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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: 2) by theluggage on Thursday July 23 2020, @01:12PM (1 child)
I think the TFA is wrong there, too - but I think your Argumentum ad dictionarium misses the point.
Starting from zero scientific knowledge, the superficially obvious conclusion is that matter is just a continuum of "stuff" that comes in a million different varieties because the great sky fairy decreed it so. The notion that it could be made of invisibly small building blocks, and that the myriad varieties of matter could arise from different permutations of a few standard "atoms" was a massive step forward in understanding. The idea that the properties of these "atoms" were connected with their shape was pretty insightful, too - even if it wasn't right (stupid, stupid Plato for picking cubes and tetrahedrons etc. rather than jumping straight to the solutions of the wave equation for electron orbitals... :-) )
"Modern understanding of atoms" may be vastly more refined, but every journey starts with a few steps, and the "Platonic" model (whoever actually came up with it) is a very important first step. Science - particularly physics - is a process of successive approximations and our "Modern understanding of atoms" is continually being re-defined. There are still huge reams of scientific and engineering work in which it makes sense to treat atoms - or, at least, atomic nuclei - as indivisible balls which interact with each other in well-defined ways - in the same way that an engineer doesn't routinely use quantum mechanics or relativity to build a bridge (even if the metallurgist who formulated the alloy the bridge is built from does).
You've just used "atomic" in three different contexts in which it has three different (detailed) meanings, but you're trying to apply the "pure mathematics" definition to every other context. (Computer) language "atoms" are only indivisible in the context of the syntax of the language being described (they certainly won't always translate to single machine code instructions) treat them as "atomic operations" in the other sense and trouble may ensue. Even an "atomic operation" is only indivisible for the purpose of thread safety and may (e.g.) be implemented as a sequence of lower-level operations performed with interrupts disabled.
No, you're making a scope error. Names like "atomic" are just labels, that can mean quite different things in different contexts - or start out with common meanings but diverge over time. We've known since the century-before-last that "atoms" weren't fundamentally indivisible - but fortunately "atom" is a local variable, so it can change without having to re-write Ancient Greek. You're just complaining about the naming convention.
On top of that, though, it's an interesting question as to what extent Platonic ideas have shaped the way we describe and think about "modern" science - even if the underlying abstract theory is "the truth". The computer science parallel would be the "Turing machine" who's concept of tapes and read/write heads was clearly influenced by early-20th-century "pre-computer" engineering yet is mathematically equivalent to other, more abstract, models of computation... So, is the modern description of the atom (and particle Physics in general) "not wrong" but highly coloured by our mental ball-and-stick models? Could that mental lens be the cause of some of the "head-scratchers" about quantum mechanics - like wave/particle duality (e.g. would the same maths make more sense if we thought of "events" instead of particles)?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2020, @07:36PM
Oh, boy! Not this millennial relativistitic crap, again! "Atomic" can mean "indivisible", but then can involve to begging a question, because that's how we roll! Not! Look, if "atomic" can mean both divisible and indivisible, then it is a contradictory thing, and means nothing. Meh.