Famous Scientists

  • Home
  • Top 100 Scientists
  • List of Scientists
  • Blog

Empedocles

Empedocles

Lived c. 490 BC – c 430 BC.

Empedocles lived 2500 years ago, soon after the dawn of scientific thought in Ancient Greece.

In his remarkable life Empedocles devised a theory of natural selection; proposed that everything in existence is made of different combinations of four elements: air, fire, wind and earth; recognized that air has weight; said that the speed of light is finite; and made a statement equivalent to the modern law that mass is conserved in chemical reactions.

Advertisements

Beginnings

Empedocles was born 2500 years ago, in approximately 490 BC.

Like many people who lived so long ago, details of his life are sketchy. Scholars rely on fragments from a variety of ancient sources to learn something of his life and his ideas.

Empedocles himself tells us he was born in Acragas, on the island of Sicily, which was then part of Ancient Greece. Acragas was a magnificent city, culturally and financially rich.

Empedocles’ family was well-known and wealthy. His grandfather, whose name was also Empedocles, kept racehorses. His father, Meton, was an Olympic Champion.

Empedocles was educated by the Pythagoreans, who taught him that, on an intellectual level, numbers are the most important thing in the universe. All things could be reduced to numbers, which offered the perfect way of understanding the universe.

It is unlikely that he ever met Pythagoras, who probably died a few years before Empedocles was born.

Lifetimes of Selected Ancient Greek Scientists and Philosophers

mpedocles-life-scholars

PhilolausActually, everything that can be known has a Number; for it is impossible to grasp anything with the mind or to recognize it without this.

Philolaus, c. 470 – c. 385 BC
Pythagorean Scientist and Philosopher
 

The Science of Empedocles

What we know of Empedocles’ science comes from three sources:

  • references from other ancient scientists and philosophers, such as Aristotle
  • fragments of Empedocles’ lengthy poem On Nature
  • fragments of Empedocles’ lengthy poem Purifications

The Elements

Empedocles devised the theory that all substances are made of four pure, indestructible elements: air, fire, water, and earth.

Empedocles four elements

In one sense, it is admirable that Empedocles tried to simplify our complex world into basic elements.

However, his four elements actually represented an increase in the number of fundamental substances.

  • Thales, the first scientist in Ancient Greece (and quite possibly the world) had proposed about 100 years earlier that a single element – water – made everything.
  • Then a relatively unknown philosopher by the name of Anaximenes proposed air, not water, was the basic stuff of the universe.
  • Finally, yet another philosopher, Heraclitus, said fire was actually the true substance all others were made of.

Empedocles probably could not square the idea of a single element world with his own observations, and therefore he increased the number of elements. He described air, fire, water, and earth as:

“the fourfold root of all things.”

He believed everything in the universe was made of four elements, including living organisms. He also believed all matter, whether alive or not, was conscious.

Rather mystically, he believed matter was held together by a fundamental force of the universe he described as Love and pushed apart by another force – Strife.

Although mistaken, his four element theory proved to be remarkably long-lived. About a century after Empedocles devised it, Aristotle popularized and added to it.

Empedocles’ four elements came to be known as the Aristotelian Elements.

For over two millennia people believed these elements were the basis of all matter. The theory had incredible staying power. Eventually the work of rational, evidence-based experimenters such as Robert Boyle and Antoine Lavoisier relegated the importance of the four elements to a historical curiosity.

Conservation of Mass-Energy

In the 1770s Antoine Lavoisier established his famous mass conservation law, which says:

“The total mass of a chemical reaction’s products is identical to the total mass of the starting materials.”

Other scientists in the 1600s and 1700s had also made statements of mass conservation.

However, over 2000 years earlier, Empedocles said something along the lines of:

“Nothing new comes or can come into being; the only change that can occur is a change in the arrangement of the elements.”

In poetic form, he said of the four elements:

Empedocles“For from these elements has budded all
That was or is or evermore shall be…
…Through one another, they take new faces
By varied mingling and enduring change.”

Empedocles
On Nature
 

Evolution

Empedocles was the first person in history to propose that today’s life on Earth arose from a process we could describe as natural selection.

