Polynomial

Sometime in early 2002, having just been to my first (and last) ever football match (with my then flatmate, Mr Ralph Pool) so as to watch Arsenal play at their “legendary” Highbury Stadium, a group of us dispersed into the nearby public house (The Highbury Barn) so that we might sit down and discuss the merits and faults about the way “WE” had just played.

No doubt Arsenal were victorious… So all was good! But, as the match had been against West Bromwich Albion, I could hardly find anything particularly radiant to enthuse about, as it couldn’t have been that tricky-a-match for the then “Dream Team” of football to clinch. It was more a case of Arsenal playing it defensive and warding off any attack from the Albion. Thus, after five minutes of over enthusiastic raving from everyone at the table (bar myself), I was somewhat numb to my core over this sort of narcissistic “bottle” chatter. Nonetheless, as I had made myself a promise to give this “football craze” a go for just one day (mainly because everyone I knew was into it), I felt obliged to stay on and do my best to get involved in the footie flow… After another five minutes I was very close to a state of Transmarginal Inhibition, mainly from the mind crushing boredom that I was experiencing over the slow-mo recapitulation on Arsenal’s “amazing” victory… And having still not had anything constructive spring to mind so as to “pitch” into the conversation with, I decided that the only way forward for these egocentric modes of footie babbling was to imbibe more of the good, inebriating organic solvent, “ethanol…” The final aim being that, at worst, my tongue might loose and I might disperse my then not-too-sunny disposition… Or at best I might push through the Transmarginal Inhibition and actually come to love football like I might a son or daughter of my own. !?!? After all, alcohol isn’t called “the social lubricant of the mind” for nothing now, is it…

Thus I marched up to the bar and ordered everyone another pint of whatever it was they were swilling. As you can imagine, the pub was heaving with good vibes from the victory just past, and the queue was long… While waiting I bumped into a somewhat sheepish looking gentleman with long hair and a maroon colored coat. And as his appearance was of the demeanor that he might be someone who enjoyed football for the essence of coming out together, without getting too overly caught up in the “beauty” of the play, I figured that it might perhaps be a good time to strike up a conversation and get into the groove of footie’s languid lubricious social flow. “Damn good game, eh?” I launched off with. And he turned to me, with his eyes lighting up and rambled on about some amazing tactic of play that Sol Campbell had used to deflect the ball back into midfield for the final goal… “ARSE!” I though, as the beautiful tapestry of eloquent prose which exploded from his mind simply trickled off my own like water from a duck’s back. Thus I stared at him with somewhat vacant eyes, pondering over what to say next from behind a forced smile… But all my mind could muster was, “YES! Marvelous wasn’t it!”

Well… Standing in the awkward silence that followed my seemingly “banal” retort, I noticed the queue wasn’t getting any shorter, especially what with all the foul play that was unfolding at the bar’s brim i.e. queue barging, pushing in, friends taking orders for other friends who couldn’t be bothered to queue, etc… So, pondering on how a ref might bring some order to this bevey rush, I turned back to the maroon coated fellow and asked him how long he had been following Arsenal. “Ever since I was 12, to the present,” he said near enough. As I probed more, I stumbled on what he was currently doing as a job… Low and behold I found out he was doing a Ph.D. in “Fractal Topography” at UCL!!! “WOW!” I remarked… But he glazed over and said, “It’s boring as hell.” After this, I noticed we both tried to bring the conversation back around to what we enjoyed i.e. he tried to engage me in footie banter, and I did my best to reciprocate, after which I’d try to bring the conversation back round to fractals, only to find he didn’t want to talk about “work.” Alas the exchange didn’t last long. But I vividly remember asking him, “Might fractals play any role in evolution or biological diversity?” And he laughed, saying that all fractals were was just pretty mathematical patterns that had no other use what-so-ever. So I suggested that I would trade my football friends for his Ph.D. studies any day. To which the silence re-ensued.

To this very day, I know football is just not my thing… And where as some people ramble on poetically about “this” player touching that kind of defensive play and knocking the ball over to “so-and-so,” who dived and ducked inbetween the defence and then shot a scoring goal like some god… Well, despite the liguistic prose… To me, it’s still just a game where a bunch of talented, hairless monkeys run around a pitch kicking and nudging a ball into nets. Equally so, where some people see my varied ramblings about chaotic discourse within music and non-linear dynamical systems as pointless drivel about computer generated art, I know it touches my soul in a way makes me feel connected to the universe… But this is it. It’s about connection with what you are drawn to. No doubt there are many more footie fans than fractal fans in the world today. But that’s life! And it’s fine… This Ph.D. footie experience was in many ways a humbling reminder about how two people’s views of similar things can vary so drastically that we can sometimes see the beauty within each other’s dislikes. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

