although heraclitus argued for eternal change, his quasi-contemporary parmenides made the radical suggestion that all change is an illusion, that the true underlying reality is eternally unchanging and of a single nature. parmenides denoted this reality as το εν (the one). parmenides' theory seemed implausible to many greeks, but his student zeno of elea challenged them with several famous paradoxes. aristotle resolved these paradoxes by developing the notion of an infinitely divisible continuum, and applying it to space and time.