Nuculus the Stoic

Nuculus the Stoic made virtually no contribution to stoic philosophy; today he is known as one of the earliest challengers to Democritus’ atomic theory. Physics, such as it was in the Hellenistic era of the late 3rd century BC, acknowledged the possibility that there was a small indivisible unit of matter referred to as an ‘Atom’, derived from a greek term meaning ‘cannot be cut’. Nuculus, however, held to the view that there was no such lower limit on the size of matter, believing instead that the universe could smoothly be cut, down to an infinitesimal level. In an assertion that had more to do with intuition than real knowledge or experimentation, he suggested that cutting at a very fine level would release large amounts of energy.

While quantum mechanics, developed in the first half of the twentieth century, has demonstrated to a very high level of accuracy that Nuculus was wrong about the nature of the universe, his theories still dog us today, not in the domain of physics, but in the world of linguistics. When Rutherford discovered that the atom was mostly empty space, and that its mass was almost all concentrated in a small packet at the centre, he referred to this as the atom’s ‘nucleus’, using a latin term meaning ‘kernel’ or ‘nut’. A better physicist than classicist, Rutherford thus trod roughshod on the stoic’s much earlier assertions.

From this has arisen one of the more common debates in pronunciation, one that has purists on both sides up in arms. The classical model, that of Nuculus, was known for centuries as ‘nucular physics’, the ‘nucular theory’, and the energy Nuculus supposed would be released was called ‘nucular energy’. Rutherford’s discoveries earnt him the title of ‘The Father of Nuclear Physics’. The confusion between ‘nuclear’ and ‘nucular’ continues to this day, in the mouths of schoolboys and U.S. presidents alike. Had Rutherford known of the work of the stoic, he may, perhaps, have chosen a different name for his discovery.