Science confirms Plato's Theory: Earth is made of cubes

WHAT WOULD YOU get if you smashed the Earth into little bits? To answer that question, scientists from the US and Hungary ran a series of simulations illustrating the ways that rock fractures.

- CAROLINE DELBERT

The results help us understand the natural shapes on Earth and across our solar system. They also confirmed what philosopher Plato had theorized in ancient Greece: As you break down the Earth, it crumbles into cubes.

This explains the distinct fracture patterns observed in nature, says study co-author Douglas Jerolmack, Ph.D., a geophysics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. ‘Since fragmentation is a ubiquitous process that breaks rock and ice across the solar system, our findings help to explain the shape and size of planetary materials.’

In the first of the computer simulations performed by teams from the University of Pennsylvania, Budapest University of Technology, and the University of Debrecen in Hungary, researchers created a geometric model in which they carved an abstract cube into almost 600 000 pieces by randomly inserting a series of 50 2D planes. All of the resulting fragments were, on average, cubic. These pieces were then randomly split apart, many times, resulting in 13 million fragments. The numbers of sides, edges, and vertices were counted, and those outcomes were averaged. While the resulting fragments weren’t actually millions of tiny cubes, the averages are cuboid, down to multiple decimal places.