What is a fractal??

Well, we had a great time last Thursday! It was so cool to hang out and enjoy being with people who accept us as ourselves - and are all sick of the usual thing in this country of always trying to get more, become more, be more, buy more, achieve more, etc.

This time we talked about fractals.

What are fractals? Yeah, i had no idea until relatively recently either.

Fractals are shapes that when you split them into parts, there are reduced size copies of the original. They are amazing - allow me to copy a couple links to web sites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_GBwuYuOOs

http://fractalfoundation.org/

The interesting thing (check out the 3rd of the web sites) is that fractals occur everywhere. In DNA, in weather, in geography, in math, in space - everywhere. Check out this quote from:

http://library.thinkquest.org/26242/full/


What is a Fractal?

Imagine flying in a space shuttle looking at the coast of Britain. From such a great distance the coast looks perfectly straight, going from north to south. But, as you approach the earth something tells you the coast is not perfectly straight... Of course! As you go into the upper atmosphere you realize that it has thousands of bays, harbors, capes, and peninsulas that you could not see from a distance. Thinking that now you have a detailed picture of the coast, you turn towards one of the harbor beaches, which seems to be straight... However, as you get closer to it, you see that it too has thousands of smaller bays, harbors, capes, and peninsulas! Wondering if this will ever end you decide to get even closer... Eventually you wind up on the beach looking at the coast through a microscope. You can now see every grain of sand clearly, but, it too has thousands of indentations and extrusions!


No matter how close you get, you will
always see a similarly detailed picture


The fact that any small part of the coast will look similar to the whole thing was first noted by Benoit Mandelbrot. He called shapes like this fractals. Fractals are figures with an infinite amount of detail. When magnified, they don’t become more simple, but remain as complex as they were without magnification. In nature, you can find them everywhere. Any tree branch, when magnified, looks like the entire tree. Any rock from a mountain looks like the entire mountain. The theory of fractals was first developed to study nature. Now it is used in a variety of other applications. And, of course, beauty is what makes them popular!

So, here is this naturally occurring, amazingly complex shape system that seems to be everywhere. It is perfect and it is not understood! Why does this happen this way? What is the purpose of all this?

Well, the problem is that this unbelievable organization does not fit with the idea that the world just randomly evolved into existence - if it was random and naturally selected only, there would not be this much consistency. What is does scream is that there is a marvelous creator who is intelligent beyond our imaginations and made the world in a beautiful, organized way. His creativity was applied with reason and purpose!

Now, i know this is interesting and i hope you enjoy learning about it, but if all you do is read this and go, "Cool" and then back to your life, then it is not enough.

My advice?

When you read about fractals, thank God - invite Him into that moment with you and ask Him to be part of your life. When you see fractals in life (which if you look, you will), do the same - enjoy the fact that the very same God who made the world so amazing and complicated, made you and if He went to all that trouble, He will not abandon you - and plus there is More to life than the everyday!! Stop and notice it, let is sink in, maybe there is something besides work, sleep, and bills!


Hope this can encourage you this week when the week begins to overwhelm,