The Obvious and Unbelievable Rock

The article draws attention to the fact that modern petrography has no theoretical concept of rock. The visual representation “a rock is an aggregate of a large number of mineral grains” (compare: a mineral is a set of a large number of atoms) in the methodological aspect is systematically inconsistent, in the philosophical aspect demonstrates vulgar materialism, alien to theoretical thinking. The rapid transition from structural, proper petrographic understanding of a rock to its genesis is, of course, cognition, but within the framework of other (causal, genetic, evolutionary...) methodologies and at the expense of other (primarily physics and chemistry) scientific disciplines. Meanwhile, it is possible to express a number of primary truths about a rock by means of modern mathematics, if we turn from the morphometry of mineral grains (interesting, but secondary) to their systemic relations, but not to any, but also to primary ones, which cannot be absent in a rock.