nlc315
12-17-2006, 02:38 AM
As far as I can tell from my current knowledge of chaos mathematics (which is basic), a fractal is basically an image that constantly repeates itself. As a crude explaination, it's a picture, and if you were to zoom in on any one piece of it, the zoomed image would be the same as the original.
I find this an interesting concept, and I wonder if the universe is merely a big fractal? As a perhaps poor example, on the microscopic scale, the model of the atom shows electrons revolving around the center nucleous...and in the macroscopic view of the solar system, planets revolve around the sun.
Billions of cells make up the human body...perhaps the sum of all human beings on the planet make up some macroscopic organism or something? Imagine your individual cells as being like people...they have good/bad poker days, lol, and personal problems just like the rest of us. I'm stretching this obviously...but view the idea as a whole with an open mind. I saw one three dimensional fractal model called a "spherical fractal" which involved a sphere of radius 1, then having 9 sphere's attached evenly and symetrically around that sphere with their own radii being 1/3, and so on and so forth. The calculated surface area of this sphere is infinite... Like the expanding universe?
My second question is concerning some laws of physics. This was the topic of a really great PBS Nova called "the elegant universe" narrated by Brian Greene, a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia. Currently, and again, from my small scope of understanding, it seems we've got 2 sets of laws. One for big things (relativity), and one for small things (quantum mechanics). The question posed is, what do we do when we have something that falls under both of those categories? For example, a black hole...it's very massive...more than our Sun for sure...but yet, it's been compressed into something REALLY small. It's gravitational force is so great, as I'm sure everyone knows, light itself cannont escape. What if we compared this to the strong force inside the nucleous of the atom? By that I mean this isn't a gravitational force any longer...in effect it's the strong force equal to that inside the atom. Basically, from the perspective of this "the universe is a fractal" idea, a black hole becomes like some really dense nucleous of an atom?
I find this an interesting concept, and I wonder if the universe is merely a big fractal? As a perhaps poor example, on the microscopic scale, the model of the atom shows electrons revolving around the center nucleous...and in the macroscopic view of the solar system, planets revolve around the sun.
Billions of cells make up the human body...perhaps the sum of all human beings on the planet make up some macroscopic organism or something? Imagine your individual cells as being like people...they have good/bad poker days, lol, and personal problems just like the rest of us. I'm stretching this obviously...but view the idea as a whole with an open mind. I saw one three dimensional fractal model called a "spherical fractal" which involved a sphere of radius 1, then having 9 sphere's attached evenly and symetrically around that sphere with their own radii being 1/3, and so on and so forth. The calculated surface area of this sphere is infinite... Like the expanding universe?
My second question is concerning some laws of physics. This was the topic of a really great PBS Nova called "the elegant universe" narrated by Brian Greene, a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia. Currently, and again, from my small scope of understanding, it seems we've got 2 sets of laws. One for big things (relativity), and one for small things (quantum mechanics). The question posed is, what do we do when we have something that falls under both of those categories? For example, a black hole...it's very massive...more than our Sun for sure...but yet, it's been compressed into something REALLY small. It's gravitational force is so great, as I'm sure everyone knows, light itself cannont escape. What if we compared this to the strong force inside the nucleous of the atom? By that I mean this isn't a gravitational force any longer...in effect it's the strong force equal to that inside the atom. Basically, from the perspective of this "the universe is a fractal" idea, a black hole becomes like some really dense nucleous of an atom?