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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.

38 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. Ehhh What ? by Crashmarik · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Ehhh What ? by disputationist · · Score: 5, Informative

      Incorrect. Abstract mathematical objects are not "encoded within the observable universe"

    2. Re:Ehhh What ? by X0563511 · · Score: 5, Informative

      The set is not encoded in the universe, though the description of the set is. Else, every reference to "infinite" would, well, break the universe.

      --
      For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
    3. Re:Ehhh What ? by JustOK · · Score: 5, Funny

      And you think the universe isn't broken NOW? Good god, man. Wake up!

      --
      rewriting history since 2109
    4. Re:Ehhh What ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      You're talking about people who sincerely believe that in a black hole, "loss of information," a completely human-created concept, is some sort of law of physics. They also think they can measure all the mass and energy in the entire universe even though some of it isn't observable. Astrophysicists aren't exactly logical.

      I know, right? These "scientists" can't even wrap their heads around the infinite mysteries. I think it's because a lot of them are Gemini's.

    5. Re:Ehhh What ? by carou · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    6. Re:Ehhh What ? by MillionthMonkey · · Score: 4, Interesting

      When stuff falls into a black hole, it gets measurably heavier. If a charged particle falls into one, the black hole retains a measurable electric field. If a black hole picks up angular momentum from gas circling in sideways, the hole spins faster, and the gas fired from the jets comes out at a higher speed.

      Your argument that mass or energy exists that isn't measurable since it isn't observable sounds a little illogical... how would you even know there was such a thing if nobody had measured it for you in the first place?

      Actually Stephen Hawking would have agreed with you in 1997, but by 2004 he decided he had lost the bet with John Preskill of Caltech.

    7. Re:Ehhh What ? by ultranova · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Incorrect. Abstract mathematical objects are not "encoded within the observable universe"

      Sure they are. The set of concepts that humans can conceive are those which human brains, either directly or through tools like computers, can handle. Human brains evolved in the context usually called "the observable universe", so all concepts - including but not limited to abstract mathematical objects - we can think about are encoded within it, just in a real roundabout way. In other words, you can not know anything that isn't encoded in your causal past; even the very notion of abstraction only exists because it's inherent in the physical universe to such a degree that evolution encoded the principle into your brain.

      And besides, the notion that math is supernatural - something that exists above physical reality, independent of it - is an unproven and probably unprovable assertion.

      --

      Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.

    8. Re:Ehhh What ? by gl4ss · · Score: 2

      math, as a set of rules and logical conclusions made from them, doesn't depend on the universe. that's whats magical about it. some alien force should come to same math conclusions, including mandelbrot set.

      it's not "above" physical reality, it's more like parallel.

      it's a real shame that the voyager doesn't include a mandelbrot set.

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    9. Re:Ehhh What ? by ultranova · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --

      Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.

    10. Re:Ehhh What ? by flug · · Score: 2

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

      Put succinctly: Nope.

    11. Re:Ehhh What ? by MillionthMonkey · · Score: 3, Funny

      Do they germinate, take root, send up leaves, and decrease atmospheric dioxide... in the DARK? Entropy always increases within a closed system, but I suspect your "closed system" has a window open somewhere.

    12. Re:Ehhh What ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

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

    13. Re:Ehhh What ? by Crashmarik · · Score: 2

      The set is complex not random. You'd no more expect particular random images in it than you would an indefinitely iterated sierpinski gasket.

      Anyway at this point I am guessing is that "Ask Ethan" made friends with somebody at Slashdot. Which explains why these non news non stories keep showing up here.

  2. YouTube? Srsly? by ma++i+ude · · Score: 5, Funny

    A zoom into a fractal stored as a 16-minute YouTube video must be the least efficient way to store an equation. If only there was some sort of a 'fractal compression' method.

    --
    You can't shut us down! The Internet is about the free exchange and sale of other people's ideas!
    1. Re:YouTube? Srsly? by itzly · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:YouTube? Srsly? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Hi. Welcome to CS 121. Today we discuss the Time vs Space complexity tradeoff.

    3. Re:YouTube? Srsly? by Natural+Philosopher · · Score: 4, Interesting

      In the 60s we didn't need no blinkin computer

      Indeed. Ed Lorenz was able in 1963 to visualize the attractor behind deterministic nonperiodic flow with only rudimentary manual graph plotting done on basis of numeric printouts. And Mandelbrot wrote his pioneering papers on fractals (such as 'How long is the coast of Britain') in the middle Sixties, and although he was at IBM's Thomas J. Watson, the computing resources were those available at that time.

  3. It's that twat with the upside down head again. by Hognoxious · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's not n^2 + n, it's n^2 + c.

