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In Plato’s Timaeus, atoms of the elements were proposed to be the simplest possible geometric forms — the Platonic solids. Furthermore, it was proposed that the
by dr_dshiv 3y ago
In Plato’s Timaeus, atoms of the elements were proposed to be the simplest possible geometric forms — the Platonic solids. Furthermore, it was proposed that the geometry of the forms determined the material properties of the elements. For instance, cubes were earth because of how well they stack together.
However, atoms don’t have Euclidean geometry. For instance, a hydrogen atom can be described with spherical harmonics. However, it seems that the intuition seem to bear out:
1. that the elements are composed of variations in the simplest geometrical forms.
2. that the properties of the elements are derived from their geometric forms.
Curious if anyone has a good piece of evidence for or against this platonic perspective.
- 082349872349872 3y agoA related point: medieval philosophers often divided things into 'male' and 'female', or 'male', 'neuter', and 'female', but it seems like they weren't attempting to convey anything gender-based, but rather found that the most intuitive way (grammar-based?) to make bi- or tri-partite distinctions. That made me wonder why so much of the world is easily modeled by black-white (or black-white-red) distinctions — I eventually came to the conclusion that if 'n' is the real number of species within a given genus, after one has taken even subtle differences into account, well: for any given finite horizon there are many more n's that are divisible by 2 than by 3, and by either of those than larger primes... (The chinese philosophers, who loved to stuff things into 5 categories, made things difficult for themselves by this model. Then again, other people loved to make 7-way categorisations, so maybe they all just thought binary splits were too easy to show their erudition?)