In Europe, the ancient Greek concept, devised by Empedocles, evolved into the system of Aristotle and Hippocrates, who introduced systematic classification into the area, which evolved slightly into the medieval system, which for the first time in Europe became subject to experimental verification in the 1600s, during the Scientific Revolution. While the classification of the material world in ancient Indian, Hellenistic Egypt, and ancient Greece into air, earth, fire, and water was more philosophical, during the Middle Ages medieval scientists used practical, experimental observation to classify materials. Some of these interpretations included atomism (the idea of very small, indivisible portions of matter), but other interpretations considered the elements to be divisible into infinitely small pieces without changing their nature. Sometimes these theories overlapped with mythology and were personified in deities.
These different cultures and even individual philosophers had widely varying explanations concerning their attributes and how they related to observable phenomena as well as cosmology. Ancient cultures in Greece, Tibet, and India had similar lists which sometimes referred, in local languages, to "air" as "wind" and the fifth element as "void". The classical elements typically refer to earth, water, air, fire, and (later) aether which were proposed to explain the nature and complexity of all matter in terms of simpler substances.
0 kommentar(er)
