Let’s talk about the elements.
Now, I’m not talking about oxygen, phosphorous, and uranium. Not yet, at least. We’re a long way from the periodic table of elements. But we are at the very beginning of a path that will lead to it.
Today, we’re talking about the four classical elements…which will become five after Aristotle comes along.
If Lomekwian stone tools were the zygote of science, then the four classical elements would be its crude embryo. The purpose of this series is to methodically advance through the stages of science until we arrive at today’s intricate conception of the building blocks of spacetime—the stuff we’re made of, at the smallest (known) level.
The beginning is right here.
We find ourselves now in the middle part of the oldest section of the human literary canon, antiquity, just after pre-literate prehistory. Now is when the musings of the progressive chronology of written human expression start to take shape on clay tablets, having evolved first from symbols of uncertain meaning inscribed on artifacts in Europe and turtle shells in China, then to symbols imbued with disjointed meanings, then to picture-based languages and the halting hash marks of early cuneiform which began as early simple inventories of stock and treasures and kings but gradually morphed into more complex adorations of warrior kings and gods. Lists became sentences and songs. The timid bud of language became, in time, a forest of early knowledge.
And now—right here at this crucial juncture—the canon of human knowledge begins to turn from sacred speculations about the mechanics of creation to more granular and disciplined reflections on the composition of man and matter.
I’ve argued that human prehistory should begin with Kenyanthropus (or possibly Australopithecus), which aren’t technically humans, aren’t even archaic humans like Neanderthals but are pre-humans. They were the first to create tools by chipping jagged edges onto stones over 3 million years ago. That’s where science begins, in my mind, where human discovery is first recorded in the language of flaked stones.
This innovation would lead to others, and this process—iteration—would give pre-humans and their human descendants the upper hand in survival. With stone tools, they could get more meat from their kills and eat more protein. With the next known innovation, controlled fires, they could cook their food, which would help them avoid illness and digest more easily. Their enhanced diets would grow the brains of their offspring.
Even though the hominins who accomplished these early advances weren’t from the genus Homo, their attainments would mean their heirs 3 million years later could one day describe the tiniest loops in the fabric of nature. The clumsy rock-banging of our predecessors enabled us today to caress—mathematically, at least—the finest hairs of spacetime.
Making isn’t the only ingredient that gets us to modern science, though. Writing is crucial too. Writing preserves scientific advances so they can be shared across generations. Meaningful writing began somewhere between 12,000 years ago with the Turkish sky burial pictograph, and 5500 years ago, with the Kish Tablet.
So here we stand, with making as well as writing well-established in the arsenal of human abilities. We find ourselves at the threshold of pure intellectual exploration, at the dawn not of science—not yet—but of philosophy. Philosophy, as an exploratory framework, is the direct ancestor of science.
The earliest philosophies were similar to the religions that came before them, with one key difference. Religion permits unquestioned and unquestionable asserted truths; philosophy does not. Early religion posed answers to questions and etched those answers onto sacred stones kept by priests. Early philosophy was similar, but kind of flipped—it was about posing questions, not propounding answers. It had no place for reciting orthodoxies but called for entertaining and debating different potential answers to questions posed.
Philosophy elevated curiosity over conviction.
Some answers proposed by philosophers ended up becoming like religious orthodoxies. They found favor and were held onto dearly for centuries, like religious tenets.
Bertrand Russell’s sharp criticism of the way the world embraced Aristotle’s incorrect teaching about classical elements comes to mind. For over 1000 years, the thinking world took a philosophical proposition from Aristotle—that the universe was made of earth, wind, fire, water, and aether—and forgot to question it.
But questioning was what made philosophy, philosophy, from the beginning. Ancient philosophy encouraged and rewarded curiosity, and the only thing that distinguishes the questioning of ancient natural philosophy from the questioning of modern science—even today’s most rigorous science—are the additions of hypothesis and experimentation, of testing proposed answers to definitively separate true from untrue, rather than merely debating them with the tools of logic as the philosophers did.
Religion seeks the truth of our world through faith. Philosophy seeks the truth of our world through logic. Science seeks the truth of our world through replicable experimentation.
Observations about the natural order of things appear early in the history of writing. The extensive historical record preserved in clay from Sumerian and Egyptian cultures reveals early contemplations related to what would become astronomy, math, and medicine.
