Hydrogen

Hydrogen is the basic building material out of which stars such as our Sun are formed… Hydrogen, then, is the basic matter out of which all other matter is formed. It is the simplest of all atoms, a single electron circling a nucleus of one neutron and one proton.

Cunningham establishes hydrogen as the cosmological prima materia and identifies its atomic diagram with the solar glyph, grounding an astrological-symbolic argument about the Sun’s psychological centrality.

Donna Cunningham, An Astrological Guide to Self-Awareness, 1982thesis

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if it had had a value of 0.006 there would be no other elements than hydrogen; if it had a value of 0.008, protons would have fused in the Big Bang, leaving no hydrogen: in either case, no universe.

McGilchrist deploys hydrogen’s existence as contingent on a razor-thin cosmological constant to argue that the universe’s fine-tuning demands rational explanation beyond chance.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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if it had had a value of 0.006 there would be no other elements than hydrogen; if it had a value of 0.008, protons would have fused in the Big Bang, leaving no hydrogen: in either case, no universe.

A near-duplicate passage reinforcing McGilchrist’s anthropic argument that hydrogen’s persistence in the universe reflects an improbability requiring philosophical account.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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he names oxygen and hydrogen, the elements of water, as the two principles of life in the animal body, acting as ‘weights on the lever of life’, the local disequilibrium of each allowing for the maintenance of lif

McGilchrist cites Schelling’s Naturphilosophie to present hydrogen and oxygen as polar vital principles whose dynamic disequilibrium constitutes the living balance.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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he names oxygen and hydrogen, the elements of water, as the two principles of life in the animal body, acting as ‘weights on the lever of life’, the local disequilibrium of each allowing for the maintenance of lif

A parallel passage confirming Schelling’s use of hydrogen as one of two oppositional life-principles in a philosophy of dynamic polarity.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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Where Helmont had eliminated air in favour of water, Cavendish could now show that water dissolved into gas. For Lavoisier, water was simply an oxide of hydrogen.

Hillman situates Lavoisier’s identification of water as an oxide of hydrogen within the archetypal drama of elemental revolution, tracing how air — the ‘invisible imagination’ — reclaimed primacy in chemical thought.

Hillman, James, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting

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Both hydrogen sulphide and sulphur dioxide immediately tarnish metals — they form sulphide compounds, many of which are black.

Edinger makes incidental reference to hydrogen sulphide as a chemical illustration of sulphur’s corrupting, blackening properties in the alchemical-psychological symbolism of the nigredo.

Edinger, Edward F., The Mysterium Lectures: A Journey Through C.G. Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis, 1995aside

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all the chemists’ univalent atoms, i.e. those that combine with an atom of hydrogen, seem to be associated with the same quantity of electricity

Simondon uses hydrogen’s role as the unit of chemical valence to frame Faraday’s discovery of electrolytic quantization, illustrating the discontinuous structure of electricity.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020aside

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