"Plato was right: Earth is made, on average, of cubes" Topic

"Science has steadily moved beyond Plato's conjectures, looking instead to the atom as the building block of the universe. Yet Plato seems to have been onto something, researchers have found.

In a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team from the University of Pennsylvania, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, and University of Debrecen uses math, geology, and physics to demonstrate that the average shape of rocks on Earth is a cube.

"Plato is widely recognized as the first person to develop the concept of an atom, the idea that matter is composed of some indivisible component at the smallest scale," says Douglas Jerolmack, a geophysicist in Penn's School of Arts & Sciences' Department of Earth and Environmental Science and the School of Engineering and Applied Science's Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics. "But that understanding was only conceptual; nothing about our modern understanding of atoms derives from what Plato told us…"
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Armand

It was Democritus who first promulgated the rudiments of "atomic theory".
But both Democritus and Plato lacked cyclotrons and so on, so it was mostly drunken frat boy bloviating on their part.
Any speculation that they "discovered" atomic theory is a reach. A lot of fine Greek wine was involved.