From rocks to icebergs, the natural world tends to break into cubes

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

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.

The PDF of the paper is on the arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.04628

And ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343041685_Plato%27s...

Previous postings which didn't get much attention:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23922393

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23975716

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 2. 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...

Sounds like Minecraft.

Great, so we live in a voxel game engine.

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?