Before science was science, it was philosophy. The rigorous scientific method of trial and error, of hypothesis and experimentation, would emerge later. It would appear in its fullness in the 17th century, albeit with some early adopters in the centuries before. Long before the scientific method was conceived, though, science took its first baby steps when the bases of knowledge that had been written down centuries before by Egyptians and Mesopotamians inspired natural philosophers in early Greece.
The first known thoughts about what we’re all made of—about what the universe is made of—came from ancient Greece and ancient India. These two distant cultures appear to have independently explored very similar ideas related to the composition of matter. Each of their systems held, in its way, that the material world is comprised of what we call the “classical elements”: water, earth, fire, and air.
Let’s jump ahead a little.
Aristotle, who lived between 384 and 322 BCE, would add a fifth element, aether, to the list of classical elements he inherited from the philosophers who came before him. He did this to account for the immutable material that made up what he thought was an unchanging celestial realm. Aristotle also believed in something he called “prime matter,” one basic element that even the classical elements were made of, because he believed that classical elements could morph into one another. He also believed that when matter changes, some aspect of the matter must remain through the change. As a result, air couldn’t just miraculously become water. Something more fundamental than both air and water had to persist through the change. Aristotle’s idea of “prime matter” would be echoed by later thinkers including St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, and it’s not too far off what string theorists believe today—that a single component (in the modern case, a one-dimensional string) is the single fundamental building block of all matter and energy.
Before we dive into the development of the philosophy of the four classical elements, let’s pause to touch on the discoveries of actual elements, like gold and phosphorous.
One of the difficulties of tracing human advancements is that multiple things are happening at different times and in different cultures that are interrelated. They will come together at some point in the future. This is a perfect example of that. Ancient humans—we don’t know who, or when, or where—started isolating and using certain elements, and their use became commonplace in different parts of the world.
The first elements known to man were the ones that could be found in their pure form in nature. These include gold and silver. Later, ancient humans learned to heat certain materials and extract elements from compounds found in nature. These ancient humans didn’t know about elements and compounds. They didn’t know why, when you heated certain ores, iron came out. They just knew that iron was hard and useful.
It’s thought that copper may have been the first element isolated and used by ancient man, with an estimated date of discovery of 9000 BCE. Copper beads dating back to 6000 BCE have been uncovered. Archaeologists have also found evidence that copper was smelted from ore as far back as 5000 BCE and molded as far back as 4000 BCE. After copper was discovered, lead (7000 BCE), gold (6000 BCE), silver (5000 BCE), and iron (5000 BCE) would be used. Carbon and tin would be identified around 3500 BCE, followed by sulfur and mercury around 2000 BCE. Other elements known since ancient times, all discovered between 1000 BCE and the year one, include zinc, antimony, and arsenic.
These dates come from a handy timeline posted online by Alan’s Factory Outlet, a provider of quality metal carports and science facts that are straight fire. The timeline is nice. Its visual appeal is great. The owner, Alan Bernau Jr. must be a huge science buff. My hat’s off to him; he has some great info gathered there.
After year one, it would be over 1500 years before additional new elements would be discovered.
The first human known to have discovered an element was a German merchant and alchemist named Hennig Brand (c. 1630-c. 1692). He was trying to turn distilled urine into a philosopher’s stone, a mythical substance the alchemists believed could turn base metals into precious ones. Sometime around 1669, Hennig Brand turned pee into a glowing white substance he called “cold fire.” Brand didn’t tell anyone about his 1669 discovery until after 1680, when Robert Boyle announced his discovery of the same substance—the element phosphorous.
Let’s get back to what we were originally talking about, which was the idea of the four classical elements. This idea didn’t originate in science but in philosophy. Science as a discipline didn’t exist yet. The appearance and exploration of the idea of basic elements may have helped bring about the birth of science.
To get to the beginning of philosophy, we have to back up a bit and start with the beginning of urbanization. Philosophy was born in a city.
One of the first truly urban civilizations is thought to have been the Mesopotamian city of Uruk, founded sometime around 4500 BCE, led at one point by the famous king Gilgamesh. Gobekli Tepe in Turkey is a much earlier static settlement, its founding dating back to between 9500 and 8000 BCE. Other Pre-Pottery Neolithic sites older than Uruk abound in the Mesopotamian region, including one called Boncuklu Tarla which is thought to be up to 12,000 years old.
