|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Fractals
| Article
# : |
12833 |
|
|
Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
|
| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1987 |
4,404 Words |
| Author
: |
Mort La Brecque
Mort La Brecque is a free-lance science writer residing in New
York City. He is a former editor of the Sciences magazine,
published by the New York Academy of Sciences. |
We all have a limited way of viewing the world, which we have learned from our culture. Occasionally with the advance of science we are challenged to learn a new way of seeing.
Today we see the earth rotating on its axis while it revolves around the sun, but several hundred years ago it was obvious that the sun revolved around the earth.
Similarly, the absolute flow of time seemed obvious and confirmed by science so long as the Newtonian frame of reference was dominant. Yet with the advent of Einstein's relativistic time frames, we are now taught that time itself is relative to our frame of reference.
Today a new way of viewing the world - fractal geometry - is gaining rapid acceptance in diverse scientific disciplines as an important way of seeing some parts of the world. The structure of natural systems is found to possess detail through several levels of magnification. Such nested detail is fractal. If the details at different levels possess an identifiable similarity, the fractal is self-similar.
In contrast, modern science has been able to advance because scientists have made simplifying assumptions that the systems they are studying have regular geometry similar to the standard Euclidean forms that have been taught for centuries. For complicated systems, the assumption has been that behavior could be modeled by a set of equations that cumulatively describe the behavior of the system. However, many natural systems have remained outside the domain of science because scientists could not see how to make suitable simplifying assumptions about the system.
Fractal geometry is now being found to apply to diverse types of natural phenomena. It is also being used to create images of stunning beauty, which appeal to mathematicians, scientists, and laymen alike. The aesthetic and analytical capabilities of fractals have brought them to the forefront of scientific research in a host of scientific disciplines.
When scientific experiments yield results differing significantly from those predicted by theory, scientists must search for an explanation. Is something wrong with the experiment? Does the theory underlying the experiment have an undetected flaw? Are the scientists perhaps on the brink of a major discovery?
This was the situation and
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
