Alchemical "elements" corresponding to phases of m

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For anyone that doesn't know, up until the last couple hundred years the four elements model was prevalent in the scientific community.

These elements were: earth, water, air, and fire.

Does anyone think that these "elements" more or less correspond to:
Solid, liquid, gas, and plasma.

The definitions of these phases have changed over the decades to become more technically accurate, but basically they refer to the same things.

What do you all think?

That's interesting. Which would mean that the traditional categories of earth, air, fire, and water were phases of each other rather than forever separate and unconnected things. Sort of shades of Yin and Yang flowing in and out of each other. Cycles/states. I like that.

Hmm. Thinking about this in context of recently revived interest in astrology. Oddly enough the astrological system divides each of the elements up into those which are mutable/changeable, those which are fixed, and those which are cardinal, ( whatever that means) .

PS: I don't know anything about plasma's place in the phases.

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Plasma is gas that been excited with enough kinetic energy that the electrons temporarily separate from the nucleus and you have a lot of radicals. Charged highly ionized gas, which in some proportion is present in a flame (or electrical spark, or whatnot.)

I'm not in favor or promoting the old view, but I'm saying that there may be a correspondence between that view and the phases of matter which are due to temperature and pressure.

Actually, yes, I have before thought almost that exact same thing, except substituting "energy" as fire instead of plasma.

Yeah, energy might fit with some of the mysticism involved. However, fire displays thermal/kinetic energy whereas there are plenty of other types. Work of friction, gravitational potential, etc.

you forgot the ether.

Which ether? The medium that light was supposed to oscillate within?

I would say: On the surface, yes. Anything beyond that, no.

These are hybrid variables that take on a much greater varieties of meaning in alchemy. This is similar to yin/yang in Chinese philosophy, and the 3 doshas of Ayurveda.... both the Chinese and Indian systems also use a concept of 5 elements. In India, ether (~space) is the fifth element added to the 4 you mention - the Chinese ideas are rather different.

If you look at something like principle components analysis, it is a technique that creates hybrid or artificial variables. Think about quantum physics, where things have properties called 'charm' and 'color' ... these are not literal properties ... it was found that another variable was needed to explain something, and they made up a variable called charm. In Chinese medicine, the different observable patterns (such as condition of the tongue or eyes) were encoded in terms of yin/yang (excess/deficiency) of the five elements and of the various organs - initially just a symbolic representation. Over time, these various terms were related to each other and to disease, in a way that is totally inscruitable to outsiders, but which makes perfect sense and actually has meaning to someone trained in that way of thinking.

for example, if someone is diagnosed as 'liver fire rising' headaches and one takes a literal examination, there will be no fire seen moving from the abdomen to the head. On the other hand, if that is is accepted as an arbitrary name that describes a particular constellation of symptoms, and if it has been determined through trial and error that this constellation of symptoms often responds to particular types of herbs or other therapy, then it makes a certain type of sense, and might even be reconciled with western medicine to a certain degree.

Well, yes, but those weren't known of back then. Aristotelian physics didn't involve friction as a force simply because the natural state of things was to be at rest, and that explained loss of momentum without invoking any other force. And they were a bit fuzzy on gravity as well.

The idea of input=output (a general idea of conservation) wasn't present among the Greeks, so I guess that stalled science for a while.

the black soupy stuff in the sky that held the stars.

Uh, no. Maxwell wrote one of the last papers on it and mentioned nothing of that nonsense.

No. The idea of an element is something indivisible, immutable; unchangeable, in a word. Plus we have aether in the ancient system, and there are no less than five states of matter that we've discovered so far. And before you start getting any funny ideas, BEC isn't anything like aether.

Besides, there are totally eight elements.

No funny ideas here if you actually bothered to read. Boise-Einstein Condensation, wow, is that ever taught to chemistry students? The ancient system? Really now, there were many not just one. Also your use of a modern definition is meaningless in this context and unrelated to what I was saying, which you would have seen if you cared to read rather than try to be a smart-aleck.

I still like the elements, they give me some ideas of things, to me I figured they could be aplied to 4 different things: Earth=soul, water=body, fire=mind and wind=spirit. The soul and earth are at the base also with the coulor brown which is a mixture of the other 3 coulors, blue(water), red(fire) and yellow(wind). And true peace is obtained by matching body, mind and spirit, so you maximise your soul.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFIvXVMbII0[/youtube]

For the record, these are the chemical elements...