funnily enough, there's a course in bristol that used to be taught at the physics department, called air water earth fire, i think it was atmospheric physics, though didn't take it so wouldn't know. but yeah,i'm always for resuscitating ancient greek theories, call it the nationalistic me peeking through, dressed under a heavy intellectual mantle.

I'm not asking that we resuscitate it, just that we re-evaluate it.

"dressed under a heavy intellectual mantle"

I would have said "anorak" myself...

Nous sommes tous M. Jourdain - et surtout Haris...

Hang on Eric, I think they WERE supposed to have certain "properties" in themselves... "primarily wet and secondarily hot" for "air" etc. etc. - would not "hot, wet, dry, and cold" then be in some respects "more" fundamental?

Good heavens - were Bose-Einstein condensates apparent to unaided observation back then?

I think the Chinese had five - dashed ingenious of them...

aren't we making an equivocation here, in the sense that we're confounding 'forms of matter' (ie the four or five elements) and the different varieties of matter (the different elements) somehow. it seems to me that to want to talk of 113 different abstract entities that are matter seems to multiply things unnecessarily, whereas it would be perfectly legitimate in our world-view to talk of one variety of things-atomic matter- with its many instantiations.

Haris: I am ALWAYS equivocal, save when I write 8 page replies...

Michael: I know; hence my reply ;) But as for the ingenious Chinese, check out the One Source of All Human Knowledge: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_elements

I've been keeping my fingers crossed that no-one would mention the "quintessence" - up to now, I've been lucky, but the cat's out of the bag

Recently, in 2013, I had a similar idea i.e. that the four elements of Ancient Greek philosophy Earth, Water, Air and Fire correspond to the four phases; solid, liquid, gaseous and plasma. My idea was partly inspired by reading Thomas Kuhn's book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". There, he argues that the Greek philosophers were using a different paradigm to modern scientists and thus their arguments were valid in their thinking but not in ours. The idea of chemical elements was not invented until the late 18th Century, and so if we translate the the Ancient Greek for element to the modern word phase then their definition does make sense.

Of course this is not an original view. If you follow David Hirst's link to Classical elements, this correspondence between Greek elements and modern phases is described.

There, the five Chinese elements are also listed viz. Fire, Earth, Water, Metal, and Wood. These could be described in modern terms as chemical: reaction, mixture, inorganic compound, element, and organic compound.

I prefer the Greek partitioning, but then I am European!