A state of being only occurs where there is a significant quantum flux in the quantum void or vacuum.

I tried to read the foreward of “The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature” (Doctoral Dissertation of Karl Marx) few months earlier but understood nothing.
Today, I’ve got something more objective to think of. Finally, I am starting to understand the materialism of Karl Marx.

There was no way to test it back then. Should Democritus have conceived of the telescope too?

Your notion that the atomists (especially Democritus) did not see the need to test their theories is not based on any evidence. Their works abound with empirical justifications for their theories.

You’d have a point if Democritus’ theory on the Galaxy was just a wild guess. If someone makes 1,000 wild guesses, then one of them may turn out to be true, but that doesn’t make him a visionary.

However, Democritus didn’t get it right about the Galaxy by a wild guess. His idea was a natural consequence of his physical theory.

Scientists extrapolate their theories beyond what can be tested at the time. They proposed the idea of a “black hole” long before anyone thought of a way to “observe” one.

That is true only from the viewpoint of the time when theories are proposed. They are not immediately useful; they may be appealing because of their simplicity or elegance, but you can’t accept them fully.

It is the empirical evidence that decides whether such theories are _accepted_ as scientific explanations. Theories are right or wrong whether or not they are recognized as such or not. It doesn’t make one iota of difference whether they are recognized as such during or shortly after their originator’s lifetime. In fact, the larger the intervening time, the more visionary they appear to be.

The Higgs boson was testable much longer ago than you might think–it’s just that the searches for the Higgs boson at a few GeV came up negative.

Democritus’ theory was also testable when the first magnifying glasses appeared. Eventually one of them was powerful enough, and someone pointed it to the heavens, and the theory was confirmed.

Of course a theory can be proposed before it can be tested empirically. I think theories do become less useful the further in the future that testing is, and several of your example theories were proposed virtually hand-in-hand with corresponding experiments. The Higgs boson was testable much longer ago than you might think–it’s just that the searches for the Higgs boson at a few GeV came up negative. And of course, Einstein himself predicted how to test General Relativity using the 1919 solar eclipse, only four years after he published the theory, and the test worked out well.

But the larger issue, and the reason that the ancient atomists weren’t really scientists, is that (as far as I understand it) they had no concept that their ideas needed to be tested. Are their ideas important philosophical building blocks of science? Yes. But were they scientists? No.