One could surmise that if cannonball stacking was your duty, you might want to know the best way to do it. In the 1600s, Sir Walter Raleigh had that very question... so he asked his assistant Thomas Harriot to figure it out. Harriot quickly calculated the number of balls in the stack without counting them. But for efficiency, it was his mathematician friend Johannes Kepler who conjectured that cubic close packing would allow for maximum ball packing density. And as any good atomist knows, if you can understand how balls pack together, then surely you know how all the elements of nature are arranged.

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