单项选择题

It is a must to preface any discussion of atoms by paying homage to Democritus, an Ionian philosopher of the fifth century B. C., the earliest known proponent of an atomic theory. Though Democritus’ idea were in many ways strikingly modern and were promulgated (传播) by his more celebrated successor Epicurus, his theory never gained wide acceptance in Greek thought. It had largely been forgotten by the time of the late Renaissance rebirth of science. While the dramatic rise of the atomic theory over the last century and a half deems to have vindicated (证明……正确) Democritus, only the Greek name atom ("indivisible") remains to establish his claim as the father of the theory.
Nonetheless, Democritus’ thinking contained the seed of the idea that has dominated the twentieth-century physical thought. He was one of the first to perceive that nature on a sufficiently small scale might be qualitatively different in a striking way from the world of our ordinary experience. And he was the first to voice the hope, today almost an obsession, that underlying all the complex richness, texture, and variety of our everyday life might be a level of reality of stark simplicity, with the turmoil we perceive representing only the nearly infinite arrangements of a smaller number of constituents.
Today, the notion that simplicity is to be found by searching nature on a smaller level is embedded in physical thought to the point where few physicists can imagine any other approach.
Democritus’ ideas were popular among the philosophically sophisticated founders of modern physics. Galileo, Newton, and most of their contemporaries were atomists, but their beliefs were based more on intuition than on concrete evidence. Moreover, the invention of calculus had eliminated the difficulties with continuity that had in part motivated the Greek atomists, so the theory received little attention in the century following Newton’s work. Still, the atomic theory remained a popular speculation among physicists, because it offered the hope that all the properties of matter might ultimately be explained in terms of the motion of the atoms themselves.
It remained for the chemists of the early nineteenth century to find the first solid empirical support for atomism without stretching the point too far, it is fair to say that in 1800 the atomic theory was something physicists believed but couldn’t prove, while the chemists were proving it but didn’t believe it.
Through this passage, the author may want to show ______.