Discovery of Cosmic Fractals by Yurij Baryshev and Pekka Teerikorpi

• 25 January 2003
• Marcus Chown
• Magazine issue 2379

Discovery of Cosmic Fractals by Yurij Baryshev and Pekka Teerikorpi, World Scientific, $38/£26, ISBN 9810248725 Reviewed by Marcus Chown

FRACTAL structures are everywhere - in clouds, in snowflakes, even in Islamic art, says Benoît Mandelbrot, godfather of fractals. So why not throughout the Universe? Why not indeed?

In Discovery Of Cosmic Fractals, astronomers Yurij Baryshev and Pekka Teerikorpi set out the evidence for fractal structures everywhere from interstellar clouds to galactic dark-matter haloes. Intriguingly, they say, a fractal distribution of matter can squirrel away "baryonic dark matter" (which consists of familiar particles such as neutrons and protons, rather than exotic ones) in small molecular clouds that might so far have escaped detection. But the most controversial idea by far is that the entire Universe is fractal.

Recall that Einstein's fiendishly complex equations of gravity can be solved exactly only if we assume that the Universe on the large-scale is homogeneous ...