Is there an ultimate indivisible unit of matter?
Sometime before 330 BC Aristotle asserted that the atoms of fire, air, earth, and water actually change when making new combinations to form the objects that we see. But changes in nature exhibit direction and not chaos. To treat this issue of direction in change, Aristotle asserted the principles of “in potency” and “becoming” to deal with what he saw as the primary flaw in Democritus’s atomism—Democritus’s insufficient explanation for the direction of change among the atoms: [13] when air is produced from water, the same matter has become something different, not by acquiring an addition to it, but has become actually what it was potentially, and, again, water is produced from air in the same way. Accordingly, Aristotle concluded that every material object in the universe has two essential components: the 1) potential matter and the 2) actual matter. The potential matter consists of the atoms of fire, air, earth, and water that can change from one potential condition to another and c