But Uruk wasn’t a village like Gobekli Tepe and Boncuklu Tarla. It was a city. Uruk had up to 40,000 inhabitants at its peak in the 3000s BCE.
Uruk is the city where cuneiform emerged as an accounting language and then as a written language.
Uruk didn’t start as a city. The geographical area was populated by the Ubaid people, a group dating back to 6500 BCE and who moved to the region where Uruk would appear sometime around 5000 BCE.
Like in Uruk, large cities would emerge from scattered Stone Age farming communities in other parts of the world. Ancient hominins appeared on the islands of the Aegean Sea around 130,000 years ago, and Homo sapiens began living in small farming communities on those same islands around 12,000 years ago. Later, around 3500 BCE, the cities of the Minoan civilization appeared. Theirs was the first advanced, urban civilization to appear anywhere in Europe, and it would become highly developed, boasting complex art, massive temples, and elaborate palaces, with some reaching up to four stories high. Like Uruk, Minoan civilization would birth a well-established writing system. Well, that’s not exactly true. The Minoans had two writing systems: Cretan hieroglyphs and Linear A. Neither has been deciphered.
On the islands of the Aegean, the Bronze Age Mycenaean civilization eclipsed the Minoan civilization around 1750 BCE. The decline of the Minoans is thought to have come about through conquest, possibly with the aid of a volcanic eruption on the isle of Thera, which occurred in the latter half of the 1500s BCE. The Mycenaean civilization spoke Mycenaean Greek, and its written version is called Linear B. This script was fully deciphered in the 1950s.
The Mycenaean civilization would thrive, but its end would come suddenly and violently at the beginning of a period known as the Greek Dark Ages, when the fossil record shows that temples and palaces across North Africa and the Mediterranean were abandoned, written languages were lost, populations shrank, and economies collapsed. The Greek Dark Ages were characterized by small, isolated villages with few monumental structures in place of the well-developed cities from before. The fossil record shows that pottery devolved like cities, from advanced and delicately decorated to crudely made and plain. Something bad happened and brought about the Greek Dark Ages, and no one is exactly sure what it was.
After this mysterious decline, cities began reappearing in Greece around 800 BCE. One of them, Miletus, appeared on the western coast in a region called Ionia, at the site of previous Stone Age and Bronze Age settlements. Miletus would become a thriving center of trade.
And it was here, in Miletus, where philosophy first emerged in the 6th century BCE.
A school of “those who discoursed on nature” (as Aristotle would later call them) emerged somewhere in the bustling milieu of Miletus, where traders and travelers from different parts of the world intermingled, their ideas mixed, and their regional religious convictions collided and combined. The thinkers of this school contemplated many things, including the composition of nature and the nature of matter. For the most part, these discoursers agreed that everything was made of something and that while everything could change in many ways, the fundamental stuff that things were made of could not itself change. It could only be rearranged.
They disagreed on the topic of exactly what that fundamental, unchanging stuff was. (To be honest, that’s kind of where our brightest minds in theoretical physics still are today. Though we’ve filled in a billion details since 600 BCE, we’re no closer than they were to a consensus on what everything is made of.)
These 6th century BCE philosophers used abstract reasoning to try and figure out answers to their questions, as opposed to repeating mythologies or insisting on the acceptance of some unchallenged religious dogma. Theirs was a new way of thinking.
This, in and of itself, was a paradigmatic shift in how humans thought about the world and how they thought about how they should think about the world. What came out of the mingling of diverse modes of thought and conviction in Miletus changed the whole trajectory of human development.
The earliest Western philosopher came from the Miletus school; his name was Thales.
Thales was born in 624 BCE and died in 546 BCE at the age of 68. He entered a world where Greeks interpreted the origins of the universe and the world around them by believing in the anthropomorphic gods of Olympus; he left behind a world where Greek philosophers interpreted the world using reason, perception, and logic.
Nothing written by Thales remains. We know of him because of attribution by other ancient writers. Later writers reported that he had been a traveling merchant and had brought knowledge of geometry and astronomy back with him from Egypt. He used his newfound knowledge to predict a solar eclipse in 585 BCE; he also measured the height of a pyramid in Egypt by waiting until the length of his own shadow matched his exact height, at which time he measured the shadow of the pyramid.
There is some controversy about his exact contributions to philosophy. Some have credited him for innovative ideas like urging seafarers to navigate by Ursa Minor. He reportedly postulated the immortality of the human soul.
