The Four Elements

The four Classical elements typically refer to the concepts, rejected by modern science, in ancient Greece of earth, water, air, fire, which were proposed to explain the nature and complexity of all matter in terms of simpler substances, they later added a fifth element ether, which was though to be the substance that holds all other substances. Other Ancient cultures in Babylonia, Japan, Tibet, and India had similar lists, sometimes referring in local languages to “air” as “wind” and the fifth element as “void”, the term void has also been interpreted as “self” or “spirit”.

In our modern understanding of the world we live in, there are a lot more than four elements. However with respect to biological life there are four elements that are more common. i.e. Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen and Nitrogen. In this piece I tried to combine the modern observations, with the ancient intuition of what matter is.