It turns out that Plato's conception about the element earth being made up of cubes is, literally, the statistical average model for real earth. 'The interesting thing here is that what we find with rock, or earth, is that there is more than a conceptual lineage back to Plato.

'But that understanding was only conceptual nothing about our modern understanding of atoms derives from what Plato told us. '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. 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.

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

Flat earth theory wiki