Category:Atom

Atoms (from the Greek: ἄτομος átomos, "the indivisible") are, according to the current understanding of matter, the smallest building blocks of the chemical elements. According to Rudolf Steiner, they are not to be understood structurally as material "things", but rather as ideal spatial contents. The content is the result of mutually encountering directions of forces. Force is understood here as a one-sided spatial (luciferic) revelation of the spirit.

In other words: atoms, as modern quantum theory also confirms, are not material objects in the ordinary sense but regulatively acting ideas - namely the sum of all physical laws obeyed by the forces of nature, which regulate - indeterministically - the orderly connection of all perceptible or measurable phenomena in the realm of the smallest spatially graspable units of a specific chemical element. Such measurable phenomena or properties are, for example, the atomic mass, the chemical valency, the electronegativity or the atomic spectrum typical for the respective element.