ylem

Origin

Resuscitation of Middle English ylem, from Medieval Latin hȳlem, accusative of hȳlē (“matter, the fundamental matter of all things; the matter of the body”) (whence English hyle), a transliteration of Ancient Greek ὕλη (húlē, “wood; material, substance; matter”). The concept of “fundamental matter” - Ancient Greek πρώτη ὕλη (prṓtē húlē) - was propounded by the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.). The term ylem was first used in modern English in the paper “The Origin of Chemical Elements”, coauthored by Russian-American theoretical physicist and cosmologist George Gamow (1904-1968), American cosmologist Ralph Asher Alpher (1921-2007) and German-American nuclear physicist Hans Bethe (1906-2005), published 1 April 1948 in Physical Review. Alpher claimed to have found the word “in a large dictionary”, perhaps Webster’s New International Dictionary (2nd ed., 1934), which he referred to in a second 1948 paper (cited below). In a 1968 interview, Gamow also associated ylem with a Hebrew word he did not name; it remains unclear which word he was referring to. The word ylem reappeared in popular books on science following the discovery in 1964-1965 of the cosmic microwave backgr...