Ancient writers claim Thales wrote two books that are lost to history: On the Solstice and On the Equinox. One ancient writer claimed he wrote a third work called the Nautical Star Guide.
None other than Aristotle would declare Thales to be the founder of natural philosophy—an old term that pretty much means “pre-science”. Aristotle would also list Thales first in his investigation of the wisdom of philosophers.
Of particular importance to the purpose of this series, Thales expressed a belief in a single fundamental element. That element was water, from which Thales believed everything was made.
In the Western world at least, this is the earliest known enunciation of a fundamental particle, an idea that today’s scientists still probe using multi-billion-dollar particle accelerators and space telescopes. Thales came to this conclusion using only his eyes, his brain, and the logic and math of his time.
Other philosophers picked up where Thales left off. Among his successors, the first thoughts about the four classical elements revolved around which one of them had primacy over the others. None of these philosophers ever used the term “elements.” That term originated later, with Plato in the 300s BCE.
After Thales, Ionian philosophers included Anaximander, who was born in 610 BCE. He was a student of Thales and would become his successor as master of the Miletus school. Other Ionian philosophers would also weigh in on the nature of, well, nature. These men included Anaximenes, born in 586 BCE, and Heraclitus, born in 535 BCE. These early philosophers argued earnestly about which fundamental element might be the primordial substance from which all matter came. Heraclitus threw his lot in with fire. Anaximenes was straight-up Team Air.
Anaximander, though, went in a completely different direction. He saw what he considered to be mutual exchanges between earth, water, air, and fire, and he decided none of them could be the primordial substance of things. Instead, he argued that an indefinite and eternal “something” generated everything and accounted for opposites like wet and dry, or hot and cold, which he believed emerged when the four classical elements interacted.
Anaximander called this hypothesized substance Apeiron. He believed that everything came from Apeiron and would return to it upon its destruction, but that Apeiron itself could not be destroyed and was never created.
Few writings by Anaximander remain, but a fragment is attributed to him by a later writer named Simplicius. It begins: “From where things have their origin, there their destruction happens, according to the debt.”
Much later, scientists would come up with a theory called the conservation of mass which bears a striking similarity to Anaximander’s idea that the origination and destruction of things must equal out, as with a debt being paid.
Another contribution of Anaximander was his conception of the cosmos, which involved the sun and moon as round openings on the inside edge of two tubes of fire that encircled the earth. The tubes themselves were invisible, but when the round openings passed over the earth, humans could see the fire that presumably filled each tube.
Anaximenes, Anaximander’s student, put his own spin on this conception of the cosmos. Anaximenes imagined that the sun, moon, and stars were all made of fire and that the fixed stars were attached to a crystal sphere that spun around the earth, accounting for the movement of the stars. This notion of a fixed sphere upon which the stars resided would recur in the cosmologies proposed by Aristotle, Copernicus, and Johannes Kepler.
Other important philosophers from ancient Greece merit mention here. Meton of Athens lived in the 5th century BCE and, with a colleague named Euctemon, he observed a series of solstices—when the sun is farthest from the equator—to try to figure out exactly how long a year is. Meton figured out that 19 solar years and 235 lunar months are almost identical, and that they repeat on a cycle. He developed a calendar known as the Metonic calendar.
Meton had an observatory constructed, from which he watched sunrises during equinoxes and solstices. He noted the movement of the sunrise across the horizon between the summer and winter solstices. The foundations of Meton’s observatory are still visible today.
Pythagoras (born in 570 BCE) is one of the most famous names to come out of the Ionian school. He’s known for numerous scientific and mathematical advances—the most famous of which is his theorem, a2+b2=c2.
The work of Pythagoras is vital to our survey of the history of science because he and his students advanced the notion that mathematics was a principal tool for uncovering the structure of the world. This idea has led to the mysticism of numerology, but it has also led to mathematical guardrails on later thinkers that kept them moving in a direction that would, at length, lead to numerous incredible advances on humankind’s way to the atom and its even smaller components.
Pythagoras had thoughts about astronomy, too. He believed, for example, that the universe was a sphere. And one of Pythagoras’ disciples made his own huge impact on this field we might call elemental thought. More on that guy—Empedocles—in the next episode.
Come back next time for more of The Stuff We’re Made Of.