I couldn’t sleep, and so, for whatever reason, thought to do something I haven’t done in years: play around with the Mandelbrot set.
Whatever computational backend this site runs on is way more sophisticated and capable than these things used to be: what you’re looking at here is the set’s “ass crack,” followed inward to ludicrous levels of zoom. (Again: couldn’t sleep.)
Then I got curious about how big the total set would be from this position, if every time I did a reverse-pinch gesture the portion visible on the screen was subjected to 10x magnification. It turns out it only takes 29 reverse pinches for that dimension to exceed the diameter of the known universe.
Finding minibrots really really deep in the set always puts me in mind of Carl Sagan’s spine-tingling conceit in “Contact,” about the discovery of a perfect rasterized circle buried somewhere past the octillionth digit of π. There is the distinct brush of the numinous.
