There's something that feels good about these old school documentaries they just bring peace, warmth and focus.

POV: When you’re not a brilliant mathematician but fascinated by the geometric patterns of nature and somehow encounter the Mandelbrot set by sheer happenstance and it resonates deeply for reasons unknown.

I love the mysterious world we live in and as long as I’m breathing, I’m yearning for learning.

I think it was David Gilmour who wrote the music for this. Full-on Floyd.

Remember when you were young?
You shone like the sun
Shine on, you crazy diamond

The Mandelbrot Set is paisley. No wonder many human beings,  including myself,  are fascinated by paisley patterns and zentangles. The human mind seeks patterns in nature.  They satisfy something basic within us.

The phrase "seeing islands of order in a sea of chaos" beautifully captures the essence of the Mandelbrot set and, more broadly, the world of fractals.

At first glance, the boundary of the Mandelbrot set appears wildly chaotic. Zooming into it reveals tangled spirals, filaments, and endlessly complex structures that seem random and unpredictable. Yet amid this apparent disorder, recognizable forms repeatedly emerge. Tiny copies of the Mandelbrot set—often called "baby Mandelbrots"—appear again and again at different scales, like islands of familiarity surrounded by oceans of intricate detail.

This interplay between order and chaos is one of the deepest lessons of fractal geometry. The Mandelbrot set is generated by a completely deterministic rule: no randomness is involved. Every detail arises from the repeated application of a simple mathematical equation. Yet the resulting structure possesses such complexity that it can appear almost chaotic. The paradox is that the chaos itself is organized.

The same phenomenon appears throughout nature. A coastline looks irregular, but its shape follows statistical patterns. A tree grows in a seemingly unpredictable way, yet its branches follow fractal principles. Clouds, mountain ranges, lightning bolts, and river networks all display a balance between order and disorder. Nature rarely produces perfect geometric forms, but neither is it truly random. Instead, it exists in a realm where simple rules generate complex outcomes.

The Mandelbrot set provides a window into this realm. Its boundary can be viewed as a frontier between stability and instability. Deep inside the set lies order—points whose behavior remains bounded forever. Far outside lies divergence and simplicity. But at the boundary, where order meets chaos, extraordinary complexity emerges. This "edge of chaos" is where many scientists believe the most interesting phenomena in nature occur: ecosystems, brains, economies, and even life itself.

Philosophically, the Mandelbrot set suggests that chaos is not necessarily the absence of order. Rather, order may be hidden within chaos, waiting to be revealed through closer examination. Each zoom into the fractal uncovers new structures, yet these structures remain connected to the whole. The more deeply one explores, the more one discovers that apparent disorder conceals an underlying unity.

In this sense, the Mandelbrot set becomes more than a mathematical object. It is a metaphor for discovery itself. What initially appears chaotic and incomprehensible may, upon deeper investigation, reveal patterns, relationships, and meaning. The "islands of order" are not exceptions to the chaos; they are evidence that order and chaos are intimately intertwined, each giving rise to the other in an endless dance of complexity.

The Mandelbrot set teaches us that the universe may be far richer than the simple categories of order versus disorder. Between them lies an infinite landscape—a fractal coastline where structure emerges from complexity and where every new horizon reveals another.

I used to have a screensaver of this in the 90’s and would spend a lot of time watching it as a kid 😊

Two of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century.  Mandelbrot shows that nature is self organising.  Jung shows that the psyche is self organising.  Both empower us as individuals with a sense of belonging to the universe

Arthur C. Clarke
Incredible mind, outstanding author.

I came for the title and stayed for the quality.

The Universe is Alive. Galaxies are Its DNA. Solar Systems are Its Atoms. And we are alive within It. 🥰

This is my kaleidoscope

The DMT experience is very much like seeing and experiencing this dynamism of concentric form, first-hand, unfiltered.
The vivid blazing colors are shocking because they don't seem to belong to the normal categories of
Color frequency. It is as though we are seeing the absolute versions of purples blues and pinks and reds for the first time.

“Thumbprint of God”….a Great Way to Describe It!❤

The end of our universe would be the beggining of the next phenomenon.

Crazy how something can be both finite and infinite in length and volume.

The computer generated fractal mountains remind me of Andrew Hall's idea that mountains are fractal structures created from shock waves of supersonic winds from intense plasma storms.

Am I the only one stoned and loving it?

“peaks and valleys go together.” -Alan Watts

I've been looking for this! I stumbled across it in the 90s, happened to have a tape in the VCR, and I taped it and made everyone I knew watch it. So glad to stumble across it again!