Natural Selection Monster

In On Nature, he pictured Earth in its early days populated by bizarre creatures – cattle with human heads, arms without shoulders, and all sorts of other monstrous creatures. These strange lifeforms became extinct, Empedocles said, leaving the creatures we now see.

Empedocles arrived at this rudimentary description of natural selection soon after the birth of science. He did not realize that natural selection might lead to the evolution of entirely new species. In his eyes it had operated in the past simply to remove freakish creatures.

The Speed of Light

Empedocles believed the speed of light is not infinite. We know this because, although Empedocles’ own work on this topic has been lost, Aristotle tells us:

Aristotle“Empedocles says that the sun’s light arrives first in the intervening space before it reaches our eyes or the earth. This seems reasonable.”

Aristotle, 384 – 322 BC
De sensu
 

Rather than having modern-style thoughts about the speed of light, Empedocles might have been thinking more in terms of Zeno’s famous dichotomy paradox. The Greek philosopher Zeno lived at the same time as Empedocles, so his paradox would probably have influenced Empedocles’ ideas.

In Zeno’s dichotomy paradox, you are trying to get to a destination. Clearly, you must reach the halfway point before you reach your destination. Having traveled halfway, you are still not at your destination. In fact, you now face a new, albeit shorter, journey in which you must still travel halfway before you reach your destination, etc, etc. Zeno’s paradox is that if you must always reach halfway points you will never arrive at your final destination.

Thankfully, Empedocles did not tie himself up in the sort of knots Zeno delighted in. However, if Empedocles’ thoughts were in tune with his time, he might well have acknowledged that light coming from the sun must reach a halfway point before reaching the earth. This could be what he is suggesting in the quote above.

Whatever his thought processes were, Empedocles was right – the sun’s light does not reach us instantly, and hence the speed of light is finite.

Senses

Empedocles believed our senses do not reveal the whole world to us. There are things out there that our limited senses do not allow us to observe. It would be nice to believe he was thinking of ultraviolet or infrared light, but he wasn’t. He was, with commendable wisdom, simply expressing a general principle.

Respiration, Air Pressure and Compression

In On Nature, Empedocles tried to explain breathing by comparing it to how a device for lifting water operates.

Although his ideas about breathing were rather inaccurate, his description of the water-lifter has generated a good deal of interest.

water lifter

The clepsydra – the water-lifter.

Empedocles described a girl playing with a clepsydra – a hollow metal sphere with holes punched in the bottom and a larger hole at the top which can be covered with a finger, as shown on the left.

Empedocles noted that when the girl blocks the top hole with her finger, and submerges the vessel in water, no liquid enters. It is blocked by the weight of air in the clepsydra. If she then removes her finger, the compressed air is pushed out by the water rushing in.

Likewise, he said that when the clepsydra is lifted full of water up into the air and the hole at the top is blocked by a finger, the air outside the clepsydra trying to get in keeps the liquid inside the clepsydra. When the finger is removed air rushes in and the water falls in a shower downwards.

Some authors, such as Carl Sagan in his magnificent Cosmos, have described Empedocles’ observations as ‘an experiment.’

There are also claims that Empedocles was carrying out this ‘experiment’ trying to prove that air, although invisible, was a substance. In fact, it seems likely that his intended audience already knew air was a substance.

Empedocles was actually using the well-known clepsydra and the (probably) equally well-known principle of how it worked to try to explain something more difficult – the process of breathing. We can therefore deduce that educated Ancient Greeks were happy with the concept of air as a substance.

The fact Empedocles recognized that air has weight is historically significant.

Astronomy

According to Empedocles, the four elements emerged from a vortex and condensed into the earth.

He pictured the universe with the earth at its center, and the sun as a vast collection of fire. He described a solar eclipse in these terms:

Empedocles“The moon passing under the sun’s beams
darkens a bleak tract of Earth
as large as the breadth of her. [the moon]”

Empedocles
On Nature
 

Empedocles said the heavens are spherical and crystalline and revolve around the earth. The stars are patches of fire fixed to the sphere.

