The periodic table tells us we are made from 30 elements, but in our imagination the human condition is much simpler, writes Rebecca Rupp in an extraction from her latest book. —— Rebecca Rupp
1. Socrates's injunction 'know thyself' is tougher than it sounds. Knowing ourselves, much less our families, friends and neighbors, is a colossal endeavour, which explains why psychology is such an acrimonious discipline. What makes us all the intelligent, insightful and delightful people we hope we are is a dauntingly complex mix of genetic, physiological, psychological, evolutionary and environmental factors, melded in some unspecified fashion to make each of us unique. Unique, of course, is relative. Humans share many behavioral, emotional and cognitive traits which predict, more or less, how we’re likely to learn, adapt to changing environments and interact in social situations. Such traits allow psychologists to categorize our personalities.
2. Personality study dates back at least to the ancient Greeks, whose four elements were not only the fundamental substances of matter, but also the raw material of human nature. The idea of elements as determinants of behavior was an outgrowth of the theory of the four essential body fluids, or humors, proposed by Hippocrates. These were phlegm, associated with the element water; blood, associated with air; yellow bile, with fire; and black bile, with earth. One’s dominant humor was believed to determine one's personality type. An individual high in black bile was of melancholic disposition, the human equivalent of Eeyore. Elevated yellow bile rendered its possessor choleric, violent and vengeful – the sort id disposition that led John McEnroe to throw his tennis racket. High blood engendered a sanguine temperament, and produced amorous, cheerful people – Falstaff with a touch of Santa Claus; and phlegm made for timorous types, like Uriah Heep.
3. Though accepted as dogma in western medicine well into the 17th century, the humorous had vanished from medicine by the 20th. Psychological theory continued to reflect ancient Greek constructs, however. In Carl Jung’s Psychological Types, published in 1921, four basic personality functions – feeling, thinking, intuition, and sensation (each with introverted or extroverted aspects) – echo water, air, fire, and earth.
4. While the nature of our psychological elements is open to debate, chemically speaking, we know what we are made of. Though, as elements go, ours are stunningly atypical. Of all the known elements, the universe consists almost entirely of hydrogen and helium which respectively constitute about 90% and 9%. All the rest, from the carbon so integral to organic molecules to the copper that edged us out of the Stone Age, the iron that fueled the Industrial Revolution and the silicon that sent us into cyberspace, are chemical rarities, Our lives depend on the residual 1%.
5. A diamond Consists of one element; table salt, two; sugar, three. A mobile phone contains 42. In shaming contrast, human beings are cobbled together from a mere 30 – predominantly oxygen (65%), carbon (18%), hydrogen (10%) and nitrogen (3%), plus bit players such as calcium, phosphorus, potassium, and sulphur. Boil us down to our elemental constituents and we're worth about $450, according one estimate, and some cynics price us out at less than a dollar. This seems economically shortsighted, since our personal elements – except for hydrogen -- are so exceptionally rare. They're also of impression pedigree. We are the stuff of stars.
6. Our sun, though it consists primarily of hydrogen and helium, contains a smattering of heavier elements: oxygen, carbon. nitrogen, silicon, magnesium,. neon. iron. and sulphur. Their presence indicates that the sun is at least a second-generation star. Our solar system is reconstituted from the remains of an ancient supernova. While the matter of the universe is believed to have been dispersed some 14bn years ago by the Big Bang, the elements in our segment are the result of a secondary boom.
7. The demise of stars is ultimately the result of depleted fuel. Star ordinarily run on hydrogen, converting it, via nuclear fusion. Into helium, with a massive release of energy. As supplies of hydrogen are exhausted, the star begins to sputter to a halt. The drop in energy output initially causes the stellar core to contract; simultaneously the star's outer layers balloon to form a bloated monstrosity known as a red giant. Contraction increases temperatures at the core from 10 m to 100 m C, which allows the star to burn its helium, fusing it to form beryllium, then carbon, then oxygen. A sun-sized star from here has hit its celestial glass ceiling and can go no further; its outer layers dissipate, leaving behind a solid core of slowly cooling crystallized carbon. In larger stars – three times the size of the sun or more -- greater mass allows the core to contract still further, raising temperatures to the point where the now desperate star is able to fuse its reverses of carbon. The process continues – a runaway gallop into the grave – as the start, in increasingly rapid succession, creates new and heavier elements, and then exhausts each new fuel. At last, with one final brief Herculean effort, it fuses silicon producing iron.
8. Iron in stella terms, is the cup of hemlock, the coup de grace, and the end of the line. At this point the start looks like a fiery onion, its iron middle surrounded by concentric layers in which other fusion reactions – making other elements – soldier on. Iron is too stable for the star to fuse. Now deprived of energy and crushed inward by its own gravitational force, the star collapses. Internal temperature rockets to billions of degrees; the layers, instantaneously compressed. Slam violently into the core and bounce back again, flinging their contents into space in a blinding explosion as bright as a billion suns. During the star's death throes, violent atomic collisions generate even heavier elements -- anything heavier than iron is a product of this stellar swan song.
9. The force of the blast propels the elements into space on a glowing wave of gas. Supernovas, astronomers estimate, occur at a rate of about two per century per galaxy, and each seeds its surroundings with the raw material of life. We are, quite literally, stardust. It's a wondrous and briefly ennobling thought. Briefly, that is, because a moment's reflection reveals that our glorious origin is shared by slugs, slime moulds, and driveway gravel.
10. In the millennia since Thales of Miletus posited a world made wholly of water, the elements have been counted, named, weighed, numbered, analyzed, and, in particularly determined laboratories created. The Periodic Table continues to expand; in early 2004, researcher from California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories and Russia’s Joint Institute for Nuclear Research spent a month peppering americium with calcium atoms, finally generating four atoms of two brand new elements: element 115, which persisted for 1/100,000 of a second, and then spat out an alpha particle to form element 113.
11. Our elucidation of the nature of the elements allows us, with ever increasing precision. To understand the world around us. So why do the clumsy and clearly non-elemental four continue to resonate in the human mind?
12. The Periodic Table. once the tool of chemists. appears on T-shirts and coffee mugs, and has been touted as abstract art. It has become an icon of classification: we now have Periodic Tables of music, dance, pasta, vegetables, animals. presidents. beer, and college basketball. Humorist Tom Lehrer has set the entire Table to music. In 2002, Theodore Gray won an Ig Nobel Prize for building a Periodic Table in walnut. Still, the Periodic Table is new. The four elements are our past. Just as literature grew from ancient tales of heroes, talking animals, and children lost in magical woods, so modern science grew from the fundamental four. Water, air, fire. and earth exert their influence at the border where the inner world of imagination meets the outer world of fact.
13. Only one person in a million, wrote Thoreau, is truly awake to the wonders of daily living. 'Few adults can see nature.' said Ralph Waldo Emerson. Perhaps they're right But I prefer to think that the sheer marvels of the planet -- of water, fire. air, and earth -- occasionally flip the blindfolds off our preoccupied eyes. We are the species that sometimes manages to see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower, to see every common bush afire with God. Sometimes, we see what the Greek natural philosophers saw, Sky and ocean, sun and stars. Rain and rocks and mountains.
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