image by Norbert Kowalczyk from Unsplash
1.
What are humanity’s great dreams? To conquer the world? To split the atom? When Alexander spread his empire from the Mediterranean to India, we say he conquered the world, but he barely touched a quarter of it. We lie. We lie again when we say we split the atom. ‘Atom’ was supposed to be the smallest piece of matter—all we did is give that name to something we can split, knowing that there are quarks and tensors, other pieces smaller that we cannot touch, and only these deserve the title ‘atom.’ Man is more ambitious than patient. When we realize we cannot split a true atom, cannot conquer the whole Earth, we redefine the terms to fake our victory, check off our boxes and pretend the deed is done. Alexander conquered Earth, we tell ourselves, Rutherford split the atom, no need to try again. Lies.
– Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning
2.
Mogadishu, the now-capital of Somalia, is a port city on the Indian Ocean. It has been a trade hub for Centuries. When Marco Polo explored the Indian Ocean, it was one of the cities he looked for. He thought he found it, too, and wrote on his map, ‘Madageiscar’ (by way of transliteration). He was wrong and influential and the name spread. Soon, the name ‘Madageiscar’ appeared on maps everywhere atop the island now known as Madagascar.
3.
It should come as no surprise that humans can split a chair. All we need do is bring a sufficiently large hammer, and we will find the chair in pieces. To split those pieces, we might bring a sharp saw, and to split those pieces, we can use a knife. To split salt, we can dissolve it in water. To split a metal, we can melt it.
But each time we split something, we find smaller things. Either, this continues forever, and we find infinitely divisible pieces to our world, or there must be some smallest things – these ‘atoms’ we cannot split. To the Greeks, the former was preposterous and the latter was a matter of course.
Much, much later, we found things that we could not split. Sure, we could dissolve salt, but then what about the sodium? We could melt metal, but could not divide the iron. ‘We have found the atom!’ We rejoiced.
Then, we found the subatomic particles. (We should never have found subatomic particles.) We found the quarks and the tensors and the strange wave-particle duals of quantum physics, and now we write electrons as probability distributions and must ask: ‘Was there ever an atom?’. Perhaps the Greeks were right and infinite divisibility is unthinkable, but perhaps they were wrong too. Perhaps there is a third answer.
4.
‘Homer did not exist’.
What does it mean to say that? Homer is the man who penned the Iliad and the Odyssey. Perhaps the man who penned the Iliad is not also the man who penned the Odyssey. Perhaps a woman first penned both. Perhaps no one person penned either, and they were both assembled by committee.
5.
That island is Madagascar. The people who live there say so; the United Nations says so; even the Oxford English Dictionary says so. I would be thoroughly outvoted were I to say otherwise.
And yet… ‘Madagascar’ is ‘Mogadishu’ as surely as ‘Anne’ is ‘Anna’. And ‘Mogadishu’ is ancient. So ancient that we do not know where the name comes from (but my favourite theory is that the name means ‘sight killer’). If I, in London, were to start calling the city ‘Bombay’, might we someday have a Bombay in England?
6.
Is that island Madagascar? And if so, is not an atom an atom?
