Minerals are natural solids formed through many geological processes under high pressures. To be thought as a true mineral, a substance must have a crystal structure with uniform physical things throughout. Minerals differ in composition from pure elements and simple salts to very complex silicates with thousands of known forms. In contrast, a rock sample is a random aggregate of minerals and/or mineraloids, and has no specific chemical composition. Most of the rocks of the Earth's crust have quartz (crystalline SiO2), feldspar, mica, chlorite, kaolin, calcite, epidote, olivine, augite, hornblende, magnetite, hematite, limonite and a few other minerals. Some minerals, like quartz, mica or feldspar are common, while others have been found in only a few places in the world. The largest group of minerals by far is the silicates (most rocks are ≥95% silicates), which are made largely of silicon and oxygen, also with ions of aluminium, magnesium, iron, calcium and other metals.

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The sufficient condition for the reproduction of a political democracy refers to the citizens' level of democratic consciousness and, as David Gabbard & Karen Appleton point out, ""the responsibility of cultivating the democratic consciousness requisite to this conception of citizenship falls to paideia"" which involves not simply education but character development and a well-rounded knowledge and skills, i.e. the education of the individual as citizen, which alone can give substantive content to the public space. This is particularly so because democracy can only be grounded on the conscious choice of citizens for individual and collective autonomy. Thus it cannot be the outcome of any social, economic or natural ""laws"" or tendencies dialectically leading to it, let alone any divine or mystical dogmas and preconceptions. In this sense, neither representative democracy nor soviet democracy meet the conditions for political democracy, and are simply forms of political oligarchy, where political power is concentrated in the hands of various elites, i.e. professional politicians, and party bureaucrats respectively.

In many prehistoric and ancient cultures, the Sun was thought to be a deity or other supernatural phenomenon. One of the first people in the Western world to offer a scientific explanation for the sun was the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras, who reasoned that it was a giant flaming ball of rock or metal, and not the chariot of Apollo. For teaching this heresy he was imprisoned by the authorities and sentenced to death.