There is an interesting video on YouTube that I found several months ago called "Powers of Ten." This was a short film produced by Charles and Ray Eames of the Eames Office in 1977, and it is a fascinating view of our world, the world without and the world within.

The movie opens with a picnic in a field in Chicago, and the narrator describes how the camera will zoom out at a certain rate as it leaves the Earth, the solar system, our galaxy and continues to zoom out on an imagined, hypothetical journey through the universe.As we speed away, it is amazing and awe-inspiring to see our galaxies and its neighbors as single points of light in the universe. Millions and millions of stars reduce to no more than points of light from an imagined perspective billions of light years away.Just as quickly, the camera reverses its direction and returns toward that picnic spot in Chicago, and we can see the points of light expand into galaxies and solar systems as we zoom back toward the Earth, into our atmosphere and down to that picnic in Chicago, where the camera stops.The narrator discusses the journey back to our world and then proceeds to take us into the micro-universe. The world magnifies and we see cell groupings, then individual cells and finally a single cell. The camera keeps zooming in to show molecules, a single molecule, then atoms and the magnification continues.Of course the microscopic view, much like the macroscopic view shown previous to it, is imagined, but it is based on our understanding of the outer and inner worlds. What is amazing to me is how similar both worlds appear to each other.Galaxies containing stars and solar systems can be comparable to cells, while solar systems become molecules. Planets become electrons, and the suns at the center of these systems are similar to nuclei. The outer world is so much like the inner world it makes one wonder if we could go even smaller or beyond our universe what would we find.This examination of the macro-universe and the micro-universe would lead us to believe that if we could explore to a minuteness past subatomic particles, perhaps we might find even tinier particles that behave like subatomic particles, which group to become atoms and so on.At the other end of this scale, our universe may be one part of an ever larger system of universes that combine to form their own systems, which combine to form a macro-galaxy, and so it continues.There is a mathematical equivalent to this model, and it is called a fractal. Fractals are a part of geometry and are defined as endless patterns that are created by a recursive pattern that loops upon itself.One of the most famous patterns is called a Mandelbrot set, which looks like a small bug with a proboscis or tongue. Magnifying the little nodules along the surface of said "bug" shows microscopic versions of the same Mandelbrot set. If you magnify those, the pattern repeats infinitely.Basically a fractal is a mathematical equation that is calculated and then the answer is fed back into the equation to develop a new answer. This cycle repeats infinitely, creating some beautiful patterns. The majesty of this mathematical object is that fractals are found throughout nature.One large example is a hurricane. A satellite photograph of a hurricane shows that well-defined spiral with its central eye has branching patterns that are similar to those described by fractal mathematics. A tree is another example.When we look at a tree, it is a series of branches. Each branch has a series of smaller branches that when viewed independently looks very much like a smaller tree. Each of those sub-branches have smaller groupings of twigs and so on.Eventually we reach the leaves of the tree, so while a tree may not be as infinite as a mathematical fractal, it still offers the same beautiful patterns. What is neat however is when you look at an individual leaf, you can see the veining matches the same branching as the tree, and so it continues on a smaller and smaller level.Fractals continue outward as well. Much like the branching cyclical cloud patterns around the hurricane are fractal in nature, so are the systems of stars that spin around and within the arms of spiral galaxies.No matter how large or how small the pattern is, fractal mathematics can be used to define them, and they create such a beautiful representation of our world.This ability for mathematics to continue infinitely while creating such beautiful patterns makes me pause and wonder if our world and its place in the universe is some kind of result of a complex system of mathematical equations which have created a gigantic universe that is a fractal, and we are a minute portion of that equation.This would lead one to postulate that if we are a microscopic part of an indescribably large fractal, there are more of us, and our universe is just a speck of an even larger fractal.This would lead me to believe in a geometric sense that we are not alone, there are more worlds like ours with more people or humanoids similar to us.There are other universes like ours, and in some small sense we are not alone, and like some theoretical physicists occasionally half-jokingly state, we are but a speck of dust on the head of someone's pin. A fascinating possibility of mathematics to the extreme.What do you think?Till next time …