Fractal Cosmology - Publications

Publications

The book Discovery of Cosmic Fractals by Yurij Baryshev and Pekka Teerikorpi gives an overview of fractal cosmology, and recounts other milestones in the development of this subject. It recapitulates the history of cosmology, reviewing the core concepts of ancient, historical, and modern astrophysical cosmology. The book also documents the appearance of fractal-like and hierarchal views of the universe from ancient times to the present. The authors make it apparent that some of the pertinent ideas of these two streams of thought developed together. They show that the view of the universe as a fractal has a long and varied history, though people haven’t always had the vocabulary necessary to express things in precisely that way.

Beginning with the Sumerian and Babylonian mythologies, they trace the evolution of Cosmology through the ideas of Ancient Greeks like Aristotle, Anaximander, and Anaxagoras, and forward through the Scientific Revolution and beyond. They acknowledge the contributions of people like Emanuel Swedenborg, Edmund Fournier D'Albe, Carl Charlier, and Knut Lundmark to the subject of cosmology and a fractal-like interpretation, or explanation thereof. In addition, they document the work of de Vaucoleurs, Mandelbrot, Pietronero, Nottale and others in modern times, who have theorized, discovered, or demonstrated that the universe has an observable fractal aspect.

On the 10th of March, 2007, the weekly science magazine New Scientist featured an article entitled "Is the Universe a Fractal?" on its cover. The article by Amanda Gefter focused on the contrasting views of Pietronero and his colleagues, who think that the universe appears to be fractal (rough and lumpy) with those of David Hogg of NYU and others who think that the universe will prove to be relatively homogeneous and isotropic (smooth) at a still larger scale, or once we have a large and inclusive enough sample (as is predicted by Lambda-CDM). Gefter gave experts in both camps an opportunity to explain their work and their views on the subject, for her readers.

This was a follow-up of an earlier article in that same publication on August 21 of 1999, by Marcus Chown, entitled "Fractal Universe.". Back in November 1994, Scientific American featured an article on its cover written by physicist Andrei Linde, entitled "The Self-Reproducing Inflationary Universe" whose heading stated that "Recent versions of the inflationary scenario describe the universe as a self-generating fractal that sprouts other inflationary universes," and which described Linde's theory of chaotic eternal inflation in some detail.

In July 2008, Scientific American featured an article on Causal dynamical triangulation, written by the three scientists who propounded the theory, which again suggests that the universe may have the characteristics of a fractal.

A paper published in August 2012 claims to have ruled out the hypothesis that the fractal structure of the universe continues at arbitrarily large distance scales (See Scrimgeour et al, 2012*). Previously, clustering seemed to be largely prevalent in the universe up to arbitrarily large distances with clusters, super-clusters and even hyper-clusters of galaxies having being observed. This paper, however, claims that the universe is uniform at distance scales larger than 350 million light years. This is in contradiction to models of fractal cosmology and in agreement with the standard model of cosmology. However, the case for fractal universes will be completely ruled out only once measurements of the universe at even larger distance scales can be procured.