Some Personal Details and the End

Empedocles was in favor of government by democracy, and he is reputed to have been unenthusiastic about following rules made by other people.

He was a vegetarian. He believed human souls could inhabit animals’ bodies, so it would be murderous and even cannibalistic to kill and eat any animal. This was a typical Pythagorean belief.

In Purifications Empedocles claimed that he is a god with thousands of followers:

Empedocles“I, an immortal god, no more a mortal, so honored by all, go about among you… I am praised by men and women, and followed by thousands who ask for deliverance…”

Empedocles
Purifications
 

Whether or not he actually believed he was a god is unclear. Perhaps it was poetic license? He may have been completely serious. Accounts say he was a solemn, dignified person, who was able to perform magic and heal the sick.

Empedocles is reputed to have died when he threw himself into the molten crater of Mount Etna, the volcano that dominates Sicily. Accounts of this incident differ. Some say he did this because he did not want his body found, so people would think he had truly been a god. Or possibly he was trying to prove his immortality, and he actually believed he would return to his followers as a fully fledged god.

Alternatively, and less dramatically, he did not jump into the volcano; he moved to the Peloponnese peninsula in southern Greece, where he died of an unknown cause.

According to Aristotle, Empedocles died aged about sixty. Other ancient sources claim he lived to the age of 77 or 109.

Advertisements

Author of this page: The Doc
Images digitally enhanced and colorized by this website. © All rights reserved.

Cite this Page

Please use the following MLA compliant citation:

"Empedocles." Famous Scientists. famousscientists.org. 13 Nov. 2015. Web.  
<www.famousscientists.org/empedocles/>.

Published by FamousScientists.org

Further Reading
William Ellery Leonard
The Fragments of Empedocles
Open Court Publishing, 1908

Diogenes Laertius
Lives of Eminent Philosophers, translated by R.D. Hicks
William Heinemann, 1925

William Keith Chambers Guthrie
A History of Greek Philosophy: Volume 2, The Presocratic Tradition from Parmenides to Democritus
Cambridge University Press, 1962

Jonathan Barnes
The Presocratic Philosophers
Routledge, 2002

More from FamousScientists.org:
  • Pythagoras
    Pythagoras
  • Aristotle
    Aristotle
  • Anaximander
    Anaximander
  • Robert Boyle
    Robert Boyle
Advertisements

Search Famous Scientists

Scientist of the Week

  • Linda Buck: Discovered how we smell things

Recent Scientists of the Week

  • Jan Ingenhousz: Discovered photosynthesis
  • Barry Marshall: Overturned the Medical Establishment
  • Linus Pauling: Maverick Giant of Chemistry
  • William Röntgen: The Discovery of X-rays
  • Howard Florey: Brought penicillin to the world
  • Henrietta Leavitt: The key to the size of the universe
  • Archimedes: A mind beyond his time
  • Stanley Milgram: The infamous Obedience Experiments
  • C. V. Raman: Color change allows harm-free health check of living cells
  • Rosalind Franklin: Shape-shifting DNA
  • Robert Boyle: A new science is born: chemistry
  • Carl Woese: Rewrote Earth’s history of life
  • Alfred Wegener: Shunned after he discovered that continents move
  • Henri Poincaré: Is the solar system stable?
  • Polly Matzinger: The dog whisperer who rewrote our immune system’s rules
  • Otto Guericke: In the 1600s found that space is a vacuum
  • Alister Hardy: Aquatic ape theory: our species evolved in water
  • Elizebeth Friedman: Became the world’s most famous codebreaker
  • Evangelista Torricelli: We live at the bottom of a tremendously heavy sea of air
  • Eudoxus: The first mathematical model of the universe
  • James Black: Revolutionized drug design with the Beta-blocker
  • Inge Lehmann: Discovered our planet’s solid inner core
  • Chen-Ning Yang: Shattered a fundamental belief of physicists
  • Robert Hooke: Unveiled the spectacular microscopic world
  • Barbara McClintock: A Nobel Prize after years of rejection
  • Pythagoras: The cult of numbers and the need for proof
  • J. J. Thomson: Discovered the electron
  • Johannes Kepler: Solved the mystery of the planets
  • Dmitri Mendeleev: Discovered 8 new chemical elements by thinking
  • Maurice Hilleman: Record breaking inventor of over 40 vaccines
  • Marie Curie: Won – uniquely – both the chemistry & physics Nobel Prizes
  • Jacques Cousteau: Marine pioneer, inventor, Oscar winner
  • Niels Bohr: Founded the bizarre science of quantum mechanics
  • Srinivasa Ramanujan: Untrained genius of mathematics
  • Milutin Milankovic: Proved Earth’s climate is regulated by its orbit
  • Antoine Lavoisier: The giant of chemistry who was executed
  • Emmy Noether: The greatest of female mathematicians, she unlocked a secret of the universe
  • Wilder Penfield: Pioneer of brain surgery; mapped the brain’s functions
  • Charles Nicolle: Eradicated typhus epidemics
  • Samuel Morse: The telegraph and Morse code
  • Jane Goodall: Major discoveries in chimpanzee behavior
  • John Philoponus: 6th century anticipation of Galileo and Newton
  • William Perkin: Youthful curiosity brought the color purple to all
  • Democritus: Atomic theory BC and a universe of diverse inhabited worlds
  • Susumu Tonegawa: Discovered how our bodies make millions of different antibodies
  • Cecilia Payne: Discovered that stars are almost entirely hydrogen and helium

