Elemental Spectrum

I have been working on this little painting, it's not finished yet, because I'm not sure how it's going to develop, but my thinking behind it is a diagram of Aristotle's classical elements. This photo isn't brilliant, so what what looks like a black area is actually blue and purple. I am trying to combine the idea of the classical elements, with the scientific states of matter, and the spectrum of visible light.

Aristotle was one of the first to publicly hypothesize about the nature of light, proposing that light is a disturbance in the element air (that is, it is a wave-like phenomenon). On the other hand, Democritus argued that all things in the universe, including light, are composed of indivisible sub-components (light being some form of solar atom). Today, the theory of wave–particle duality postulates that all particles exhibit both wave and particle properties. In the diagram above I have compared the wavelength of light with the particles of matter, thereby assigning different colours to different densities of matter. The states of matter are associated with the classical elements. According to Aristotle in his On Generation and Corruption:

Earth is primarily dry and secondarily cold,
Water is primarily cold and secondarily wet,
Air is primarily wet and secondarily hot,
Fire is primarily hot and secondarily dry.

These elements were believed to be the essential ingredients of the physical universe. As such, they could be equated to the states of matter, which are the modern way of categorising the physical universe. The classical elements were also associated with humours and seasons.

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