Geometry Reveals How the World Is Assembled From Cubes | Quanta Magazine
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.
In other news, it turns out we’re all chained inside a cave.