ART MATRIX PO 880 Ithaca, NY 14851-0880 USA (607) 277-0959, Fax (607) 277-8913 'The Paths of Lovers Cross in the Line of Duty.' THE THEORY BEHIND 'THE CELL AND THE WOMB' Part 1 Copyright (C) 1988 by Homer Wilson Smith All Rights Reserved The following interpretation has received much criticism and some praise. It is not presented here as TRUE, only as food for thought. Some people seem to take immediate offense at the thought that fractal math might explain something. I don't really understand why, they seem so defensive by saying things like 'we don't need fractals to explain this.' My position on this is as follows. Every equation that is non- linear and iterated (not merely evaluated) will show fractal manifestation. These manifestations fall into three categories. 1.) Stability/Unstability. This describes how small or infinitesimal changes to the input affect the output. 2.) Periodicity/Chaos. This describes the behavior of the output. 3.) Fractal Dimension. This describe the convolutedness of various boundaries or shapes involved with input spaces and output spaces. One example where I have been unceremoniously attacked for suggesting that fractals might apply is to planetary motion. Planets clearly do not show the rich and varied behavior that most quickly associate with fractals. Their motion is like a pendulum, very boring and uninteresting. Thus on the surface it might seem that fractals have nothing to do with planetary motion. However their very 'boring' behavior immediately comes under the classification of PERIODIC. Furthermore perturbations to their orbits do not especially change in wild disarray what they were originally doing. This comes under the heading of STABILITY. Next, planetary motion is known to be the result of equations containing 1/R**2 terms which is highly NON LINEAR. Lastly, a planet's position can be thought of as being a function of it's just previous postion, so clearly this comes under the heading of ITERATION. All that is missing is the complex swirls and convoluted boundaries that people normally associate with fractals. Thus they claim that fractals don't apply here. STABLE, PERIODIC behavior can be one type of FRACTAL BEHAVIOR! It obliges us therefore to look where the planetary equations might start acting in an UNSTABLE fashion producing strange PERIODS or even CHAOTIC behavior. Fractals do not EXPLAIN anything at all. Fractals are not CAUSE, they are EFFECT. Fractal behavior is merely a description of what some equations do given some inputs. Thus any system modeled on non linear iterated equations, should be considered to be showing fractal behavior even if it is STABLE and PERIODIC. If one looks further one should be able to show how the input could be changed to create chaotic output results and to map the input areas of greatest instability, for example where the output changes without warning from periodic to chaotic and visa versa. Voila, pretty pictures! Thus people who claim that 'Fractals do not apply here' are almost uniformly wrong except in the very few cases where the model uses a linear equation or is a non iterated system. If the model is linear and non iterated and works, one can not argue about that. However very few things can truely be modeled on a straight line. And almost everything in existance is a function of what it was just before. Thus it behooves us to look at non iterated models to see if they can't be rewritten in an iterated form. I expect to be attacked for this view. It's like wearing a sign that says 'Kick me'. Homer