The First Table of Elements:

The early Greeks also considered the composition of things. Anaximines of Miletus, c. 525 B.C. proposed that everything made out of the four elements. This idea prevailed for many centuries.

Do we still have this idea today?

It was believed that earth was some sort of condensation of air, while fire was some sort of emission from air. When earth condenses out of air, fire is created in the process.

This model is completely consistent with the Greek bias that Nature is highly ordered and that "science" is all about deducing the ordering elements. Plato will later get into this big time with his Theory of Forms:

This theory was meant to deal with following primary issue:

The Problem of Permanence and Change: How can the world appear to be both permanent and changing? The world we perceive through ours senses appears to be constantly changing.

However, the world that we perceive through the mind, using our concepts and cognitive structures, seems to be permanent and unchanging.

Which world (sensory or cognitive) is the most real and how is it that the world can appear both ways to human perceptions?

But prior to the emergence of strict logic as championed by Plato and Aristotle, there was dissent and an alternative world view.

The most spokesman for the alternative world view was Democritus who postulated the existence of indestructible atoms ( from the Greek a-tome: that which cannot be cut) of an infinite variety of shapes and sizes. He imagined an infinite universe containing an infinite number of such atoms, in between the atoms there is an absolute void.

This implies, in essence:

• The Universe is random and runs by itself
• There is no order in Nature
• But, how do the atoms interact?

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