[Rockhounds] Scientists Uncover the Universal Geometry of Geology

[Alan Goldstein]

It's (obviously) the Borg!

Alan G.

Sent from my iPhone

> On Nov 20, 2020, at 8:59 AM, Kreigh Tomaszewski <kreigh at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> n a mild autumn day in 2016, the Hungarian mathematician Gábor Domokos
> <http://bagira.iit.bme.hu/~domokos/> arrived on the geophysicist Douglas
> Jerolmack <https://earth.sas.upenn.edu/people/douglas-j-jerolmack>’s
> doorstep in Philadelphia. Domokos carried with him his suitcases, a bad
> cold and a burning secret.
> 
> The two men walked across a gravel lot behind the house, where Jerolmack’s
> wife ran a taco cart. Their feet crunched over crushed limestone. Domokos
> pointed down.
> 
> “How many facets do each of these gravel pieces have?” he said. Then he
> grinned. “What if I told you that the number was always somewhere around
> six?” Then he asked a bigger question, one that he hoped would worm its way
> into his colleague’s brain. What if the world is made of cubes?
> 
> At first, Jerolmack objected. Houses can be built out of bricks, but Earth
> is made of rocks. Obviously, rocks vary. Mica flakes into sheets; crystals
> crack on sharply defined axes. But from mathematics alone, Domokos argued,
> any rocks that broke randomly would crack into shapes that have, on
> average, six faces and eight vertices. Considered together, they would all
> be shadowy approximations converging on a sort of ideal cube. Domokos had
> proved it mathematically, he said. Now he needed Jerolmack’s help to show
> that this is what nature does.
> 
> “It was geometry with an exact prediction that was borne out in the natural
> world, with essentially no physics involved,” said Jerolmack, a professor
> at the University of Pennsylvania. “How in the hell does nature let this
> happen?”
> 
> https://www.quantamagazine.org/geometry-reveals-how-the-world-is-assembled-from-cubes-20201119/
> _______________________________________________
> Rockhounds mailing list
> Subscription Services:  http://rockhounds.drizzle.com/mailman/listinfo/rockhounds_rockhounds.drizzle.com
> List Usage Policy: http://Tomaszewski.net/Kreigh/Rockhounds/Rockhounds.shtml