Top 100 Scientists

  • Our Top 100 Scientists

Our Most Popular Scientists

  • Astronomers
  • Biologists & Health Scientists
  • Chemists
  • Geologists and Paleontologists
  • Mathematicians
  • Physicists
  • Scientists in Ancient Times

List of Scientists

  • Alphabetical List

Recent Posts

  • Perfect Numbers and our Tiny Universe
  • What Happens when the Universe chooses its own Units?
  • Hipparchus and the 2000 Year-Old Clue
  • Darwin Pleaded for Cheaper Origin of Species
  • You Will Die For Showing I’m Wrong!
  • Getting Through Hard Times – The Triumph of Stoic Philosophy
  • Johannes Kepler, God, and the Solar System
  • Charles Babbage and the Vengeance of Organ-Grinders
  • Howard Robertson – the Man who Proved Einstein Wrong
  • Susskind, Alice, and Wave-Particle Gullibility




Alphabetical List of Scientists

Louis Agassiz | Maria Gaetana Agnesi | Al-BattaniAbu Nasr Al-Farabi | Alhazen | Jim Al-Khalili | Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi | Mihailo Petrovic Alas | Angel Alcala | Salim Ali | Luis Alvarez | Andre Marie Ampère | Anaximander | Carl Anderson | Mary Anning | Virginia Apgar | Archimedes | Agnes Arber | Aristarchus | Aristotle | Svante Arrhenius | Oswald Avery | Amedeo Avogadro | Avicenna

Charles Babbage | Francis Bacon | Alexander Bain | John Logie Baird | Joseph Banks | Ramon Barba | John Bardeen | Charles Barkla | Ibn Battuta | William Bayliss | George Beadle | Arnold Orville Beckman | Henri Becquerel | Emil Adolf Behring | Alexander Graham Bell | Emile Berliner | Claude Bernard | Timothy John Berners-Lee | Daniel Bernoulli | Jacob Berzelius | Henry Bessemer | Hans Bethe | Homi Jehangir Bhabha | Alfred Binet | Clarence Birdseye | Kristian Birkeland | James Black | Elizabeth Blackwell | Alfred Blalock | Katharine Burr Blodgett | Franz Boas | David Bohm | Aage Bohr | Niels Bohr | Ludwig Boltzmann | Max Born | Carl Bosch | Robert Bosch | Jagadish Chandra Bose | Satyendra Nath Bose | Walther Wilhelm Georg Bothe | Robert Boyle | Lawrence Bragg | Tycho Brahe | Brahmagupta | Hennig Brand | Georg Brandt | Wernher Von Braun | J Harlen Bretz | Louis de Broglie | Alexander Brongniart | Robert Brown | Michael E. Brown | Lester R. Brown | Eduard Buchner | Linda Buck | William Buckland | Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon | Robert Bunsen | Luther Burbank | Jocelyn Bell Burnell | Macfarlane Burnet | Thomas Burnet

