"Lucretius... was an atomist, a follower of Epicurus. The original people who invented the atomic theory were and Democritus. ...Lucretius is discussing ...atoms ...he says, "at quite indeterminate times and places they swerve" ...because it allows for human free will... and "if the atoms never swerve... what is the source of the free will possessed by living things throughout the earth?" He says, "Although many men are driven by an external source, and often constrained involuntarily to advance or rush headlong, yet there is in the human breast something that can fight against it and resist it... So also in the atoms you must recognize the same possibility. Besides weight and impact, there must be a third cause of movement, the source of this inborn power... due to the slight swerve of the atoms... since nothing can come out of nothing." And then he goes on to say, "the fact that the mind itself has no internal necessity to determine its every act, this is due to the slight swerve of the atoms at no determinate time and place.""
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Atheists from EnglandUniversity of Cambridge alumniUniversity of Cambridge facultyMathematicians from EnglandPeople from Liverpool
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John Horton Conway
John Horton Conway (26 December 1937 – 11 April 2020) was an English mathematician, and Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Princeton University in New Jersey. He was active in the theory of s, , number theory, and . He also made contributions to many branches of , most notably the invention of the with .
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