[Rockhounds] Scientists Uncover the Universal Geometry of Geology

[Paul]

The paper is:

Domokos, G., Jerolmack, D.J., Kun, F. and Török, J.,
2020. Plato’s cube and the natural geometry of
fragmentation. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, 117(31), pp.18178-18185.

PDF file: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.04628
Abstract: https://www.pnas.org/content/117/31/18178

Yours,

Paul H.

On Nov 20, 2020, at 8:59 AM, Kreigh Tomaszewski <kreigh at gmail.com> wrote
>> On a mild autumn day in 2016, the Hungarian mathematician G?bor 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/