Ylem

Ylem is a term that was used by George Gamow, Ralph Alpher, and their associates in the late 1940s for a hypothetical original substance or condensed state of matter, which became subatomic particles and elements as we understand them today. The term ylem was actually coined by Ralph Alpher.

In modern understanding, the "ylem" described as by Gamow was the primordial plasma, formed in baryogenesis, which underwent Big Bang nucleosynthesis and was opaque to radiation. Recombination of the charged plasma into neutral atoms made the Universe transparent at the age of 380,000 years, and the radiation released is still observable as cosmic microwave background radiation.

History

It reportedly comes from an obsolete Middle English philosophical word that Gamow's assistant Ralph Alpher came across while thumbing through a dictionary, which means something along the lines of "primordial substance from which all matter is formed" (that in ancient mythology of many different cultures was called the cosmic egg), and ultimately derives from the Greek ὕλη (hūlē, hȳlē), "matter," probably via an accusative singular form in Latin hylen, hylem. Restated, the ylem is what Gamow, et al., presumed to exist immediately after the Big Bang. Within the ylem, there were assumed to be a large number of high-energy photons present. Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman made a scientific prediction in 1948 that we should still be able to observe these red-shifted photons today as an ambient cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) pervading all space with a temperature of about five Kelvin(when the CMBR was actually first detected in 1965, its temperature was found to be three Kelvin). It is now recognized that the CMBR originated at the transition from predominantly ionized hydrogen to non-ionized hydrogen at around 400,000 years after the Big Bang.

Ylem (Stockhausen)

Ylem is a composition by Karlheinz Stockhausen for a variable ensemble of 19 or more players, and is given the work number 37 in his catalogue of compositions.

History

Ylem is "phoenix music", in that it represents the continual rebirth of the universe, according to the theory of the oscillating universe, which holds that the universe periodically explodes every 80,000,000,000 years. The title of the work is taken from the term ylem, a word used in medieval Latin, the accusative of the borrowed Greek term hylē (ὕλη, "matter"), and adopted in the 1940s by the physicists George Gamow and Ralph Alpher to refer to the essential material of the universe, in the context of the "Big Bang theory (Peters 1999, 98–99). The subject of the composition is, in short, "the 'breath' of the universe" (Lavery 1980, 21). The score is dedicated to the composer’s son Simon, who was five years old at the time of composition. It was composed in December 1972 for a tour with the London Sinfonietta, who gave the premiere on 9 March 1973 under the composer’s direction, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, London (Stockhausen 1978, 212). The next evening, the same forces rehearsed and performed the piece on a live television broadcast from 10:50 to 11:30 pm on BBC2's Full House, hosted by John Bird, with questions from the studio audience and phoned in by viewers. Three studio recordings of this version were made on 21 March 1973 in the EMI Studios, London (Stockhausen 1992, 2 and 5).

Ylem (album)

Ylem (pronounced e-lem) is the sixth full-length studio release from German melodic black metal band Dark Fortress; and the second to feature new vocalist Morean. The album was released on January 22, 2010 in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and on January 25, 2010 for the rest of Europe. It was also released on February 9, 2010 in the United States of America.

Track listing

Bonus tracks on Slipsleeve version only

Personnel

References

External links