Way back around 300 BCE, the Greek philosopher Epicurus somehow discovered that matter was composed of atoms. (His theory would not be definitively proven until Einstein published a paper on “Brownian Motion” in 1905.) How he came to that conclusion so long ago is a mystery, but many were convinced even at the time.

One of the most prominent followers of Epicurus was the Latin poet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucretius, who expounded on the master’s teaching in his first-century BCE epic poem De Rerum Natura, or, On The Nature of Things. It’s a marvelous work, poetic, lyrical and scientific all at once. Much of it is an expansion on the theories of Epicurus, but Lucretius did make at least one original contribution to the theory of atomism, and to the debate about the freedom of the will.

In Book II of the poem, in lines 216-293, Lucretius discusses the “swerve” of atoms. Here’s a sample (from a translation by Martin Smith):

When the atoms are being drawn downward through the void by their property of weight, at absolutely unpredictable times and places they deflect slightly from their straight course, to a degree that could be described as no more than a shift of movement. If they were not apt to swerve, all would fall downward through the unfathomable void like drops of rain; no collisions between primary elements would occur, and no blows would be effected, with the result that nature would never have created anything.

What conclusion did Lucretius draw from this random “swerve” of the atom? That human beings have free will: the randomness proves that the universe if not deterministic.

It’s a clever thought, and it’s been an influential one. If you want to read more about it, a quirky place to start would be with a pamphlet called “The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature”: in March 1841, it was submitted as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Berlin by a 23-year-old student named Karl Marx.

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