3.2 The Classical Elements and Quantum Field Theory

Most ancient civilizations, such as the Sumerian, Babylonian, Chinese, Hindu, and the Greek, employed the four elements of Earth, Water, Air, and Fire to explain the origin and complexity of nature and the structure of matter and sometimes other incorporeal entities. Additionally, a fifth element is also added to explain the origin of these four elements themselves.

However, these different cultures, and even individual philosophers, had widely varying explanations concerning the attributes of these elements and how they are related to observable phenomena. Sometimes these theories overlapped with mythology and were personified in deities, as we have seen in reviewing the ancient creation theories in Chapter I of Volume III. Some of these interpretations also included the atomistic philosophy, while others considered the elements to be divisible into infinitely small pieces without changing their nature.

The ancient Greek belief in the five elements dates from pre-Socratic times, where philosophers had debated which substance was the primordial element from which everything else was made; Heraclitus elected fire, Thales favored water, Anaximenes supported air, while Anaximander argued that the primordial substance was not any of the known substances, but could be transformed into them, and they into each other. As we shall see further below, Ibn al-Arabi affirms that water is actually the source, but we need to understand first what is really meant by “water” , as well as the other elements, and how do they differ from the familiar materials such as the water that we drink.

In his treatise On Generation and Corruption, Aristotle related each of the four elements to two of the four sensible qualities, whereby:

• Fire is both hot and dry.

• Air is both hot and moist.

• Water is both cold and moist.

• Earth is both cold and dry.

Aristotle also added the fifth element of aether, as the quintessence, meaning: the fifth essence, that is incorruptible, unlike the other four earthly elements. This is in good agreement with the Duality of Time Theory, where we shall see that these four elements: earth, water, air, and fire, that the Sumerians employed to explain the complexity of nature, can be interpreted as the four condensation levels of aether, or quintessence, that is the background space which is created dynamically in the inner levels of time. These four elements, together with their quintessence, are the five levels of time that correspond to the various possible degrees of freedom, or dimensions, starting from the metaphysical oneness 0D and up to the three dimensions 1D, 2D, and 3D of physical multiplicity that is dynamically evolving through the outer time T, where earth, or physical mass, is exhibited. So in total we have four levels of dynamic existence in time: 1D, 2D, 3D, and T, which become seven when considering the two opposite directions of each one of the three physical spatial dimensions: 1D, 2D, and 3D. From these seven levels of time come the seven days of the week, while the seven heavens and seven earths are their corresponding two extreme states, which correspond to vacuum and void, from whose superposition all the states of matter are composed.

Philosophers also took various opinions as to which one of the four elements was created first, or whether they were all created from a fifth essence [I.138-9], and Ibn al-Arabi affirms that water was the first to be created. The source of confusion is because it is not clear what is meant by “water” , and also the other three elements. Of course, it is impossible for the normal molecular water, composed of hydrogen and oxygen, to be the source of all other elements, but it is indeed the super-fluid field described by (c, 0), which is the flat 2D space from which all elementary particles emerge as excitations in the imaginary time, and then condense and combine into atoms and molecules to form the various states of matter, including the molecular water, as well as heavier and lighter elements and compounds.

During the Islamic Golden Age, some scientists applied experimental observations to study and classify the chemical materials. This was first called Alchemy, but eventually this was replaced by the modern industrious chemistry that is based on pure rational materialism. Centuries of empirical investigation have proven that this simple ancient system of the four classical elements did not provide the correct explanation of the physical world, since it is now well established that the modern atomic theory is a correct explanation, and that atoms can be classified into more than a hundred chemical elements, including gases: such as hydrogen and oxygen, metals: such as iron and mercury, and many other natural and synthetic elements. Naturally, most of these elements can form many chemical compounds and mixtures, and under different temperatures and pressures, these substances can adopt different states of matter, such as solid, liquid, gas, and plasma, which may share many attributes with the classical elements of Earth, Water, Air, and Fire, respectively. However, it is now known that these states are due to similar behavior of different types of atoms at similar energy levels, and not due to containing a certain type of atom or a certain type of infinitely divisible substance or energy.

The four classical elements arise from the combination of the two properties of hotness and dryness, and their contraries of coldness and wetness. Fire and Water are obvious opposites, and so are Earth and Air, because they have no common properties. In contrary, Fire and Air share the property of hotness, Water and Air share the property of wetness, and so on. Therefore, since the four elements are two pairs of opposite elements, so also are the four properties; hotness being the opposite of coldness and wetness the opposite of dryness. This can be visualized in Figure III.1.

Figure III.1: The four classical elements and their four properties.

These four elements do not exist in their pure form, and that’s why the could not actually be found on Earth. The various chemical elements of actual matter are thought to be some proportional mixtures of these four ideal elements. This also applies to incorporeal things, such as the souls of individual humans and also other creatures. Therefore, the elements could be changed into one another by removal of one property and addition of another until a certain balance is achieved. The goal of the Alchemist is to adjust the properties of imperfect elements in order to transmute them into their most perfect state, normally via an agent called elixir, that is capable of removing all residuals and purifying and refining the metal and balancing it, and then ultimately converting it into Gold, which is the perfect state of metals.

