Scientists 'Verify' Plato's Theory, Earth Is Made of Cubes, on Average | Science - Interesting Engineering

Believe it or not, Plato's ancient idea that the Earth was made of cubes is, on average, correct, argues Brad Bergan, senior editor at Interesting Engineering.

Photo: scotto72 / iStock

Researchers have found that the philosopher Plato may be right after all: the world, on average, breaks down into cubes — and not just in the game Minecraft. A new paper from Hungary and the U.S. takes readers through a simulation of the world's "natural 3D fragments," and conclude that the most said fragments conform to a cube-like shape.

Earth is on average made of cubes, Plato was right

Plato is relevant to the discovery because in one of his works — the Timaeus — Plato wrote about the "classical elements," which was his way of categorizing the Earth, fire, wind, and air. This was long before the empirical discovery of individual elements, let alone the fully-developed idea of atomic structure.

"Natural philosophers" — the predecessors of modern-day scientists — used the idea of classical elements, sometimes including a fifth, "aether" element, to explain the fundamental composition of the world.

In his work, Plato took this idea and morphed it into the Platonic solids — a series of 3D shapes where all sides are squares, or equilateral triangles — pulling from 2D polygons. According to Plato's system, the cube was linked with Earth, but his decision to name all regular solids this way lived on into the works of later geometers, like Euclid. For example, the "atom" (or uncuttable) comes from the thought of another ancient Greek philosopher: Democritus...

Ancient Greek philosophy in modern-day science

This finding happened via sampled and computed rock-breaking simulators, along with additional software to process the litany of resulting data using Platonic shapes and Voronoi as "attractor" parameters.

The new research comes on the heels of a 2019 paper regarding Plato's room for error that included one of the same researchers — Gábor Domokos, renowned in the mathematics world for helping to create the first example of a self-righting object, called a gömböc.
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Source: Interesting Engineering