The only thing I got about fractals is that if you keep zooming you will see the same pattern repeated, but I don’t get it. First of all, you have to zoom on the border, so you technically can’t zoom anywhere and you get the same pattern, second why is the Mandelbrot so weird? Why all those weird shapes? Couldn’t it just be something normal? Also, why you can dezoom from a Mandelbrot fractal and those weird things happen. It’s just too complicated for my little brain
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Fractals are shapes that still have detailed patterns to them no matter how far you zoom in.
They don’t have to repeat (although often they will), they just have to keep having some kind of pattern or structure at all scales. No matter how closely you look there is something going on.
Contrast this with something like a letter “s.” At the normal scale it has some interesting patterns. But if you zoom in eventually you either get parts inside the letter, parts outside, and (if you look down to the pixel level), straight lines between them. Eventually the shape gets boring.
Taking [the Mandelbrot set](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mandelbrot_sequence_new.gif) as an example, you can see that as we zoom in there are still complicated patterns – sometimes looking similar to the starting pattern, but not always.
> why is the Mandelbrot so weird?
The Mandelbrot set being weird is what makes it so interesting. The Mandelbrot set is defined by a very simple set of rules. Yet the shape it gives is infinitely complicated (as complicated as a shape can be). It is the textbook example of how you can get complicated, chaotic outcomes from simple processes. If it looked normal it wouldn’t be interesting and we wouldn’t care about it.
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