Newtonian mass Newton believed matter to be formed in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles of such sizes and figures, and other properties, and in such proportion to space, as must conduced to the end. For he formed them: and that these primitive particles being solids, are incomparably harder than any porous bodies compounded of them: even so very hard, as to never wear or to break into pieces: no ordinary power being able to divide what god himself made one in the first creation.

Later the term atom was applied to this basic form of matter. When the atom was split, it was concluded that Newton was wrong because the basic unit had been broken into pieces. However, it should be pointed out that Newton never said that what we called the atom was in fact that basic, elementary, fundamental particle. Newton discovered the laws of motion and gravitation and successfully applied them to describing the detailed motion of the planets and the Moon. He believed that the entire material creation moves in a way that can be predicted with absolute accuracy. This concept , known as determinism, should apply from the largest to its smallest motion. Even the great scientific advances of the nineteenth century - the theory of heat, called thermodynamics, and Maxwell's theory of light as an electromagnetic wave - were worked within the framework of deterministic physics. By the end of the nineteenth century experimental physics contacted the atomic structure of matter and found the atomic units of matter behaved in random, uncontrollable ways which deterministic Newtonian physics could not account for. Theoretical physics responded to these new experimental discoveries by inventing a new physical theory, the quantum theory, between 1900 and 1926. Failure to reconcile the quantum theory of atoms with deterministic physics, not only required an amendment to Newtonian physics, but allowed determinism to fall. Einstein remained deterministic and never intellectually accepted that the foundation of reality was governed by chance and randomness. His fellow scientists, however, accepted the premise of the ultimate randomness of reality. I believe in determinism. I believe that even atomic structures are deterministic. Although we have not yet deduced formulas to describe this motion, that in no way should mean that they are not predictable. Our failure to find this connection should not dissuade us from the deterministic view. Whether we as humans are able to determinethe specifics of atomic motions and interactions does not have any bearings upon the precision that may underline their behavior. BACK