Pssst! You! Yeah, you... are a passenger on a planet... on a blue-green planet that's orbiting a golden star. And right now we're traveling through a place in our yearly orbit (a placed called April 2nd) that's a big anniversary for me. You may know that our word, anniversary, comes from annus, the Latin for year. Annus gives us annual and it also gives us annillo, the Spanish word for a ring that circles your finger, just as our planet circles the sun. Each time we circle through April 2nd, I re-visit an event that changed my life the way an earthquake changes the course of a river. On April 2, 1972, about six weeks before my 29th birthday, I was jolted awake in the middle of the night by a dream. 20 years later this dream earned me two international science awards. How this can happen is beyond me. All I know is that this dream was a response to my burning desire to understand how you and I are connected with the cosmos.

In the dream I looked through the eyes of our lost-to-history ancestors. These people were such devoted and respectful observers of nature that they saw the geometry nature is using. For 16 years after this dream, I searched science books for the word I needed in order to describe what I saw. Then, in 1988, I found it. The word is "fractal." This word had just recently been coined by a man who wondered, "What is the length of the coastline of Britain?" He looked up the answer in several encyclopedias and found several completely different lengths. Hmmm... Finally, he realized that the coastline's length depends on how you measure it. Do you measure around every boulder? Around every rock? Around every pebble? Around every grain of sand?

This man, mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, proved that the length of the line you're measuring depends on where you stand - and you can always zoom in a little closer. So, the length of any line is infinite. The farther you go into it, the richer it gets... "Nature," says Mandelbrot, "has played a joke on the mathematicians."

Of course, nature never went to school, so she doesn't use rulers. She uses dynamic patterns called fractals. Now, fractals include the lub-dub of your heartbeat, the branching of your bronchial tubes, the spiraling growth of a cauliflower, the meandering of a river, the zig-zag of lighting, the morphing of clouds, the eroding of mountains, and the patterns of wind on sand. Fractals are the shapes of nature's actions. And a fractal is like a coastline: the farther you go into it, the richer it gets.

Yes, 16 years after I was jolted awake by that dream, I found the word - fractal - that I needed in order to describe what our ancient ancestors understood. Now, as we're orbiting through April 2nd, I'm re-visiting my dream. Enjoying it all over again. And I'm finding that the more times I re-visit April 2nd, the farther I go into the experience that I had at this point in our orbit in 1972 - and the richer it gets. All of my many orbitings make for infinitely rich anniversaries.

This is Harriet Witt, your guide for this little ride on our passenger planet.


If you have any questions, drop Harriet an email: harriet@passengerplanet.com


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