This Greek philosopher had the right idea, just too few elements

Author: Tom Siegfried / Source: Science News

Long before there was a periodic table of the elements, there was no need for a table — just four chairs.

From ancient through medieval into early modern times, natural philosophers could count the known elements with the fingers of only one hand (with no need for the thumb).

All material reality, nearly every authority concurred, was built from only four elements. And those four elements had been identified in the fifth century B.C. by the imaginative and somewhat idiosyncratic Greek philosopher known as Empedocles of Acragas.

Even though Empedocles had the true number of elements wrong, and the substances he identified aren’t actually elements anyway, he had more or less (less, I guess) the right idea. In fact, stripped of the literary embellishment in his poetic metaphors (and ignoring a few really weird ideas that didn’t make much sense), Empedocles articulated much of what passes today for sound scientific concepts. He basically identified the essence of modern notions of matter and force, and he dreamed up a theory of the universe that shares features with some current cosmological speculations.

Empedocles was born in Sicily around 490 B.C., apparently into a prominent family (his grandfather, legend has it, was an Olympic champion chariot racer). By some accounts Empedocles promoted democracy (despite his aristocratic status) and supposedly declined an offer to be king of Acragas, his home city-state. His oratorical ability and skillful writings inspired Aristotle to declare Empedocles the founder of rhetoric. Empedocles may also have been a physician (he wrote a lot about physiological topics at any rate), he dabbled in magic, and even described a primitive notion of natural selection’s role in shaping the forms of organisms. But most of all, he deserves recognition as one of the great natural philosophers of antiquity.

Empedocles is most well-known for his theory that all matter consists of four elements — he called them “roots” — and named them for the Greek gods Zeus, Hera, Aidoneus and Nestis. They personified (or godified) the physical forms known as fire, earth, air and water (although experts do not agree about which god stood for which element). These elements, Empedocles declared, persist throughout recurring cycles of creation and destruction. That is, the various forms of matter and life and the structures of the everyday world are just mixtures of the elements in varying proportions.

Empedocles declared that sensible objects come into being as the elements are melded together or pulled apart by two opposing forces: “love” and “strife” (sometimes translated as “hate” or “conflict”). Love impelled the combination of elements into a unified whole; strife was the destructive agitator that ripped the elements asunder.

Remarkably, virtually all the Greek philosophers seemed to buy this story — at least the four elements part — and it persisted throughout the educated Western…

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