The great Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman was once asked to convey, in a single sentence, the most important scientific knowledge that humans possessed.

His answer was short and simple. Everything is made of atoms. Believe it or not, this was believed to be the case over 2,000 years ago in ancient Greece and India.

However, it wasn't until the modern era that we were able to prove it to be so.

Learn more about atoms and how we discovered they existed on this episode of Everything Everywhere

Daily. Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. Most of what the ancients knew about the physical world was wrong. Just flat out wrong.

Aristotle, for instance, thought everything in the world was made out of just four elements, Earth,

air, fire, and water. According to him, everything consisted of some combination of those four elements.

Almost every ancient culture had some ideas of how the world works, which doesn't really stand up to modern science.

That being said, given the state of knowledge hundreds or thousands of years ago, you can't really blame them.

Most of the ideas about the world were based on philosophy more than science.

They had ideas that made sense to them but weren't based on experimentation or even observation.

However, there were a few cases where they basically got it right,

even though they really didn't know it at the time.

And this is the case with the theory of atoms.

What we call science used to be part of philosophy.

The branch of philosophy which dealt with the natural world was known as natural philosophy. One school of ancient natural philosophy was called atomism.

There are two ancient civilizations that each independently developed theories of atomism, Greece and India.

Around 600 BC, one of the Vedic schools of thought

was known as Vashishika.

It was developed by the Indian philosopher Kananda

and it postulated that the world could be reduced to

invisible bits known as Paramano. According to the Vashishika school

...