops and interprets some aspects of Einstein’s theory of equivalence between matter and energy and the theory of particle wave duality: the logical discoveries of the concept of anti‑matter, the ideas of nuclear fusion and nuclear fission, the expansion of the Standard Model of elementary particles, the spring of the understanding of matter, as well as of the innovations concerning the material foundations of the human existence (as nanotechnology). The history of the nuclear interactions, thus of particles, is not univocal, but rather localised. On this basis theories of quantum gravity and cosmology were developed, as well as a holistic approach of “every‑ thing” (i.e. “grand unification theory’). The theory of wholeness illustrates the challenge of the epistemology of the continuous toward the epistemology of discontinuities. KEYWORDS: matter, energy, philosophy, modern scientific theory, atomism, nanotechnology, holism