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They called me the Laughing Philosopher because I found the foolishness of human concerns ridiculous rather than tragic. Money, reputation, political power — the things people torture themselves over — are rearrangements of atoms. The atoms do not care.

I proposed, with my teacher Leucippus, that all matter is composed of indivisible particles moving through void. The particles are eternal; the void is real; everything we perceive as solid, liquid, hot, or coloured is the result of particular arrangements and movements of these unseen particles.

This was not mysticism or speculation. I reasoned toward it from the observed facts of mixture, dissolution, and change. If a grain of salt dissolves in water, where does it go? It goes into parts too small to see, which combine with the parts of the water. The parts must eventually be indivisible — otherwise division would continue forever and the grain would become nothing.

I was right. The atom is real. It took two thousand years to confirm.