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19 years old. Homeschooled, then went to a community college instead of high school. Currently at Hampshire College. http://www.facebook.com/NamelessWonderBand http://myspace.com/namelesswondermusic http://youtube.com/namelesswonderband http://twitter.com/NamelessWonder7 http://www.youtube.com/dervine7 http://ted.com/profiles/778985

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Old FaceBook Note: My crankpot theory

Terrible quality, but whatever; it's fun:

I was going to write a note with a list of crankpot scientific theories i had about the universe, but then something awesome happened: I got my Scientific American and it had an article about a new theory that's remarkable similar to mine.So this was my crankpot theory: that the ultimate theory of everything could have something to do with fractals. If you don't know what fractals are, look them up: they're awesome and also very pretty.Basically, a fractal is a geometrical object that looks the same no matter how far you zoom in on it.

A fractal.
My reasons for coming up with this theory:1: Fractals are cool2: Fractals are EVERYWHERE!!! For instance, mountains are like fractals: if you zoom in on a mountain, you get rocks; if you zoom in on rocks, they look like mountains. Broccoli is also like this (each little sprig [if that's what you call pieces of broccli) looks like the entire broccoli). As are rivers (you have the big river with little rivers splitting of from it, which have little rivers splitting off from them, etc.). Things that appear everywhere are good candidates for unified theories, at least in my opinion.

Broccoli that resembles a fractal.
3: My impression is that one of the problems with coming up with a quantum theory of gravity is that relativistic spacetime is smooth while in quantum physics space is rough. This made me think of the Koch Snowflake (which you can also look up), which is made up of a bunch of little jagged peices that create what appears to be a smooth line.

A Koch Snowflake.
4: Fractals do wonky things to the concept of dimensions. Since all the other hopeful ultimate theories do weird things to dimensions, this seemed like a good reason.Now none of these reasons seems to be the reason that fractals show up in the theory that Scientific American wrote about (which I won't elaborate on), but it's still cool when it seems someone else who is probably smarter than you is actually working on a similar idea to something you thought up.