Fractals
Why on earth should you care about fractals today? You know, the type of image that seems to go on forever in a recursive pattern, constantly forming new branches on itself in a hypnotizing manner:
It turns out that fractals are pretty neat, and they’re all over the place in nature. Remember how excited I was to share spontaneous synchronization with you? From fireflies to subatomic particles to astronomical systems, all of these systems come about because of the same underlying mechanism, and nature is brutal in its efficiency: once it has an idea, it runs with it everywhere.
Zoom in on any coastline, and you’ll see something remarkable. Really—any coastline anywhere will do. As you get closer to a detail on a particular pattern, you start to notice that there’s another, much smaller pattern embedded in that other pattern. You zoom in to see it, only to notice that there is another similar pattern embedded in that pattern, and on and on it goes:
