Wave-particle duality is something that no philosopher had ever anticipated.

Furthermore, elementary particles can easily be created and destroyed by appropriate interactions, instead of being uncreated and indestructible or close to that, as those atomists had believed.

Well, technically, matter and energy are two sides of the same coin according to special relativity. I realize that isn't very relevant to Wayne's statements. Just thought I'd offer that bit.

On the contrary, I suspect it's highly relevant. It seems to be a standard New Age tactic to take an established fact of science (mass-energy equivalence, in this case), then redefine some of the terms (and 'energy' is a favourite here) to create a new piece of spiritual mumbo-jumbo.
I recall a time when a friend of a friend tried to explain to me how we're all immortal, since our energy cannot be destroyed. I don't recall having any great success in convincing her that the energy that physicists are talking about in the conservation of energy is entirely separate from the New Age concept of 'energy'.
Quantum mysticism is another fine example of this kind of recasting of the laws of physics into a realm where they no longer apply.

But mixtures would naturally be explained by atomism. If you dissolve salt in water, you could conclude that the salt atoms get mixed with the water atoms. That's actually pretty close to the truth; water "atoms" are nowadays called molecules, and table salt breaks down into sodium and chlorine atoms.

In fact, atomism even explains the phenomenon of diffusion. If you open a bottle of perfume at one end of a room, it will make first that part of it smell like perfume, and later the rest of the room. The perfume atoms would bounce off of the air atoms and slowly travel. And the same for introducing anything else with a strong-enough smell. We'd now say "molecules", but that principle is correct.

A counterargument to the mixture and diffusion arguments would be how light can travel through other materials; that could be an argument that continuous materials can overlap.

I don't know if any pre-Dalton atomist noted how nicely atomism explains mixtures and diffusion, however.

As for the following discussion whether atomism is just pure speculation or not, I think that to an extent, it is speculative. Neither Epicurus or Democritus could actually conduct experiments to test it. However, it is not necessary that it was conjured out of nothing. One could observe, for instance, that if you cut something, for instance a tree, apart into two, then one of these into two, then one of these into two, it becomes smaller and smaller. It isn't very far-fetched to guess - based upon that - that the tree in end is made up of very small parts that can't be divided, i.e atoms.

In any case, John Dalton in 1803 showed how atomism could account for the recently-discovered Law of Definite Proportions. Joseph Proust had discovered around then that some "mixtures" of elements come in definite proportions, though others did not. When iron rusts, it consumes an amount of oxygen in proportion to the rusted iron. John Dalton explained that by proposing that a certain number of iron atoms combines with a certain number of oxygen atoms when making rust. He was even able to make an empirically-based table of relative masses of atoms, something that no previous atomist seems to have tried.

The universe is populated by stable things. A stable thing is a collection of atoms that is permanent enough or common enough to deserve a name. It may be a unique collection of atoms, such as the Matterhorn, that lasts long enough to be worth naming. Or it may be a class of entities, such as rain drops, that come into existence at a sufficiently high rate to deserve a collective name, even if any one of them is short-lived. The things that we see around us, and which we think of as needing explanation – rocks, galaxies, ocean waves – are all, to a greater or lesser extent, stable patterns of atoms.

~ Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (p12)

"I can only imagine matter as an extension of energy/consciousness..."
Wayne?
Really?
This statement is complete New Age meaninglessness.
Energy = the capacity to do work. Ask a physicist, not a healing crystal salesperson.

Well, technically, matter and energy are two sides of the same coin according to special relativity. I realize that isn't very relevant to Wayne's statements. Just thought I'd offer that bit.