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: 4, Funny) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Wednesday July 22 2020, @02:27PM (7 children)
He came up with some wild unsubstantiated hypothesis that turned out to be right by sheer luck. So did Forko, Knifo and Spoono, his lesser-known antique philosopher buddies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22 2020, @03:04PM
Yeeeee-Haw!!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22 2020, @03:28PM
You smoking Hemlock again?
(Score: 3, Touché) by ikanreed on Wednesday July 22 2020, @03:41PM
Yeah, if Plato was right, we'd all be sitting inside all the time watching glowing shapes move around without ever going outside.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22 2020, @03:42PM
the hypothesis is not even right. it's like saying that most chicken eggs are spherical, because if you take all chicken eggs and average them you get a sphere.
if you take all the cuboid cutouts and reorient them according to some universal law, you get something else. if the law is "put the biggest side down", you'll automatically get broken pyramids. which will certainly make you a genius as far as some groups are concerned...
(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.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday July 22 2020, @06:10PM
If Plato saw a bunch of these: https://www.google.com/search?q=cubic+rock+formations&tbm=isch [google.com] then his hypothesis had more substantiation than sheer luck.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22 2020, @03:49PM (1 child)
like always, there certainly is one, just ONE atom in the whole of earth that is being squashed the most ... the HERO atom!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22 2020, @03:58PM
Heronium, every planet only as one atom of it. ^_^
(Score: 2, Informative) by Billy the Mountain on Wednesday July 22 2020, @03:53PM
The researchers, they have been playing too much Minecraft and not working on their theses.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Mojibake Tengu on Wednesday July 22 2020, @05:22PM (7 children)
This is completely incorrect and illogical statement by Douglas Jerolmack.
Plátōn's concept of atom is the same as of predecessors in his school, namely Hērákleitos.
Atom for ancient Greek materialists philosophers represents an indivisible particle of matter.
The similar concept in Vedic philosophy of ancient India is anu in Sanskrit, again a non-divisible particle of rough matter, which well corresponds to Greek philosophy concept.
Also, in both mathematical logic and programming theory, the meaning of atom always represent something non-divisible, we have logical atoms and language atoms, and atomic operations non-divisible to steps.
This is what atom truly means, indivisibility.
Said "modern understanding of atoms" is far from so called 'atoms' being non-divisible. Very far.
It is a great scientific mishap of misunderstanding and huge misconception affecting the whole civilization to call those very complex processes 'atoms'.
So, Douglas Jerolmack compares mental objects with different domains of meaning, it's a type error in my book of life.
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22 2020, @07:48PM
i am not sure this "smallest" concept comes from the kitchen, that is a ancient kitchen where a overlord demanded infinitly fine chopped parsley ...
rather, it was grotesquely mangled from the ancient building site where much wondering was done as to where exactelly the weight from one "item" was being transfered to another item ...
furthermore, the "item" themselfs, tho naively seen as "one object" was acknowledged to be to heavy to carry and thus more wondering ensued as to how best to manufacture it into smaller "items" with the same properties but with the problem of how to make it a whole.
consider a iron bridge with lots of bolts and rivets ... with pieces 10 meter long. how do you calculate this? if it all where super brittle (that is, it can deform and when it does, it "xplodes") there's no way each and every hole, bolt and pin is exact to the sub micron ... so the iron bridge, when freshly built has one place where all forces assemble the most, this place deforms a tiny bit during first use and by doing so transfers some of the force to another place. this continues like a domino, until it deforms into a "solid" whole ... ofc some bolts and pins are not loaded yet and just there for "emergencies" ...
so i think "atoms" thinking came from building sites and not the kitchen, tho both are intertwined else no kitchen to cook and no food to build ^_^
(Score: 5, Informative) by aristarchus on Wednesday July 22 2020, @08:21PM (3 children)
Let's get straight about this Greek Atomism stuff, since the fine article is not.
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").
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday July 23 2020, @12:07AM (2 children)
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
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Thursday July 23 2020, @12:51AM (1 child)
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
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
(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.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22 2020, @06:50PM (2 children)
Buckminster Fuller repeatedly made a coherent argument in all of his writings that Nature preferred tetrahedrons.
A cube, as formed by 12 struts, joined at eight vertexes, is unstable. It requires reinforcement.
There is an elegant solution for creating a stable cube but it involves two tetrahedrons nested in the same space, in polar opposition to one another - see http://www.cgjungpage.org/images/stories/image006.gif [cgjungpage.org] for an illustration of the juxtapositioning I refer to.
The author refers interested readers to Buckminster Fuller's manual on his geometry, which he referred to as 'synergetics', and which is the title - Synergetics - specifically, he refers readers to pages 4-5, because this is introductory, elementary stuff.
More info:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synergetics_(Fuller) [wikipedia.org]
- http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s01/p0000.html#100.20 [rwgrayprojects.com] (an online copy of Synergetics)
Lacking evidence to the contrary I'm going to suggest that claims that the world is modeled on cubes is driven by a need for attention of some sort, probably the "publish or perish" variety.
~childo
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday July 22 2020, @08:16PM
It's much easier to do procedural generation of landscape on a lattice of square tiles than a lattice of triangular tiles.
And much, much easier to do it in 3D (maybe you're making a game of asteroid mining?) with cubes than with regular tetrahedrons. (hard to tessellate regular tetrahedrons in Euclidean space with out doing something like mixing them with octahedra).
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2020, @04:15AM
in this paper the authors show that 12 sided objects are most common.
this is because of the way fault lines occur.
(Score: 3, Funny) by stormreaver on Wednesday July 22 2020, @06:55PM (1 child)
I'm going to classify all of my children's time playing Minecraft as, "Science, Geology".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22 2020, @08:25PM
If you can't stand minecraft, there are also octree-based free games.
(Score: 4, Informative) by https on Wednesday July 22 2020, @08:15PM
“Plato is widely recognized as the first person to develop the concept of an atom,"
That's Leucippus [wikipedia.org]. Democritus, who may be more widely known for keeping the tradition, ALSO predates Plato.
Judging from this absolute failure, the history of rocket science is harder than rocket science.
Offended and laughing about it.
(Score: 2) by srobert on Wednesday July 22 2020, @08:33PM
"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,"
I thought that was Democritus.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22 2020, @09:41PM
And who first developed the concept of a dinosaur? In what year?
(Score: 2) by leon_the_cat on Wednesday July 22 2020, @11:54PM (1 child)
Someone spent a lot of time trying to embellish a pretty dull paper. Threw in a few not really relevent Plato facts, and some of them are wrong. Surprised they didn't manage to wedge in some similarity with Aristotle. 1/10.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday July 23 2020, @03:23PM
I like Aristotle. He's the Monty Python of philosophers.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2020, @01:04PM
Its completely incorrect that he was the first. Its obvious these scientists are dumb as fuck. The Vedic literature explains reality as it is in Absolute Truth. O how I hate this fucking world!