I've mentioned before how, in his first lecture, Richard Feynman asks the question about what single, short statement captures the most important bit of scientific knowledge--the one thing we'd like to preserve if everything else was lost in some cataclysm and we had to begin again to understand the world as best we can. He proposes the atomic hypothesis, which he puts as follows: "All things are made of atoms--little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another."
I've mentioned it before but haven't stressed how serious he is about it. He asks and answers the question about the single most important idea to preserve near the beginning of the lecture. Toward the end, he says:
Everything is made of atoms. That is the key hypothesis. The most important hypothesis in all of biology, for example, is that everything that animals do, atoms do. In other words, there is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics [emphasis in original].
Perhaps those for whom the theory of evolution is a particularly despised thing should turn their attention to the atomic hypothesis. "Everything is made of atoms." An alternative way of saying it: Atoms is all there is.
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