Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article investigates why Lucretius does not dedicate any section of his poem to atomic size or provide a technical term to describe the concept. This absence is particularly significant because Epicurus’ Letter to Herodotus both uses the term μέγεθος to indicate atomic size and contains a passage reporting specifically on this property. First, the article argues that atomic size and shape are causally redundant in Epicurus’ ontology. Second, it demonstrates that the origin of both shape and size is found in the smallest magnitudes in Epicurean physics, the minima . Drawing on these findings, it concludes that, since atomic size violates the law of parsimony, it is a superfluous entity in the Epicurean system. After analysing passages from the De rerum natura , it suggests that the absence of atomic size in Lucretius may be deliberate. Lucretius’ microphysics works perfectly without introducing a philosophical notion of atomic size, and is more economical and efficient than that of Epicurus.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".