Hi Nick and Arlo, > Yes. What got me about this was the fact that the idea of gas as a chaotic > state of matter goes WAY back.
Here it seems the etymology goes the other way, though, right? The notion of a "chaotic state of matter" is actually a new borrowing of a term, with about as much connection to the original as Murray's "color" in QCD has to the visual chromatic spectrum. If original chaos meant mostly a void or gap (which seems to be what Wikipedia -- the authority on all matters -- says, then it is not a bad fit to most of our everyday experience of gases, and would work even better for the vacuum. It seems that the Term of Art "chaos", referring to tons of structure that is merely recalcitrant to description, is the odd man out. Although, perhaps the argument against my position is that when artists need to represent chaos, they paint a lot of structure that is meant to exist but to defy description. Since I don't know how ancient Greeks actually handled these things, maybe, as you say, they wouldn't tolerate a notion of "not-there", so they would have conceived of gaps as having a substantive essence, but just beyond tractability by perception, in which case modern chaos would indeed be much older. Thanks for those, Eric
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