The Greek philosopher Democritus first proposed that the Universe was built from indivisible building blocks, or atomos, in roughly 400 BCE. This animation from physicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Jefferson Lab in Newport News, Virginia, takes viewers from Democritus’ theory of matter to our understanding of nature’s building blocks as it stands today, with cutting-edge visualisations rendering nuclei at the quantum level. Through this imagery, the video explores how the peculiar quantum world of the nucleus gives rise to our own – and, by extension, to ourselves.
Via Kottke
