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from the seems-like-a-square-view-to-me dept.
Plato, the Greek philosopher who lived in the 5th century B.C.E., believed that the universe was made of five types of matter: earth, air, fire, water, and cosmos. Each was described with a particular geometry, a platonic shape. For earth, that shape was the cube.
Science has steadily moved beyond Plato's conjectures, looking instead to the atom as the building block of the universe. Yet Plato seems to have been onto something, researchers have found.
In a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team from the University of Pennsylvania, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, and University of Debrecen uses math, geology, and physics to demonstrate that the average shape of rocks on Earth is a cube.
"Plato is widely recognized as the first person to develop the concept of an atom, the idea that matter is composed of some indivisible component at the smallest scale," says Douglas Jerolmack, a geophysicist in Penn's School of Arts & Sciences' Department of Earth and Environmental Science and the School of Engineering and Applied Science's Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics. "But that understanding was only conceptual; nothing about our modern understanding of atoms derives from what Plato told us.
"The interesting thing here is that what we find with rock, or earth, is that there is more than a conceptual lineage back to Plato. It turns out that Plato's conception about the element earth being made up of cubes is, literally, the statistical average model for real earth. And that is just mind-blowing."
Journal Reference:
Gábor Domokos, Douglas J. Jerolmack, Ferenc Kun, et al. Plato's cube and the natural geometry of fragmentation [$], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2001037117)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22 2020, @04:33PM (1 child)
It has little to do with luck. The difficulty that many do not understand now a days is that refining something (which is what 99% of our science today is geared towards) is the easy part. The hard part is thinking of the initial idea, even in broad strokes, in the first place. Gravity is the most obvious example of this. Now most of everybody understands that objects attract one another which is why things 'fall'. But once you understand this idea it leads almost directly to understanding how the planets and the stars in the sky move since it just so happens that the math works out unreasonably nicely. Yet it took humanity countless tens of thousands of years to discover this. A grade schooler of today could advance humanity by centuries if he was able to go back in time and simply tell them these basic things. The scientists of those times would have no difficulty connecting the dots from there.
And this is still an issue today. For instance look at the weird relationship we're discovering between the gut biome and the brain [duckduckgo.com]. I wanted to give a single link, but there's just too many good hits there. The real progress in society comes from simply thinking up very weird shit and then pursuing it given what methodologies you have at your disposal. In the times of the ancients this methodology would have been largely relegated to logic, but their capacities there were immense.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22 2020, @05:26PM
To an extent I agree, coming up with an idea that ultimately stands up to scrutiny is hard.
But, not in this case. This isn't like when Einstein proposed things that take a century, or more, to actually test, this was just because he liked cubes. It could easily have been spheres or some other shape. And, there was little interest in testing things at that time, even easy experiments. An object thrown moves horizontal to the ground until it falls directly downward because it wants to be with the ground was one of their theories. I'm not even sure how that could have been a serious theory as throwing just one item at some point would disprove that.