We find examples of fractals everywhere in nature. Tree branches, snowflakes, river deltas, cloud formations, and more. So it’s natural to ask the ultimate question: is the entire universe one giant fractal? The answer is…no, but sorta yes.
Benoit Mandelbrot, who pretty much everyone agrees introduced the modern concept of fractals into the world (and even coined the term), was the first to wonder if our universe might be in the form of a fractal. At the time, astronomers had just begun constructing extensive deep-space catalogs of galaxies, and were just beginning to piece together the large-scale structure of the universe.
Since fractals are everywhere, maybe everywhere is a fractal. Maybe when you zoom out and see a particular pattern of galaxies, you can zoom out even further and find the same pattern repeated. And so on and so on, all the way to infinity.
