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Great show about fractals and nature

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DavidRavenMoon

DavidRavenMoon

anonymous anomalous
There was a really good episode of Nova on PBS about fractals. It was entitled "Hunting the Hidden Dimension". This got me to thinking that if everything in nature is seemingly based on fractal geometry, what about the universe itself? That could help explain multiple universes, since particular elements such as the Mandelbrot set, reappear over and over again infinitely. So any part of the universe might do the same.

Here's the page for the show.

NOVA | Hunting the Hidden Dimension | PBS
 
Thanks for the link David,

I like your thoughts on fractal geometry repeating throughout nature and what you say about the universe itself works for me. It could for instance be compared to the structure of the brain.

You might like this,


Mark
 
This got me to thinking that if everything in nature is seemingly based on fractal geometry, what about the universe itself? That could help explain multiple universes, since particular elements such as the Mandelbrot set, reappear over and over again infinitely
Click to expand...
Fractals are a pure mathematical idea/construct which generates for example (not only of course) Mandelbrot sets or Koch curves. We live in a 4 dimensional universe and not in 3.141592653589...dimensions or in any other rational/irrational numbers of dimensions (string theory dimension do not count here because nothing can leak into it because they would be (if exiting) much too small):). If we would live in a space with a different dimension we would probably already have recognized it, e.g. Newtons Law of Gravitation would simply not work physically that way we see each day. Besides this there had been implicitly searches for that hidden dimensions by means of altering Newtons Law (which is quadratically reciprocal in lenght) by guessing a 1/r^(2 + very tiny number)-law - with the effect that this 'very tiny number' is not distinguishable different from zero (with current methods). So a fractal idea would reflect simply a similarity and nothing deeply hidden in nature as far as I can see.

There are repeating structures in nature (and it is possible to assign simply a fractal dimension to physical structure) but this is then only true up to specific point (think of trees for example or a coast line of Britain which is of course not infinit of length). At least any repeating structure would have an end at the Planck Lenght (~10^-35m) for any physical structure which is not true for a fractal law.
 
PointLess said:
Fractals are a pure mathematical idea/construct which generates for example (not only of course) Mandelbrot sets or Koch curves. We live in a 4 dimensional universe and not in 3.141592653589...dimensions or in any other rational/irrational numbers of dimensions (string theory dimension do not count here because nothing can leak into it because they would be (if exiting) much too small):). If we would live in a space with a different dimension we would probably already have recognized it, e.g. Newtons Law of Gravitation would simply not work physically that way we see each day. Besides this there had been implicitly searches for that hidden dimensions by means of altering Newtons Law (which is quadratically reciprocal in lenght) by guessing a 1/r^(2 + very tiny number)-law - with the effect that this 'very tiny number' is not distinguishable different from zero (with current methods). So a fractal idea would reflect simply a similarity and nothing deeply hidden in nature as far as I can see.

There are repeating structures in nature (and it is possible to assign simply a fractal dimension to physical structure) but this is then only true up to specific point (think of trees for example or a coast line of Britain which is of course not infinit of length). At least any repeating structure would have an end at the Planck Lenght (~10^-35m) for any physical structure which is not true for a fractal law.
Click to expand...

PointLess,
I appreciate your point about fractals. I do realize that the links posted here are only ideas, and with any hypothesis, work will have be done to prove or disprove. However, I find fascination in just pondering the idea for awhile. If disproved, I will discard it and move on; even so, the discussion of what may exist is much more interesting to me. While it is true that classical physics clearly does not point to the existence hidden dimensions, I think we can agree Newtonian physics can't be applied completely at the quantum level.

I remember asking my physical science teacher (in the '80s) what he thought of Chaos Theory and he pooh-poohed it. Now it is considered a viable field of research.
 
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