However… On some level, I found this brush with the Ph.D. unsettling… Something in me didn’t want to believe it. Hell… Something in me told me he was a “chump” who was more interested in footie than anything real or viable. And still… I had to listen to him. Here was this Ph.D. – a lad who had obviously been studying the math of complex numbers and iterative patterns/structures for quite some now – and, bearing in mind my then somewhat limited understanding about these aberrant beasts of divine simplicity and complexity, who was I to question his well informed personal view on the matter at hand? None the less, I carried on looking into this phenomenon for many years to come, following a sort of gut instinct that seemed to press me ever onwards, regardless of what others would/might say, and eventually I started to develop better modes of understanding about these wondrous forms of divine order and chaotic patterns. To be fair, my interest in this subject has never waned one iota. And despite the opposition to the idea that fractals are somehow locked deep into the very essence of our being, thus defining what and who we really are, it seems that now science is rediscovering these aspects within nearly all dynamical systems of the world. What more can anyone say!?

But besides all this, there were still many holes in the theory. Well… Until last year, that is, when sometime in November I managed to read probably one of the best articles I could have cared to have read, which I had by chance found in a copy of Nature magazine that I had randomly swiped from my doctor’s surgery one “chesty” morning. It suggested that cells were using fractal mathematics to regulate their own internal cellular biology. And, at the very moment of completion, my gut instinct began to feel vindicated. At long last science was beginning to see how “chaotic” flows can create marvels of ordered wonder that could easily give rise to something as marvelous (and “seemingly” impossible) as Life. Here was that link between the beauty that I had seen in the M Set and experienced in Life. This is how chaos’ beautiful flow caused a wondrous event which give rise to all of the Life here on planet Earth. Here lies the key to seeing how we came into being. This is the same powerful internal mechanism that drives our computers to generate the marvelous serpentine flows seen within the M Set… And which, if transposed onto organic molecular soups full of various compounds, also gives rise to the somewhat random, and yet specific, generation of structured internal cellular order. Don’t ask me about the logic there… Perhaps we have to give up understanding for a moment, and simply feel this essence…

How can we mere mortals ever hope to know the unknowable i.e. the shear and almost eternal complexity of “God, or Nature,” as we “supposedly” think we know ourselves? How can we hope to know what chaos will do next? There’s no point in lying to ourselves… We don’t! We won’t! All we need to know is that dichotomies/paradoxes and chaos are wondrous things indeed… Just as wonderful as the notion of “God.” In fact… If you want to still call these wondrous flows of chaotic pattern formation around us “God,” then I can dig that. I might not agree that there is a “God” as such… But I can trip with the notion of a divinely beautiful and somewhat unknowable force i.e. that of chaos, which gives rise to what Spinoza called “God, or Nature.” And it lies in the heart of all beings, whether we love football, or not. Perhaps it truly is the “Thumb Print Of God?”

So I present the article in question, which was written by Claire Ainsworth and was published on September 4th 2009.

Mathematical Patterns Rule The Behaviour Of Molecules In The Nucleus

The maths behind the rugged beauty of a coastline may help to keep cell biology in order, say researchers in Germany. Fractals — rough shapes that look the same at all scales — could explain how the cell’s nucleus holds molecules that manage our DNA in the right location.

In new experiments, Sebastien Huet and Aurélien Bancaud of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, tracked the movement of molecules within cells in a lab dish, then compared the pattern of movement against mathematical models. Large molecules, they found, moved according to the same rules as small molecules — suggesting that their environment was truly fractal. The team reported their findings this week at the EMBO meeting in Amsterdam.

“It’s a really interesting approach,” says Angus Lamond, a cell biologist at the University of Dundee, UK. “It’s very promising that the fractal model appears to be able to describe the [molecular] behaviour in this way.”

…continued here…

To find out where I sourced this article from, please click here.

Or to learn more about our fractal universe, please click here.

And for an amazing expose into how the chaotic and fractal world of math can show us how Life arose naturally i.e. without a divine creator, then please check this BBC documentary out, entitled “The Secret Life Of Chaos.”

For the more scientific minds among you, I also present some articles concerning the fractal dimensions of cellular formations that I have found very illuminating:

1. Fractal Organization of Cultivated in vitro Spiculogenous Cells and Larval Spicules of the Sea Urchin Strongylocentrotus nudus

2. A comparative fractal analysis of various mammalian astroglial cell types

3. Fractal Dimension Characteristics Of Human Mesenchymal Cell Stem Cell Proliferation

4. Cell division: Fractal cycling