
From rocks to icebergs, the natural world tends to break into cubes - pabo
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/rocks-icebergs-natural-world-tends-break-cubes
======
cheschire
This seems intuitive with a little prior knowledge.

When I learned how to load cargo airplanes, I was taught that you have to use
dunnage to spread the weight of heavy objects across the floor of the plane to
overcome specific weight limits in the floor. So if you have a 5 ton truck,
you would need to use dunnage under each axle to distribute the load a bit so
the whole 5 tons isn't focused on effectively 6 points the size of a sheet of
paper. When adding the dunnage, we were taught to envision the weight
spreading at 90 degrees from the axle centered downward in order to add the
dunnage height to the total vehicle height during our load planning.

More simply, I remember when I was a kid the local barbershop was vandalized
with bb guns. The holes in the windows were tiny on the point of impact, but
spread at nearly 90 degrees on exit.

I am not claiming to know more than some anecdotal experiences here, and I may
have drawn the wrong conclusions altogether. When I look at how force is
typically distributed though, it seems to be regularly distributed in right
angles.

Poetically, I like to think how this is in direct opposition to the spirals
one can find everywhere in nature. Yin and yang.

~~~
kian
That poetic thought at the end is beautiful. Forces and actions (dual
tothings) have shapes that are dual to living things - most likely because
those spiraling shapes are more protective against forces than right angles.

~~~
mojomark
Actually, spirals found in nature are indications of the presence of 2
perpendicular force vectors: one in the direction of the spiral path, and one
pointing towards the center of the spiral. See centripedal force (1).

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centripetal_force](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centripetal_force)

------
pabo
The original PNAS publication can be found at [0]. I copy here (most of) the
abstract, I think it's very nicely written:

"Plato envisioned Earth’s building blocks as cubes, a shape rarely found in
nature. The solar system is littered, however, with distorted polyhedra—shards
of rock and ice produced by ubiquitous fragmentation. We apply the theory of
convex mosaics to show that the average geometry of natural two-dimensional
(2D) fragments, from mud cracks to Earth’s tectonic plates, has two
attractors: “Platonic” quadrangles and “Voronoi” hexagons. In three dimensions
(3D), the Platonic attractor is dominant: Remarkably, the average shape of
natural rock fragments is cuboid. When viewed through the lens of convex
mosaics, natural fragments are indeed geometric shadows of Plato’s forms.
Simulations show that generic binary breakup drives all mosaics toward the
Platonic attractor, explaining the ubiquity of cuboid averages."

[0]
[https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/07/16/2001037117](https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/07/16/2001037117)

------
twic
The PDF of the paper is on the arxiv:
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.04628](https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.04628)

And ResearchGate:
[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343041685_Plato%27s...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343041685_Plato%27s_cube_and_the_natural_geometry_of_fragmentation)

Previous postings which didn't get much attention:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23922393](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23922393)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23975716](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23975716)

------
mojomark
This seems to have some overlap with the proposed "Constructal Law" of
thermodynamics that is supposed to explain the natural evolution of 'design'
in nature (1, 2). Granted, this concept is not without controvercy, and I'm
not 100% sold just yet, but I was curious enough that I bought the 'Design
with Constructal Law' text book to see if I can get to the truth of the matter
by reviewing the math and perhaps running a few experiments. I'm working on
it.

1\. [https://youtu.be/lLAYHnJVmjE](https://youtu.be/lLAYHnJVmjE) 2\.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871904/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871904/)
3\. text book purchase link: [https://www.wiley.com/en-
us/Design+with+Constructal+Theory-p...](https://www.wiley.com/en-
us/Design+with+Constructal+Theory-p-9780471998167)

------
frodo_77
Sounds like Minecraft.

~~~
arkanciscan
Proof that we're living in a simulation

------
lawwantsin17
Great, so we live in a voxel game engine.

~~~
amiga
Like Minecraft, but with much higher resolution.

------
annoyingnoob
Its interesting, we think of the building blocks as atoms and we almost always
represent atoms as being spherical. Everything breaks down to cubes made of
spheres?