In trying to integrate ancient philosophy with the teachings of Islam, most Muslim scholars adopted the concepts of the four elements and merged them into their various studies of psychology, medicine and physics. Alchemists, in particular, attempted to find a Grand Universal Theory that described the whole of perfect creation, governed by elegant laws. As we have seen in the concluding chapter of Volume II, Jabir believed that the elements can be combined to make every other substance. This became the basis of his theory of metals and he proposed that all metals were made of sulphur and mercury, the intermediate stages between the elements and metals. Gold was the perfect combination of sulphur and mercury, but other metals were contaminated by impurities, with copper, silver lead and the other known metals resulting from this. In Jabir’s Islamic alchemy, the task was to restore the impurity by removing the impurities from the metal and ending up with gold.

Ibn al-Arabi explains all this in a profound discussion, in chapter 295 [II.274-9] of the Meccan Revelations, that contains other useful information on the various subjects tackled in this chapter and the previous volumes. It is next to impossible to provide any full accurate translation of this particular chapter of the Futuhat, since it contains many bolted sentences and symbolic poetry which is very difficult to interpret even by the most specialized scholars who have studied Ibn al-Arabi for years. Therefore, we will provide a summarized and somehow rough translation in the following long quote:

When Allah created the Roaming Spirits ... and He designated one of them, that is the First Intellect, which was the first creative existent; and after that, without any time intermission, the (Universal) Soul was emanated from it. This Soul is the Tablet in which is written the entities of all the beings in this Lower World, (and all what is going to happen) till the day of resurrection; that is Allah’s fore-knowledge of his creation. ... Therefore, the Soul was less luminous than the Pen, that is the Intellect, so it is like a Green Emerald (while the Intellect is like a White Pearl). Then, from this Soul, the essence of Chaos was emanated, which was absolutely dark, without any light (thus it is sometimes called: the Black Bead), and Allah made the (abstract) state of Nature (with its four elements) between the Soul and this Chaos, as an absolute state, not yet physically created.

As Allah established the logical reasons and rules (that governs the world), thus He spread the world between light and darkness, due to the ruling of manifestation and veiling (of His divine Names), thus He determined how (and when) all things start and finish according to certain destinations. All things have beginnings and endings, due to His Names: the First and the Last. Accordingly, Allah gave to this Soul an active force (and an intellective force, as we explained in Chapter IV of Volume II) from which Allah created the Universal Body in the essence of Chaos, ... and the first shape this body took was the circular shape, which is the most perfect shape; it is like letter alif with regard to the rest of letters ... and the first shape that appeared after the circle was the triangle. Then from the equilateral triangle, all shapes in all kinds of bodies can be infinitely generated, but the best and most perfected shape is the hexagon.

Then Allah held the form of this First Body in Chaos, according to the state of Nature that was determined between the Soul and Chaos, otherwise this Body would not exist and would not be held in Chaos; so (the state of) Nature is like the toolbox for the Soul, from which it can make all kinds of forms in Chaos. Therefore, the Universal Body appeared in Chaos by the tool of hotness, and life appeared in it by the accompany of hotness and moistness, while its form was held via coldness and dryness. (Consequently) Allah made this Body like a Chair (with four legs), and created for it four actual holders (which are the fundamental forces) in this Lower World, and other four effective holders which shall combine with the previous four in the Hereafter Day, so they will become eight.... (since as we showed in Chapter VII of the Single Monad Model that the Day of the Hereafter will start a new spatial dimension as the world is expanding.)

(then Ibn al-Arabi mentions many interesting facts about the structure of the world, and its anti-world, how the zodiac and constellations came to exist, how the stars were formed, and he described their motion, speaking also in some details about how motion is the result of Love)

Then Allah created the element of water, which was the first to be created amongst the four elements, but we mentioned the earth first because of its lowness, so actually water was created first and what condensed out of it formed earth, and then what became thin was air, and what was thiner formed fire, which is the sphere of aether. ... These elements came to exist in Scorpio, and Allah estimated for each zone a certain duration, with some overlapping, but they all together have a duration that we call the age of the world, and when this time is over, things return back as they have started, and so on, endlessly; so there is never any end for its essence, but the forms are never repeated again, so the creation is ever new. ... The world is created anew at every breath, without any repetition whatsoever.

When all these elements found the required fertile environment that became ready for the appearance of physical creation, as the effect of the hotness of fire ignited the moistness of air and water, from which smoke started to elevate to the higher orbs until it formed dense clouds that accumulated and mixed together, until Allah split that into seven heavens, and as a result of the sparks that were produced and burned the humid clouds, the planets (stars) were formed and the skies were lit just as the house is lit by the lamp. [II.274-9]

Then after that Ibn al-Arabi mentions some more details about the formation of life and animals, and then he says in the conclusion that the first person to teach these sciences was prophet Idris, peace be upon him, who is the Biblical Enoch, and the same known Hermes Trismegistus, the purported author of the Hermetic Corpus and other sacred texts that are the basis of Hermeticism, including Alchemy, as we described in Chapter VII of Volume II.

