Reality is Fractal

Did you know that when you measure a coastline , if you use a larger ruler, you'll get a smaller result. Likewise, a smaller ruler yields a larger result until. In other words, the closer you look, the more there is. Coastlines are fractal .

Just a few days ago my wife and I were talking about how high school history has to cover so much time in such a small space, you basically just get a a play-by-play of events. My college history class managed to actually tie cause and effect from the US Reconstruction era through the fall of the Berlin Wall — the entire period covered by the class. Meanwhile, McCullough spends over 350 pages discussing a single year . History is fractal.

Physics especially demonstrates this quality, but in both directions . Incredible beauty and complexity, both in cosmic and microscopic scales. The deeper we look into the stars , the more we discover, the more questions we uncover. The Universe is fractal.

I loved this piece about stairs . Certainly I've not thought about stairs nearly as much as the author — and aren't we glad that there are people we can trust out there thinking about things more and deeper than we do? While I'm all for learning as much about everything as you can, there are practical limits. Specialization is pretty cool. Knowledge is fractal.

The deeper you look, the more there is. The further you look, the more there is. The more ways you look, the more there is. Surely some of this is humans being humans, expressing confirmation bias and seeing what you want to see — if you want to see more in something that isn't actually there, then you'll see what you want to see. But I'm willing to risk that if there's a chance that there really is something more to be found, more questions, more experiences, more joys, more discoveries. Curiosity is fractal.