PLATO’S CUBES ON THE BIG SCREEN

At the crux of Mission: Impossible – Fallout, Tom Cruise’s character Ethan Hunt and antagonist August Walker, played by Henry Cavill, come to blows atop Norway’s famed Pulpit Rock.

The granite cliff caught the eye of study co-author Gábor Domokos, a mechanics professor at Budapest University of Technology. ‘Somebody took me to see the movie and, at the end, I said “My god! Look at those fractures!”’ he says.

Domokos asked one of his assistants to run an analysis on an image of Pulpit Rock to see whether the outcrop’s fracture patterns fit Plato’s theorised cuboid average. ‘I didn’t tell him what it was. I just told him to do it,’ Domokos says. ‘And, of course, he got the right numbers.’