Benjamin Cabrera | Santiago Ramon y Cajal | Rachel Carson | George Washington Carver | Henry Cavendish | Anders Celsius | James Chadwick | Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar | Erwin Chargaff | Noam Chomsky | Steven Chu | Leland Clark | John Cockcroft | Arthur Compton | Nicolaus Copernicus | Gerty Theresa Cori | Charles-Augustin de Coulomb | Jacques Cousteau | Brian Cox | Francis Crick | James Croll | Nicholas Culpeper | Marie Curie | Pierre Curie | Georges Cuvier | Adalbert Czerny

Gottlieb Daimler | John Dalton | James Dwight Dana | Charles Darwin | Humphry Davy | Peter Debye | Max Delbruck | Jean Andre Deluc | Democritus | René Descartes | Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel | Diophantus | Paul Dirac | Prokop Divis | Theodosius Dobzhansky | Frank Drake | K. Eric Drexler

John Eccles | Arthur Eddington | Thomas Edison | Paul Ehrlich | Albert Einstein | Gertrude Elion | Empedocles | Eratosthenes | Euclid | Eudoxus | Leonhard Euler

Michael Faraday | Pierre de Fermat | Enrico Fermi | Richard Feynman | Fibonacci – Leonardo of Pisa | Emil Fischer | Ronald Fisher | Alexander Fleming | John Ambrose Fleming | Howard Florey | Henry Ford | Lee De Forest | Dian Fossey | Leon Foucault | Benjamin Franklin | Rosalind Franklin | Sigmund Freud | Elizebeth Smith Friedman

Galen | Galileo Galilei | Francis Galton | Luigi Galvani | George Gamow | Martin Gardner | Carl Friedrich Gauss | Murray Gell-Mann | Sophie Germain | Willard Gibbs | William Gilbert | Sheldon Lee Glashow | Robert Goddard | Maria Goeppert-Mayer | Thomas Gold | Jane Goodall | Stephen Jay Gould | Otto von Guericke

Fritz Haber | Ernst Haeckel | Otto Hahn | Albrecht von Haller | Edmund Halley | Alister Hardy | Thomas Harriot | William Harvey | Stephen Hawking | Otto Haxel | Werner Heisenberg | Hermann von Helmholtz | Jan Baptist von Helmont | Joseph Henry | Caroline Herschel | John Herschel | William Herschel | Gustav Ludwig Hertz | Heinrich Hertz | Karl F. Herzfeld | George de Hevesy | Antony Hewish | David Hilbert | Maurice Hilleman | Hipparchus | Hippocrates | Shintaro Hirase | Dorothy Hodgkin | Robert Hooke | Frederick Gowland Hopkins | William Hopkins | Grace Murray Hopper | Frank Hornby | Jack Horner | Bernardo Houssay | Fred Hoyle | Edwin Hubble | Alexander von Humboldt | Zora Neale Hurston | James Hutton | Christiaan Huygens | Hypatia

Ernesto Illy | Jan Ingenhousz | Ernst Ising | Keisuke Ito

Mae Carol Jemison | Edward Jenner | J. Hans D. Jensen | Irene Joliot-Curie | James Prescott Joule | Percy Lavon Julian

Michio Kaku | Heike Kamerlingh Onnes | Pyotr Kapitsa | Friedrich August Kekulé | Frances Kelsey | Pearl Kendrick | Johannes Kepler | Abdul Qadeer Khan | Omar Khayyam | Alfred Kinsey | Gustav Kirchoff | Martin Klaproth | Robert Koch | Emil Kraepelin | Thomas Kuhn | Stephanie Kwolek