Figure III.2: Quadratic Origins: Ibn al-Arabi showed that everything in the World is based on some divine realities, and because there are four fundamental divine Names or Attributes: Living, Ability, Knowing, and Willing; the emergent worlds are always based on four fundamental facts, such as the four classical elements of Nature.

quadratic

Ibn al-Arabi explained that everything in the World must be based on some divine realities. For this reason, as we explained in Chapter IV of Volume II, and reproduced it again in Figure III.2, the emergent worlds are always based on four fundamental facts, such as the four classical elements of Nature and four levels of symmetry. All this is due to the fact that there are four fundamental divine Names or Attributes: Living, Ability, Knowing, and Willing, that are necessary and sufficient for Godship. Allah alone is the only One God Who is described by these four Attributes, in their absolute extent, and everything else in the world is also described by them but to some relative extent. As we shall see in the coming chapter, with every level of symmetry more of these attributes are realized in creation, but absolute Ability, for example, is realized through the intrinsic spin of every abstract point of space, which determines how its wave function will collapse into the specific states at every instance of time.

In the Quran, however, there is no direct reference to the four elements, but Allah mentioned in one verse that He made from “Water” everything living. The normal direct interpretation of this verse is that the biological life of all animals is dependent on normal molecular water. However, if we take the literal ontological meaning of “everything” , as all entities in the world, and the abstract meaning of “living” as “moving” , so this verse means that Allah caused all things to move, after they were absolutely constant entities in the divine foreknowledge, as we shall explain further in Chapter IV.

Nevertheless, we can clearly see that the reason why Allah described that this living is initiated from “Water” is because the real 2D vacuum (c, 0) is (like) water, because it is created internally at the speed of light, without any outer time, which is literally like an ocean providing the ground state of matter since the physical particles are its excitations in the outward level of time, that are described by (c, v), as we have seen in Chapter V of Volume II. This means that particles are created internally at the speed of light in the inner real 2D dimensions, and they are moving externally at the imaginary velocity v in the outer time level. So when this imaginary velocity tends to zero, which corresponds to absolute zero temperature, we will end up in what is called Bose-Einstein condensate, which under certain conditions becomes a super-fluid, which is the absolute meaning of “Water” .

Figure III.3: The Splitting of the Heavens and Earth into two parallel Worlds that exist in two orthogonal arrows of time. This is equivalent to splitting the perfectly symmetrical three-dimensional space, into two two-dimensional space-time with orthogonal time directions, which formed the physical and psychical worlds, each of which is 2D+1. Each of these two symmetrical worlds is based on the four classical elements of Nature: Earth, Water, Air and Fire, which are the four complex-time quantum fields described by: (0, 0), (c, 0), (0, c) and (c, c), respectively.

In the same abstract sense, the state of (0, c) is “Air” , because we do not observe it although we are immersed in it; and this is actually the dark energy that is balancing the effect of gravity on large scales, as we shall see further in Chapter II, while dark matter is the inert state of water (c, 0) that is the 2D vacuum. This also has far more interesting meanings that needs many books to introduce, but it suffices to mention here that the psychical states and all kinds of abstract knowledge or information are the physical objects of this anti-world, but they are invisible for us because we are in different time dimensions, although we are continuously interacting at every instance of time.

This subject, as we can see, opens up many gates to whole new sciences that are completely describable in terms of genuinely-complex time-time geometry, from which we can obtain the four fundamental states: (0, 0), (c, 0), (0, c), and (c, c). From these four states we get all the fundamental quadratic origins that we described in Chapter IV of Volume II (see in particular Figure IV.9), including the four fundamental divine Attributes and the four elements of Nature, as summarized in Table III.1.

In recent years, some theories suggested that vacuum is a kind of super-fluid, or Bose-Einstein condensate, although its microscopic structure is unknown, but some initial scientific models were formulated that could explain the four known fundamental interactions in terms of this super-fluid vacuum. According to this approach, the background super-fluid is assumed to be essentially non-relativistic whereas the Lorentz symmetry is considered as approximate description valid only for small fluctuations. The fluctuations of vacuum super-fluid become relativistic objects at small momenta, and non-relativistic at large momenta. Other models consider vacuum to be strongly-correlated quantum Bose liquid whose ground-state wave-function is described by the logarithmic Schroedinger equation. In this case, the relativistic gravitational interactions arise as the small-amplitude collective excitation mode, whereas relativistic elementary particles can be described by the particle-like modes in the limit of low energies and momenta.

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Table 3.1: The divine quadratic origin of the four elements in Nature.

Advocates of super-fluid vacuum theories claim that they provide mass generation mechanism that replaces or alters the electroweak Higgs one, because masses of elementary particles can arise as a result of interaction with the super-fluid vacuum, similarly to the gap generation mechanism in superconductors.