I have this huge enormous fat chemistry book. Many of you may know it, it is the Checkpoint book made by the Cambridge team. It’s not too big, but I consider it to be because 7th to 8th grade was an enormous leap. There are fifteen chapters that cover around 170 pages, and we have to finish the book in five months. Now for anybody, that would be a lot. But I’m not writing this article to talk about the Checkpoint series, this is an interesting article from it. The book has a lot of short stories in between stories, as a matter of fact the entire series does. They are all about discoveries made in the past and how it evolved slowly, or how it didn’t yet. This is a small story called ‘the first ideas of matter’ which obviously and the title says, talks about the first discoveries of matter. Enjoy-

The First Ideas about Matter

The earliest people used the materials they could find around them such as wood, stone, antlers and skin. When people learned to make fire they began to change one material into another. First they learned how to cook food, then how to bake clay and make pottery and bricks. Eventually the learned how to heat some rocks in charcoal fires so strongly that a chemical reaction took place in which a metal was produced.

By 600 BC, philosophers in the Greek civilisation were thinking about what different things were made of. They were puzzled by the way one substance could be changed into another. They asked the question, ‘If a rock can be turned into a metal, what really is the rock? Is the rock a kind of metal or is the metal a kind of rock?’ They then thought that if one substance could change into another, perhaps it could go on changing into other substances. They did not carry out experiments to test their observations and ideas but tried to explain them with more ideas.

A greek philosopher called Thales (642- 542 BC) believed that all substances were made from different forms of one single substance. He called this substance an element. He observed how water changed from solid to liquid to gas and how plants and animals needed water to stay alive. From these observations he concluded that everything was made from different forms of water.

Other philosophers did not agree with Thales. Some believed that everything was made from air. They believed that air reached up from the ground and filled the whole of space. They thought that air could be squashed to make liquids and solids. Some philosophers suggested that fire was the basic element because it was always changing and it was this element in everything that made things change.

Eventually, it was agreed that there were four elements from which all matter was made. The elements were air, water, fire and earth. Each element was given properties, and the way that the elements and their properties were related to each other is shown by the terms we use to describe the weather (hot, dry, wet and cold).

The Greeks’ ideas of the elements were used for 2000 years to explain the structure of materials and the way they change.