A long long time ago in a faraway country, there was a Greek Philosopher named Democritus who noticed that if he broke a stone in half, that each half looked alike. He asked the question, if you break a piece of stone in half, and then break it in half again, how many breaks will you have to make before you can break it no further? Democritus thought there would be a final piece that could not be broken again, and he called it the atomos, in Greek that meant uncuttable. Today thousands of years after Democritus, we use the word atom to describe this smallest uncuttable particle and we can prove these particles exist using powerful microscopes. We give Democritus and his teacher Leucippus credit for first thinking of the atom. Atoms are important because without atoms there would be no electricity since electricity comes from atoms. He was nicknamed “the laughing philosopher.”