II.3.4 Super Symmetry and the Four Classical Elements

Just like the Seven Heavens, most ancient civilizations 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 section i.2. 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.

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 II.4.

Figure II.4: 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.

Figure II.5: 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.

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 II.5, 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  vacuum  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 , 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  dimensions, and they are moving externally at the imaginary velocity  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 II.6: 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 words, 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  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  that is the  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: , , , and . 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 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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#	space-time	divine Att.	Nat. Prop.	Elements	Primordials
		Ability	hotness	Fire	Intellect
		Knowing	coldness	Air	Soul
		Living	moistness	Water	Chaos
		Willing	dryness	Earth	Nature

Table 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.