    That's to say, the number you multiply by itself isn't the same as the number you add.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    1. Re:It's that twat with the upside down head again. by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 2

      It's not n^2 + n

      Yes it is, for the second (or third, if you're starting from 0) element in the sequence. The article isn't defining the sequence, per se; it's listing elements in the sequence calculated solely from the initial complex number.

      I think the confusion has arisen because n is usually used as the element number, not the complex point (which usually goes by c).

      the number you multiply by itself isn't the same as the number you add.

      No - well, just once - but that's not what the article says. You square the previous element, then add c.

      Wikipedia says:

      The Mandelbrot set is the set of complex numbers 'c' for which the sequence ( c, c^2 + c, (c^2+c)^2 + c, ((c^2+c)^2+c)^2 + c, (((c^2+c)^2+c)^2+c)^2 + c, ...) does not approach infinity.

      which is exactly what the article says, except using c instead of n.

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
    2. Re:It's that twat with the upside down head again. by Mateorabi · · Score: 5, Informative

      Some of the confusion is that the original description is defined recursively in a way that 'c' only shows up once, and the initial value is not c. z[i] = z[i-1]^2+c. But because z[0] is defined = 0, you can effectively rewrite the sequence in terms of just 'c' starting from the second. The downside is that at first it might LOOK at first glance like the previous term is being added, which is why I like the recursive form.

      Also, by not starting from 0 you miss out on a cool connection: for a given fixed C, the graph of convergence for non-zero choices of z[0] over the complex plane gives you a Julia Set. With the neat property that Julia Sets from C inside the Mandelbrot set are fully connected and Julia Sets from C outside the Mandelbrot Set are sparse disconnected Cantor spaces.

      --
      "You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8

    3. Re:It's that twat with the upside down head again. by Hognoxious · · Score: 2

      The article isn't defining the sequence, per se; it's listing elements in the sequence calculated solely from the initial complex number.

      You can't do it from one complex number.

      If what you said was true then why does every implementation - and I've written at least two[1] - use two complex variables? And why is there such a thing as a Julia set, the difference being whether it's n (should be z anyway) or c that represents the point on the Argand diagram you're going to colour?

      http://www.fractaldesign.net/F...

      Whatever the clickbaiting hipster twat tried to say, Penrose explained it 27 million times more clearly. I read that bit of tENM just today, as it happens.

      [1] Sinclair basic, MS Pascal for Dos.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  4. Old, old news by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Mandelbrot Zooms Now Surpass the Scale of the Observable Universe

    First off, does that even mean anything? What units is the "scale" of a universe expressed in?

    Okay, let's take it to mean the ratio of the size of observable universe to the size of the Planck length, for lack of any better definition. In that case, Mandelzooms surpassed that years ago.

    with no signs of loss of complexity at all.

    You make it sound like we're expecting a loss of complexity, and we just haven't found it yet. But isn't it mathematically proven that the Mandelbrot set has the same "complexity" at all scales? Kind of inherent in the whole "fractal" thing, I thought...

    I'd have thought it would be more interesting to talk about, for example, how all the pretty colours that everyone gawps at aren't even points in the set. They're just colour-coded as to how long the sequence takes to reach a certain value (all of the coloured points ultimately diverge to infinity, which is what makes them not part of the set).

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
  5. Re:Math prodigy? Srsly? by Alwin+Henseler · · Score: 2

    the equation is just n^2+n = n but you need to be a math prodigy to do the visualizations on your own without a computer.

    The number crunching part isn't hard or even difficult to understand, people from all backgrounds have done it on lowly 8-bit machines running at a few MHz. All you need is time:

    A Bunch of Rocks

  6. Re:Practical use? by Tablizer · · Score: 2

    On Rina 4, that's how they spail it.

  7. Positive or negative infinity? by PacoSuarez · · Score: 4, Informative

    For most complex numbers the sequence will most certainly not converge to positive or negative infinity, whatever those mean. When dealing with complex numbers it only makes sense to talk about a single infinity, which is the point at infinity of the projective complex line (a.k.a. "Riemann sphere").

  8. My Casio Fx48 Calculator has a bigger range. by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Ages ago, seems like bronze age to me now, I was a freshman in college and got my first calculator. A tiny Casio-Fx48 creditcard sized one. It was only 9 decimal digits accurate, but its floating point number range went all the way up to a googol, 9.9999999e+99. That number is so huge, it is more than the number of subatomic particles in the known universe. Ming bogglingly huge number. In math such things are so common. For example the function factorial, reaches a googol at 79. Yup, Factorial (79) > number of subatomic particles in the known universe.

    I read the book "Fun With Numbers" by Mir publications, Moscow in 10th grade. It talked about simple things like immensity of a number like pow(2,64) explained in a simple language a 10th grader could get. (pow(2,64) rice grains would need a barn 3 meter wide, 3 meters tall and several times the distance of Earth to Moon or something like that).

    So Mandelbrot set could exceed the resolution of the known universe, by some version of the definition of these terms, in as little as 64 iterations.

