Blue Oyster Spiral Fractal Zoom

No matter how deep you go, there's always more. This movie took quite a few days to calculate. In 1993, when I first made a poster of the image i call "blue oyster spiral," which is a zoom at about the 100 Billion X magnification level inside the Mandelbrot Fractal, it took 34 high end Macs 3 days to render it. Today, the same poster can be rendered on one typical PC in just a few hours. Of course, since the Mandelbrot Fractal is infinite in nature, i can still easily find spots i want to explore that take a present day computer months to calculate. I'm ambivalent about the fact that no computer will ever be powerful enough to let me see the infinite detail to be seen in there. On the one hand, there will always be more to see, every time I have access to more computing power. on the other, it will never be enough. oh well :-) Fractal: This fractal zoom movie was rendered at 640*480 resolution with Fractal Extreme on a PC running win XP and an AMD Athlon 64X2 Dual Core Processor 4200+ 2.21 GHz, 2.0 GB Ram. Google ‘Mandelbrot Fractal’ for more info. I’m fascinated that all of this complexity is derived from iterating this simple equation: z -> z^2 + c, where 'c' is a complex number such as (x+i) and I is the square root of -1. That simple little equation can generate an infinite universe of possibilities. Scientists have speculated that there might be such an equation to define our own universe. What if everything in the entire universe comes from the calculating of one simple little equation? What does that mean for existence? To paraphrase Dr. Stephen Wolfram: If the whole history of our universe can be obtained by following definite simple rules, then at some level this history has the same kind of character as a construct such as the Mandelbrot Fractal. And what this suggests is that it makes no more or less sense to talk about the meaning of phenomena in our universe than it does to talk about the meaning of phenomena in the Mandelbrot fractal. I am currently rendering another fractal zoom. It still has a few weeks left before it's done. <rev jan 007, '007 (the year of james bond)>