ylem

Origin of ylem

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...

Questions about ylem

What does ylem mean?

Ylem means in the Big Bang theory, the hot and dense plasma that made up the matter in the cosmos following the initial baryogenesis at an early stage of its expansion and cooling, from which the first atoms formed and photons decoupled. The emission of photons in this phase is regarded as the source of the cosmic microwave background.

What part of speech is ylem?

Ylem is a noun.

How do you pronounce ylem?

Ylem is pronounced /ˈiːlɛm/.