Mandelbrot Set
Cosmology

        The Mandelbrot Set has become a source of inspiration and fascination for thousands, as it provides an endless array of gloriously intricate and detailed form to explore, and sophisticated software is readily available for almost any modern computer.  This figure has been called the most complex form in Mathematics, and it aptly justifies this characterization, rewarding explorers and visitors with diversity and beauty enough for many hours of delightful variations at a stretch, and occasionally interesting and intriguing surprises.  Cosmology has been a fascination of human beings for centuries, in one form or another, as the origin of the universe is one of those questions by which we define the meaning of life and reality.  The process of discovering the means by which the universe has evolved its current form is a major pursuit of Modern Science and it has been full of interesting developments over the last 5-10 years.  In fact, there has been a revolution going on in cosmology, during that time, because of what we have recently learned through astronomical and astrophysical observations.  Textbooks on astrophysics and cosmology that are more than 5 or 6 years old are now hopelessly out of date, because so much has happened in that time.

        Until recently, the idea that Fractals and Cosmology are strongly and congruently related has been a speculative assumption, somewhat distant from the mainstream of Science.  But fractals have been of serious interest to theoreticians at least as long as the Inflationary Universe model, which replaced or evolved from Big Bang theory, as the Standard Model of Cosmology.  Since the development of Fractal Geometry by Benoit Mandelbrot, the concepts of this new branch of Mathematics have found their way into the theoretical underpinnings of Cosmology both at the largest scales and in the very smallest regime, near the Planck Scale.  There has been powerful observational evidence, as well, that the distribution of matter in the universe follows a fractal pattern in the middle reaches, as observed in the clustering of galaxies.  So, while it was once far-fetched to imagine that the Mandelbrot Set might provide clues to the origin and fate of the universe, it is now a far less radical idea to explore.  Jonathan's insights of 20 years ago are therefore being re-visited, and developments made over that time are detailed in these pages, so that other explorers and researchers interested in the connections between Fractals and Cosmology can examine this work.