Chapter One

Earth, Air, Fire, and Water

The four elements of the physical world, Earth, Air, Fire and Water, proposed by Empedocles in the 5th century B.C., and by unknown Orientals even earlier still serve to define the modern physical world. Obviously our knowledge of the physical world has increased greatly since 500 BC, but the underlying philosophy has not changed. It should soon become apparent that the ancient sages did not believe that all physical objects were constructed out of impacted brown earth or that wooden logs contained fire. Rather, the alchemists had a concept of four fundamental elements which agrees closely with the four units of metrology which serve as the basis for all of the modern physical sciences.

The four elements of the ancients can be compared directly to the units of Dimensional Analysis, a little known but very interesting field of science. Dimensional analysis provides basic building blocks to the market place and measurement standards to science. It has attempted to provide a uniform basis of measurement in all laboratories. Most of our high technology is described by equations which do not explain the hows and whys of operation. They are called empirical equations and are derived using Dimensional Analysis. Ancient mankind knew that the amount of heat which came from a fire depended upon the type of wood that was burned or the heat content of the wood, how fast the air flowed into the fire, how much wood was burned and at what rate. Our knowledge of the whys of fire has not increased except that we know "quantities" such as how many BTUs there are in a piece of wood, or how much air is required. We used these equations to reach the moon, but we also took along old philosophical queries about existence and creation.

Dimensional analysis furnishes "Units" rather than "quantities" to science. The system treats each phenomenon as if it were a combination of the elements of Mass, Length, Time and a fourth component termed energy which can be in the form of heat, electricity, magnetism, or light depending upon the field of application. Being rooted in basic descriptions and definitions of matter and interactions it should not be too surprising to find a correlation between Dimensional Analysis and Alchemy.

The ancient elements are compared with the four elements of dimensional analysis in the table below. In our discussions "space" and "length" will be used interchangeably in the context of dimensional analysis for easier understanding by a non-technical reader.

Ancient:	Earth	Air	Fire	Water
Dimensional Analysis:	Mass	Space	Energy	Time

It can be assumed that the alchemists did not consider their elemental Air to be air as we know it today (a mixture of gasses), but rather to have the basic property of space or that "stuff" which surrounds "things". Similarly Earth was not common dirt but rather the elemental mass or materialistic property which earth demonstrated. Fire represented an elemental nature of the source of power which could cause things to change. The sun had Fire and could cause things to grow, man had Fire and could cause things to happen, a glowing ember had Fire and could cause clay to fuse into pottery. To people living with nature, time was not clock time as we know it in our modern world. Time was equated with change or the nature of things which flowed like water. Time was depicted with the element Water. The seasons are like the debris carried by rivers, always passing and yet always different. One's life is similar to water, first active as rain, then forceful as a river and then sedentary as a lake. The passing of life or time was as mysterious as the tides of the ocean or the erosion of rock by flowing water and had a direction which was irreversible.

The four elements of the ancient alchemists were symbols of the mysteries contained within the physical world, and accepted as such. This is in contrast with the modern world in which mysteries are denied or hidden. If a child asks, "where does the light come from when a light bulb is turned on?", our culture is content with the answer, "it comes from electricity". The question is answered by naming another unknowable, an explanation of a more fundamental step in the production of light, but does not answer the question. How does electricity produce light? Physicists if pressed would explain that electricity heats up the filament of the bulb and that causes light. The next question is how do hot filaments produce light? This game can continue on and ultimately the most wise must admit that it is a mystery where the light comes from. The ancients appear to have been more accepting of the mystery in the symbol.

Mysteries had no place in the 19th and early 20th century sciences. The underlying belief of Materialism was that there was only one reality and it was physical. Any aspect of the world could be reduced to tangible, measurable and consistent building blocks. If it could not be physically measured and reproduced, it was not real.

Papers published in technical journals had to be devoid of any evidence of mystical or non-physical attributes. Life disappeared in biology textbooks and became a physical process which could then be categorized. Consciousness was lost to psychologists who replaced it with receptor signals and conditioned responses as if human beings were electronic machines. Energy became an accounting procedure for the physicists. Energy could at least be accounted for and quantified if not explained.

The early 20th century scientists were in error when they believed they had fully defined atoms as the building blocks of the universe and that they knew the meaning of mass, space, energy and time. The ancients were not constrained in their pursuit of the metaphysical and were able to develop philosophies based on mystical elements which could help to define reality. Their attempts to integrate physical measurement were admittedly crude. In the closing decades of the 20th century we can again see the mysteries and the complexities involved in the four basic elements. We still cannot define time, energy, mass or space except in terms of the other elements. We are no closer to knowing about "time" than the ancients knew about "water". We now ponder what the space-time continuum proposed by Einstein and others really means. We are beginning to rediscover the capability to integrate the physical and the metaphysical, a process that began with Einstein.

In the materialistic viewpoint of Newton and Descartes the separate building blocks of the world each had a specific function and place. Einstein however shocked the world by stating that energy could be transformed into matter or vice versa. He argued that two inseparable basic building blocks were convertible into each other. As if this revelation were not enough, he also equated time with space and argued that one was dependent upon the other. In his famous equation E=mc2 he showed the equivalence of energy to space, time and mass. This equation in combination with his earlier definitions demonstrated that each element has no meaning unless coupled with other elements. There could not be separate building blocks because each block was formed from a combination of the others. There followed a gradual awakening of the scientific world to concepts which had long been ignored. Two statements which would have been impossible to put into print a decade earlier were Bohr's statement that the old classical concepts of space and time had limited application, and Whitehead's argument that reality only has meaning when the building blocks are changing; if there is no change, there can be no reality.

Physics was encountering the same type of problems which had long beset psychologists and biologists. One could define "sweetness" for instance or "pain" yet neither existed by itself and had to be related to the interface of a person experiencing sweetness or pain.

Quantum mechanics later gave evidence of the statistical structure of reality by stating that there is not one detailed plan for reality, but rather that events are reactions which can go in many different ways. Reality is more like a dice game than a canned program. Modern physicists observed and proved the relationship of observer to observed reality. For example if we watch the dice game closely enough, we begin to affect the outcome of the game. Finally the use of drugs which change the perception of experiential reality became so widespread that society at large has been forced to accept the premise that reality exists in the mind of the beholder.

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