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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday July 22 2020, @02:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the seems-like-a-square-view-to-me dept.

Plato was right: Earth is made, on average, of cubes: The ancient Greek philosopher was on to something, researchers found:

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)


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by aristarchus on Wednesday July 22 2020, @08:21PM (3 children)

    by aristarchus (2645) on Wednesday July 22 2020, @08:21PM (#1025088) Journal

    Let's get straight about this Greek Atomism stuff, since the fine article is not.

    Plátōn's concept of atom is the same as of predecessors in his school, namely Hērákleitos.

    Actually, Ἡράκλειτος ὁ Ἐφέσιος [wikipedia.org], held that all is change, or πάντα ῥεῖ, everything flows. (Same river twice, etc.) He may have held that there are five elements, but the notion of an unchangeable, eternal, smallest part of matter is really not his thing. For him it was more λόγος.

    ἄτομον is the negation (alpha privatum!) of τέμνω, to cut, so un-cuttable. Splitting the atom is not just a terrible weapon, it is a contradiction in terms. And usually highly radioactive.

    The Atomists in ancient Greece were Leucippus and his pupil Democritus, [wikipedia.org] who held there are smallest parts, and infinite variety of them. But the main thing, besides being materialist and thus opposed to religion an the super-natural, is that the posited the existence of the Void. For atoms to be able to move (and form things), and for things to be cuttable, there has to be empty space between them. Even Modern philosophers, and many scientists, used to hold that "nature abhors a vacuum" and that there is no empty space, or in other words, the universe is "full of it". So, it is not the being of the atoms that is reality, it is the non-being of the Void, which of course has no shape, not even a square. In this, the Atomists agree with Ἀναξίμανδρος of Miletus [wikipedia.org] and his ἄπειρον ("infinite" or "limitless").

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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday July 23 2020, @12:07AM (2 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday July 23 2020, @12:07AM (#1025210) Journal

    Splitting the atom is not just a terrible weapon, it is a contradiction in terms. And usually highly radioactive.

    Happens all the time in ye olde fires. Electrons get delocalized then recombine in different configurations - most frequently as carbon dioxide and water. </pedantic>

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Thursday July 23 2020, @12:51AM (1 child)

      by aristarchus (2645) on Thursday July 23 2020, @12:51AM (#1025235) Journal

      Ionization is not fission, nor is chemical reaction, but you already knew that. And, of course, if your atom has parts, and even valences, well not really a un-cuttable smallest part, then, is it?

      Point being that the Atomists got some things wrong, and even Plato. And they did not play Minecraft.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Thursday July 23 2020, @01:36AM

        by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday July 23 2020, @01:36AM (#1025254) Journal

        Point being that the Atomists got some things wrong...

        Point taken.

        Or the fault for the confusion was in the more modern scientists sticking the "atom" label on that contraption of nucleons and electrons that makes the chemical elements, they should have waited until the quantum chromodynamics got into the picture (and even this may be too hasty)

        --
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford