Mandelbrot Zooms Now Surpass the Scale of the Observable Universe

StartsWithABang writes You're used to real numbers: that is, numbers that can be expressed as a decimal, even if it's an arbitrarily long, non-repeating decimal. There are also complex numbers, which are numbers that have a real part and also an imaginary part. The imaginary part is just like the real part, but is also multiplied by i, or the square root of -1. It's a simple definition: the Mandelbrot set consists of every possible complex number, n, where the sequence n, n^2 + n, (n^2 + n)^2 + n, etc.—where each new term is the prior term, squared, plus n—does not go to either positive or negative infinity. The scale of zoom visualizations now goes well past the limits of the observable Universe, with no signs of loss of complexity at all.

Comments

Ehhh What ?

[Crashmarik]

Technically the description of the Mandlebrot set is encoded within the observable universe so there is a problem in recursion her.

Second how is this surprising to anyone ? It's long been possible to describe and mathematically manipulate sets with more elements than the observable universe.

Re:Ehhh What ?

[carou]

Loss of information is not a human-created concept, it is an expression of what is (as far as we know) a fundamental law of thermodynamics. You may have heard of them.

Re:Ehhh What ?

[ultranova]

A law that is violated in my garden every Spring as the seeds germinate, take root, send up leaves, and decrease atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Plants are engines powered by the Sun. The very purpose of those leaves is to tap the flow of solar energy. When the giant celestial nuclear reactor is taken into account, the entropy of the entire system is increasing.

There is something fundamentally wrong about the fundamental "laws" of thermodynamics. Put succinctly, they fail to take into account that these "laws" do not apply to the observer, who is not necessarily decaying into his constituent parts during the process of observation.

Your body is using an external source of energy - the food you eat - to fight the decay.

Re:Ehhh What ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Information is never lost in the universe. Entropy is when you can't know the information, but it is still there.

Re:YouTube? Srsly?

[itzly]

If only there was some sort of a 'fractal compression' method.

I'm looking forward to your decompressing code that can reproduce the video in less than 16 minutes.

Re:evolution

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy crap, the internet is full of stupid. Your argument has no place in this discussion - there is no anthropomorphization of plants in describing the function of leaves. Just because evolution does not know where it is headed and does not have a "direction" or a "director" does not mean that body parts do not have functions.

Birds do in fact have wings in order to fly. They did not decide to evolve wings, nor did they have a manifest destiny to fly and therefore created wings, but the function of wings in most birds is to enable flight.

Plants use photosynthesis to create the sugars they need to survive. The leaves are where this happens. The function of the leaf is to present surface area to the sun for photosynthesis. This says nothing of evolution, intelligent design or anything else of the sort.

We are all now suffering from your sophomoric inability to understand simple concepts of language and distinguish between a discussion of thermodynamics and the absorption of external energy and a discussion of evolution. Damn, the internet is a cesspool of stupid of every kind.