Fractals The Patterns of Chaos A New Aesthetic of Art, Science, and Nature

A PLANET OF LIVING FRACTALS If the eye attempts to follow the flight of a gaudy butterfly, it is arrested by some strange tree or fruit; if watching an insect, one forgets it in the strange flower it is crawling over; if turning to admire the splendour of the scenery, the individual character of the foreground fixes the attention. The mind is a chaos of delight...Charles Darwin,writing home from hisBeaglevoyage on his impressions of the Brazilian tropical rain forest. Hike into a forest and you are surrounded by fractals. The inexhaustible detail of the living world (with its worlds within worlds) provides inspiration for photographers, painters, and seekers of spiritual solace: the rugged whorls of bark, the recurring branching of trees, the erratic path of a rabbit bursting from underfoot into the brush, and the fractal pattern in the cacophonous call of peepers on a spring night.The landscape is the crucible in which living forms have evolved, and since the landscape crackles with fractals, the forms bred there are fractal as well. Living creatures, from trees to beetles to whales, have shapes and behaviors that provide a fractal record of the dynamical forces (the endless feedback) that act upon them and within them, forces that have continually caused them to evolve new niches in which to live. In hisBoston Globenewspaper column, physicist and science writer Chet Raymo declared after seeing a museum exhibition of beetles, "Darwinian explanations are reasonable enough, but...the spectacular variability of beetles suggests that nature is infected by...a sheer lunatic exuberance for diversity, a manic propensity to try any damn thing that looks good or works."The riotous beauty and dreamlike strangeness of nature provided a chief inspiration for Charles Darwin as he struggled to develop a coherent theory of evolution. Psychologist Howard Gruber, who has done a lengthy study of how Darwin arrived at his theory, says, "The meaning of his whole creative life work is saturated with...duality....On the one hand, he wanted to face squarely the entire panorama of changeful organic nature in its amazing variety, its numberless and beautiful contrivances, and its disturbing irregularity and imperfections. On the other hand, he was imbued with the spirit of Newtonian science and hoped to find in this shimmering network a few simple laws that might explain the whole movement of nature." Darwin concludes his landmarkOrigin of Specieswith a striking metaphor of nature as "the tangled bank," reveling in what Gruber calls "the spectacle of complexity itself." Indeed, the pattern -- the image -- that gave Darwin his essential insight into how evolution works was a classic fractal: He conceived of the evolving forms of nature as an irregularly branching tree.Examining Darwin's notebooks, Gruber carefully tracked Darwin's creative process to the moment when this image emerged in his thought. Gruber initially expected Darwin's mental processes on evolution would be "fine, clean, direct," but soon found that they were "tortuous, tentative, enormously complex." Gruber realized that "Darwin's picture of nature as an irregularly branching tree attributed to nature some of the characteristics I saw in his thinking."According to Gruber, after considerable mental bifurcation Darwin reached a point where he drew in his notebook three tree diagrams which captured his insight that all creatures are related to one another through a process of branching pushed forward by natural selection. Darwin had found a simple law that could explain life's breathtaking complexity.Through the ages artists have been driven by a desire to capture life's simultaneous complexity and simplicity in a single image or work. Some artists have created simple images with hugely complex overtones; others have spun out complex images that imply a simple order beneath. ArtiBriggs, John is the author of 'Fractals The Patterns of Chaos A New Aesthetic of Art, Science, and Nature' with ISBN 9780671742171 and ISBN 0671742175.