Four element system earth, water

Chemistry is an ancient science dating back to at least 1000 b.c., when early "chemists" discovered how to isolate metals from ores and how to preserve bodies by using embalming fluids. The Greeks were the first to try to figure out why chemical changes occur. By 400 b.c., they had proposed a system of four elements fire, earth, water, and air. The next 2000 years of chemical history were dominated by a pseudoscience called alchemy. Although many alchemists were fakes and mystics, some were serious scientists who made important discoveries. 

The interest in alchemy did not exclude philosophical or theoretical aspects of the study of matter, and a number of different systems of matter theory were developed in China. A four-element system based on earth, water, air (or wind), and fire can be traced back to Chinese creation stories, but a more popular system, based on five elements, was well established by the time of the introduction of Taoism, and its roots are lost in history. The five elements of... 

There is a long history for us to recognize polymers. Let us start with the early evolution of our molecular views (Rupp 2005). As early as in the middle of 500 BC, the Greek philosopher Leucippus and his follower Democritus suggested that, an indivisible minimum substance called atoms constituted our world. Almost at the same time, Empedocles proposed that the world was formed by four elements, i.e., water, air, fire, and earth. Later on, Plato set up the Academy at Athens, inherited the atomic theory, and also advocated the four-element theory on the basis of the formal logic system of geometries. 

But want of originality did not help Etienne de Clave. His idea was heretical because it contradicted the system of elements propounded by the ancient Greeks and endorsed by Aristotle, their most influential philosopher. Aristotle took this scheme from his teacher Plato, who in turn owed it to Empedocles, a philosopher who lived during Athens s Golden Age of Periclean democracy in the fifth century bc. According to Empedocles there were four elements earth, air, fire, and water. 

From the prevailing alchemical viewpoint of the later Middle Ages, an explanatory system that had developed out of the thinking of Aristotle and that had been expanded and embellished by Islamic authors, the various metals and minerals of the earth were thought to be composed of different amounts of two main ingredients, sulphur and mercury. According to Aristotle, the terrestrial world was composed of four elements earth, air, hre, and water and each element was itself composed of two separate qualities. Earth was cold and dry fire was hot and dry water was cold and... 

In spite of the fact that the phlogiston theory made it possible for a large number of facts to be coordinated into a system, it nevertheless retarded the progress of chemistry and prevented a number of the best chemists from seeing the correct explanation of the facts they uncovered. So until it, along with the four-element theory, were comprehensively rejected, modem chemistry remained unfounded for earth, air, water, and fire are not the elements, and substances do not bum because of the presence in them of a common principle of inflammability. 

These four ingredients show a resemblance to the four elements of the medieval philosophers earth (from which flour is derived), water, air, and fire (corresponding to energy). When energy is imparted to a system comprising a solid (flour), a liquid (water), and a gas (air), it is converted into a material (dough) that has properties of both a liquid and a solid. It has viscosity like a liquid and elasticity like a solid and thus is said to be "viscoelastic"—a property that we will pursue further in Chapter 6. 

We give few examples of the important role of water as a fundamental element in other religious or philosophical systems in the Hinduism, the classical elements are bhumi (earth), ap or Jala (water), agni or tejas (fire), marut or pavan (air or wind), and byom or akasha (aether). The four elements earth, water, fire and air are also found in Buddhism. In the philosophy of the seven Chakras also water plays an important role it is called Svadhisthana (Sacral). 

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