The ultimate test of a fractal universe wouldn't come until this century, when truly gargantuan surveys, like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, have been able to map the locations of millions of galaxies, painting a portrait of the cosmic web on scales never observed before. Those theories predicted that the universe was still homogeneous, just on much, much larger scales than astronomers had observed previously. Maybe if we built sophisticated enough surveys, we would find nesting structures - cosmic webs inside cosmic webs, filling up the entire universe to infinity.Īs astronomers discovered more about the cosmic web, they learned more about the history of the Big Bang, and they came up with ways to explain the existence of the large-scale patterns in the universe. Maybe what we saw as the pattern in the arrangement of galaxies was the beginning steps of the greatest fractal possible. If fractals are everywhere, Mandelbrot guessed, then perhaps the entire universe is a fractal. Fractals surround us in nature, and the mathematics of fractals have enabled us to understand a vast variety of self-similar structures in the universe. If you zoom in on a coastline, you see miniature coastlines. If you zoom in on the branches of a tree, you see miniature branches. If you zoom in on the point of a snowflake, you see miniature snowflakes.

Mandelbrot didn't invent the concept of fractals - mathematicians had been studying self-similar patterns for ages - but he coined the word 'fractal' and ushered in our modern study of the concept.įractals are everywhere. Fractals are frustratingly hard to define, but they can be simple enough to intuit: They are patterns that repeat no matter how far in or out you zoom. One proposal came from mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractals.

Cosmic view of the universe.