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From the 1993 “Kinetic Engineering“ VHS tape. Audio replaced with CD version. Originally from the 1992 album “Man-Amplified“. Liner notes: --- Devised by Benoit Mandelbrot from the latin term Fractus, from the verb Frangere, to break. The resonance of the main English cognates - Fracture and Fraction (noun and adjective) (English and French). Mandelbrot devised the word Fractal to describe a new mathematical geometry, part of the new science of chaos. “A fractal is a geometric shape, a geometric shape having a special property that as you look closer and closer to it you see it is essentially the same thing.“ The notion of self-similarity strikes ancient chords in our culture. An old strain in western thought honors the idea. Leibniz imagined that a drop of water contained a whole teeming universe containing in turn water drops and new universes within. “To see the world in a grain of sand.“ Blake. When spermatozoa was first discovered it was thought to be a homunculus, a human, tiny, but fully formed. But self-similarity receded as scientific principle, and the process of ontogenetic development is far more interesting that mere enlargement. The myth died hard as the human vision was extended by telescopes and microscopes. The first discoveries were realizations that each change of scale brought new phenomena and new kinds of behavior. For modern particle physicists, the process has never ended. Every new accelerator with its increase in energy and speed, extends sciences field of view to tinier particles and briefer time scales and every extension seem to bring new information. But physicists wanted to know more. They wanted to know why. There were forms in nature, not visible forms, but shapes embedded in the fabric of motion, waiting to be revealed.
