source - http://www.atomic-swerve.net/tpg/DRN_I.html

...there have always been elements ready for re-confection, they are by nature immortal, that is certain
and that is why they cannot return to nothing.

If things were not composed of permanent elements, any force would at once unravel the pattern.  As it is, patterns hold together in various ways but substance is always identical and eternal and so things hold until a force is encountered
which is just enough to rip their particular texture. So you see once more that nothing returns to nothing:
What happens is that things revert to their common elements.

You know I have said creation out of nothing is nonsense and so is destruction of things to nothingness.
 But since you may doubt the validity of a doctrine requiring the existence of invisible elements [atoms],
 I should like to draw your attention to certain bodies which must be allowed to exist, although we can’t see them.

There is the void—the emptiness of unoccupied space, without which, clearly, nothing could ever move.

If there were no such thing as emptiness, ..., nothing indeed could ever change or begin; There would be closed-packed matter and that would be all. The fact is, things which appear to us to be solid are really made of somewhat rarefied stuff.
 

... if a thing exists it must either act or else be acted upon by other agents, or provide a space in which other things can exist.
But only material objects can act and be acted on, and only void can provide a space. Apart from emptiness and material objects there can be no third element in nature—no third which could have an effect on our senses or be the subject of any reasoning.

...there are particles made of solid and changeless matter which are the basic constituents of the universe
from which all things are made.

Matter, consisting entirely of solid particles, can be eternal, though everything made of it dies.

There must be, therefore, immortal elements into which all things in time can be dissolved and from which all things can be renewed once again.

...the mind has no alternative but to admit the existence of parts which cannot be further divided
 

 Anaxagoras ... contends that every kind of thing is concealed in everything, while the thing we see is simply the one which predominates or has somehow come to the surface of the mixture;

(Lucretius disagrees with Anaxagoras and says rather ) ... it is fair to conclude that things are not mixed up with each other like that, but instead that the particles, mixed in various ways, are all the same and common to many things.

Falling Bodies fall at the same speed in a void! good for A360
For if anyone thinks that the heavier bodies could fall on the lighter, because they fall down more swiftly,
and that this could be the origin of the encounters which bring about the movements of generations,
they are certainly wandering a long way from the truth. Anything falling through water or through the air
no doubt must gain in speed as it has more weight because the body of water and the nature of air
are such that they cannot offer equal resistance to everything, but give way fast to the heaviest:
But the void has no power of resisting anything at any time whatsoever or at any place; Its nature is to give way, and so it does. It follows that the void is passive and everything falls through it at equal speed whatever its weight.
 

finite number of types of elements
...it follows that matter has a fixed number of shapes.

Here is a bit of a joke/pun on chromodynamics
Any color can change into any other —which is not consistent with nature of elements.
There must be something unchangeable in the elements if everything is not to turn into nothing, for nothing can change so as to change its nature without the extinction of what it was before. Do not therefore attribute color to elements. You would be on the way to destroying the whole creation.
 

Also Lucretius from this source
Aristotle's work on line http://classics.mit.edu/Browse/browse-Aristotle.html
Lucretius -On the Nature of Things- http://classics.mit.edu/Carus/nature_things.html

atomic interaction/adhesion Lucretius book II on atomic motion (http://classics.mit.edu/Carus/nature_things.2.ii.html)
"Linked by their own all intertangled shapes,-
     These form the irrefragable roots of rocks
     And the brute bulks of iron, and what else
     Is of their kind..."