Elements (Earth, Fire, Water, Air)

Factual Questions
1

I am fascinated by the number of elements that scientists have found over the years. However, I realise tt a review of Chinese, India, and some other parts of the world view the elements as Earth, Fire, Air, Water.

It bugs me how they actually define an “element” in the past. And it so happens tt different countries’s histories record the same elements as the above four elements.

If we do not define “Fire” as an element, then what is fire made up of in the first place? Can we break up fire into even simpler fragments?

2

It’s my understanding that fire is a chemical reaction. If you define fire as an element you should also define melting as one…

3

Melting doesn’t change the molecular structure, so the analogy is not quite apt, but the point is well made.

Fire is a reaction which converts fuel (e.g. methane, CH4) and an oxidizer (e.g. O2 in air) to some collection of products such as H2O, CO2, etc. You’ll also get things like NOx from the N2 in air. The overall reaction is exothermic, so heat is released, and the visual effect of “fire” is the radiant hot gases (and solids, depending on fuel) in the combustion zone and emissions.

So, fire is not an element in the sense of the periodic table of atomic elements, but if you’re trying to do a more philosophical classification of animal, mineral, vegetable…, then “fire” is a category all its own.

It makes sense that early civilizations described their world in terms of earth, air, fire and water long before anyone knew about atomic structures just like we considered our periodic table to be “elemental” (in the sense of simplest, most fundamental) before we learned more about the smaller particles.

4

You left out the traditional 5th element. No, no Boron, but Surprise. Known in antiquity.

5

Mustn’t confuse the two very different meanings attached to the word element. Ancient philosophers (including Greeks as well as Indians) classified phenomena according to their tendencies or processes. This has nothing to do with the chemical elements on the periodic table. Apples and oranges.

Fire, water, air, and earth were considered to arise from combinations of hot, cold, moist, and dry.
Hot: giving out energy, active.
Cold: taking in energy, passive.
Moist: coherent, holding together and flowing.
Dry: separating into pieces.

Thus “fire” doesn’t necessarily mean chemical combustion, it means any process that’s “hot” and “dry” in the philosophical senses of those terms. “Water” doesn’t necessarily mean H[sub]2[/sub]O, it means any process that’s “cold” and “moist.” “Air” is then “hot” and “moist,” while “earth” is “cold” and “dry.” Anything could be classified according to these abstract principles without implying that fire, etc. in the literal sense was involved.

The Indians always added a fifth element to these four, âkâsha, meaning ‘space’, considered to be the intangible ground from which all phenomena arise. The Greek concept of aether is probably a Western adaptation of âkâsha.

As for the Chinese, their system of five elements does not match the above. The Chinese ones are fire, water, earth, wood, metal. They form a cyclical process as each one is produced by the previous one in the cycle and is in turn destroyed by the next one:
water nourishes wood (trees and plants need water to grow);
wood feeds fire;
fire creates earth (ash);
earth creates metal (mined from the earth);
metal creates water (condensations on the outside of a metal cup).

Again, though the literal substances are taken as illustrations of the processes, the Chinese philosophers were always quite clear that they are really talking about abstract patterns of behavior.

6

The states of matter, in order of energy is: solid, liquid, gas, and PLASMA. Plasma is what the sun is made of, lightning is made of, and FIRE is made of.

Sigh, I love Discover Magazine. :slight_smile:

7

The fifth element in Pythagorean thought was quintessence or ether.

I think of it as the “hokey” element. Never quite figured out what it was supposed to be.