Dr. Dobb's | Homogeneity of Physical Systems

Homogeneity of Physical Systems

The image “http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/110948main_galaxy_distant.jpg” "Nature has played a joke on the mathematicians. The 19th-century mathematicians may have been lacking in imagination, but Nature was not. The same pathological structures that the mathematicians invented to break loose from 19th-century naturalism turn out to be inherent in familiar objects all around us." - Freeman Dyson, 'Characterizing Irregularity', Science, quoted in Benoit Mandelbrot's The Fractal Geometry of Nature

Perhaps twenty years ago around this season of the year, a younger brother-in-law and I were seated by the holiday board engaged in a discussion heated enough to cook the holiday turkey. The subject was the possibility of life on Mars ...

January 08, 2010
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/homogeneity-of-physical-systems/228701492