When you speak to people that understand fractals, they say everywhere and everything is fractals. I have tried to understand fractals but I am completely lost, can someone please explain it like I’m 5?

Question

Side note: I tend to find these people very eccentric, I sorta feel like they can see the matrix 🙂 I am absolutely fascinated by this but completely lost 🙂

In: 17

Answer 1

I think people like that just mean “the closer you look, the more you see”. Like, zoom in enough on a smooth-looking surface and you’ll see the roughness of it.

Which is true, until you reach the level where either ~~wavelengths are too short to see anything~~ the stuff you’re looking at is too short for visible wavelengths or, if you aren’t taking “see” literally but just mean detect, well at some point you’re at quantum physics and you really can’t zoom in more than that.

Fractals themselves are a mathematical concept, not literal stuff. But since reality behaves that way (to a point, see above) they like to say it.