    --
    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
  9. Can't tell you how disappointed I am by Overzeetop · · Score: 2

    Two hours and nobody has posted this until now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    It's like you all aren't even trying anymore.

    --
    Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
  10. Re:Practical use? by Rei · · Score: 2

    I don't think the Mandelbrot Set itself persay is all that useful, but its 3d relatives like Mandelbox, Mandelbulb, etc sure generates some amazing landscapes... I could totally picture that used in games or movies. It's amazing the diversity it can do with some parameter changes - steampunk machinery and evolving spacescapes, reactors / futuristic computers, art deco, extradimensional beings, alien cities, floating viny landscapes, transforming robotics, things hard to describe, etc.

    I'd love to have a house / secret supervillain lair that looks like this one ;)

    --
    *Kid Rock runs for Senate* Democrats: We must run Kid Scissors.
  11. Re:Practical use? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    persay

    That's per se. Go and stand on the naughty step with "peak" guy from the previous post.

  12. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 2

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  13. Re:Is most of it empty space? by itzly · · Score: 2

    The Mandelbrot set itself is the collection of points that are shown as black. The set itself is a fully connected, but very complicated, shape. If you zoom in on a point inside of it, after a while you only see black. If you zoom in on a point outside of it, it will become another solid color. In order to keep it interesting, you need to zoom in right on the edge. But the edge is infinitely long, so there are many interesting points where you can zoom in.

  14. confused by edittard · · Score: 3

    How can something which is just a pure number outscale something that's physical and has actual dimensions?

    --
    At the bottom of the /. main page it says 'Yesterday's News'. Well they got that right.
    1. Re:confused by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 3, Informative

      The idea is that the "scale" of the observable universe is the ratio from the largest "thing" (the whole observable universe) to the smallest "thing," which is the Planck length. That ratio is 10^63 or something like that, much less than the zoom level that's achieved in the video.

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
  15. Surpirse discovery: infinity is infinite!! by jandersen · · Score: 2

    The scale of zoom visualizations now goes well past the limits of the observable Universe, with no signs of loss of complexity at all.

    I have deperately tried to interpret some insight into this 'discovery' - and failed; this may be because of my lack of understanding, of course, but I don't think so. Mathematically, the set of complex numbers is infinite - uncountably so, in fact (Cantor's diagonal argument):

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

    The observable universe is limited by the speed of light, so it will be less than ~28 ly across (we can at most see as far as light has traveled since the big bang), and intuitively infinite must be bigger than something of limited size. It is a misleading argument, though; infinity is a strange thing, and comparing the sizes of infinite sets has to be done with care (as Cantor's argument demonstrates). For one thing, we don't really know that the universe is a continuum in any of the senses defined in mathematics - there are speculations that there is a "smallest size" of distance and time "because of quantum" (I'm being deliberately wooly-mouthed because I don't know what I'm talking about here). If that is the case, then any infinite set will have more elements than there are bits of universe that we can observe (total volume of observable universe / volume of.the smallest element = finite number)

    If we are talking about continua, on the other hand, then we don't really know, I think. A Mandelbrot set is a subset of the complex numbers, so is at most of the same cardinality as that one. Incidentally and perhaps surprisingly, there are exactly as many complex numbers as there are real numbers, and there are as many real number between 0 and 1 as there are between +/- infinity, courtesy Cantor again. The universe, on the other hand may or may not be fully describable as some sort of N-dimensional, smooth manifold (manifold: a winkly version of space, so to speak); a smooth manifold will again have the same cardinality as [0,1], and if the universe can not be fitted into one of those, it is anybody's guess, I think. There are sets larger than the real numbers.

    As an aside note: why have I ignored the idea of 'size' as in distances or volumes? Because it makes no sense to talk about metrics, when one of the sets does not have a defined method of measuring distances in meters or any other physical distance. Assigning a physical unit to an abstract set would be arbitrary.

  16. Re:I'm wondering about the precision of the math p by DamnOregonian · · Score: 2

    There are quite a few arbitrary precision libraries out there. Sure, not "unlimited", but close enough for the video. These days, with multi-core machines, you can even generate images of decent resolution, far beyond the useful precision of double precision floats, *fast*. And since distributed computing is all the rage, these days, you can do even better: http://www.ultrafractal.com/

  17. Re:evolution by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  18. Re:evolution by micahraleigh · · Score: 2

    "The function of the leaf is to present surface area to the sun for photosynthesis."

    Too monolithic here. If someone thinks the purpose of a leaf is to make salads taste good, or for keys to surface properties of electricity, who is to say he is wrong?

    You can't really talk about purpose in any meaningful way without also introducing someone or something that purposes that thing. I can see how people, (and more superficially) animals, even plants aim to accomplish objectives. I don't see how evolution does that.

    The arrogant style here is a major problem for me also.