Joseph-Louis Lagrange | Jean-Baptiste Lamarck | Hedy Lamarr | Edwin Herbert Land | Karl Landsteiner | Pierre-Simon Laplace | Max von Laue | Antoine Lavoisier | Ernest Lawrence | Henrietta Leavitt | Antonie van Leeuwenhoek | Inge Lehmann | Gottfried Leibniz | Georges Lemaître | Leonardo da Vinci | Niccolo Leoniceno | Aldo Leopold | Rita Levi-Montalcini | Claude Levi-Strauss | Willard Frank Libby | Justus von Liebig | Carolus Linnaeus | Joseph Lister | John Locke | Hendrik Antoon Lorentz | Konrad Lorenz | Ada Lovelace | Percival Lowell | Lucretius | Charles Lyell | Trofim Lysenko

Ernst Mach | Marcello Malpighi | Jane Marcet | Guglielmo Marconi | Lynn Margulis | Barry Marshall | Polly Matzinger | Matthew Maury | James Clerk Maxwell | Ernst Mayr | Barbara McClintock | Lise Meitner | Gregor Mendel | Dmitri Mendeleev | Franz Mesmer | Antonio Meucci | John Michell | Albert Abraham Michelson | Thomas Midgeley Jr. | Milutin Milankovic | Maria Mitchell | Mario Molina | Thomas Hunt Morgan | Samuel Morse | Henry Moseley

Ukichiro Nakaya | John Napier | Giulio Natta | John Needham | John von Neumann | Thomas Newcomen | Isaac Newton | Charles Nicolle | Florence Nightingale | Tim Noakes | Alfred Nobel | Emmy Noether | Christiane Nusslein-Volhard | Bill Nye

Hans Christian Oersted | Georg Ohm | J. Robert Oppenheimer | Wilhelm Ostwald | William Oughtred

Blaise Pascal | Louis Pasteur | Wolfgang Ernst Pauli | Linus Pauling | Randy Pausch | Ivan Pavlov | Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin | Wilder Penfield | Marguerite Perey | William Perkin | John Philoponus | Jean Piaget | Philippe Pinel | Max Planck | Pliny the Elder | Henri Poincaré | Karl Popper | Beatrix Potter | Joseph Priestley | Proclus | Claudius Ptolemy | Pythagoras

Adolphe Quetelet | Harriet Quimby | Thabit ibn Qurra

C. V. Raman | Srinivasa Ramanujan | William Ramsay | John Ray | Prafulla Chandra Ray | Francesco Redi | Sally Ride | Bernhard Riemann | Wilhelm Röntgen | Hermann Rorschach | Ronald Ross | Ibn Rushd | Ernest Rutherford

Carl Sagan | Abdus Salam | Jonas Salk | Frederick Sanger | Alberto Santos-Dumont | Walter Schottky | Erwin Schrödinger | Theodor Schwann | Glenn Seaborg | Hans Selye | Charles Sherrington | Gene Shoemaker | Ernst Werner von Siemens | George Gaylord Simpson | B. F. Skinner | William Smith | Frederick Soddy | Mary Somerville | Arnold Sommerfeld | Hermann Staudinger | Nicolas Steno | Nettie Stevens | William John Swainson | Leo Szilard

Niccolo Tartaglia | Edward Teller | Nikola Tesla | Thales of Miletus | Theon of Alexandria | Benjamin Thompson | J. J. Thomson | William Thomson | Henry David Thoreau | Kip S. Thorne | Clyde Tombaugh | Susumu Tonegawa | Evangelista Torricelli | Charles Townes | Youyou Tu | Alan Turing | Neil deGrasse Tyson

Harold Urey

Craig Venter | Vladimir Vernadsky | Andreas Vesalius | Rudolf Virchow | Artturi Virtanen | Alessandro Volta

Selman Waksman | George Wald | Alfred Russel Wallace | John Wallis | Ernest Walton | James Watson | James Watt | Alfred Wegener | John Archibald Wheeler | Maurice Wilkins | Thomas Willis | E. O. Wilson | Sven Wingqvist | Sergei Winogradsky | Carl Woese | Friedrich Wöhler | Wilbur and Orville Wright | Wilhelm Wundt

Chen-Ning Yang

Ahmed Zewail

Return to top of page

Famous Scientists - Privacy - Contact - About - Content & Imagery © 2023