First, we are going to travel back a little over 2,000 years ago to the times of Aristotle and Democritus. The Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that matter could be divided infinitely without changing its properties.
Democritus disagreed. He thought that matter could only be divided until you got to the smallest particle (which he called the atom, coming from the Greek word atomos, meaning indivisible). So, who was right? Aristotle was very convincing and did many experiments using the scientific method, so more people believed him. But they do not test their ideas. Until…
John Dalton