Extraordinary claims. Ordinary investigations.

Quite literally: After a trip of 10 minutes inside this Mandelbrot fractal (be sure to check the HD version on Vimeo), the original image you saw would be “billions and billions” of times larger than the whole Universe. As the author, hd-fractals, explains:

“The final magnification is e.214. Want some perspective? A magnification of e.12 would increase the size of a particle to the same as the earths orbit! e.21 would make a particle look the same size as the milky way and e.42 would be equal to the universe. This zoom smashes all of them all away. If you were "actually" travelling into the fractal your speed would be faster than the speed of light.”

You can compare it to some actual zooms into hair, concrete, metal et al.

I found this gem via the always great Nerdcore, which also pointed to a previous zoom into the Mandelbrot set which “only” went to e.89, in 2008, with a maximum of 2,100,000,000 iterations.

Remember that these infinite and exquisite details emerge from the repeated iteration of the simple expression z_n+1 = z_n² + c. It’s the Mandelbrot set.

And there’s more! After the jump.

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Behold! Such a simple and cool illusion, you can impress your friends by printing it and presenting first the man, hiding the dark patch “below” him. Try it yourself. He seems grounded.

Then say he will levitate, and present the whole picture. We can’t help but have the impression he’s levitating. Click for the whole picture.

This reminded of another similar illusion:

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“Many conspiracy theorists seem very keen on the idea of hidden messages or codes secretly embedded within ancient writings. Believers claim hidden prophecies of significant world events and disasters can be uncovered and deciphered by analysing the Bible. By simply selecting a random paragraph and taking out the punctuation and merely inserting the passage into a matrix a skeptic, if suitably motivated, and with the benefit of hindsight is easily able to uncover whatever it is they fancy. Believers see predictions of the assassination of President Kennedy and the 9/11 twin towers terrorist attack uncovered in the bible as irrefutable evidence of divine revelation even though rational thinkers can locate predictions of the death of Leon Trotsky and Princess Diana secreted within “Moby Dick”.” – [Science, Reason and Critical Thinking]

Pure delusion, of course…

From the smallest observable length, the Planck length, measuring 0.00000000000000000000000000000000001 meters; to the greatest length, the length of the whole Universe estimated at 930.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000 meters: there are many zeroes, many orders of magnitude that mey be difficult to grasp.

To make that a tiny bit easier, a user on Newgrounds named Fotoshop created an amazing interactive Flash animation, through which you can travel between all the scales of the Universe, from the tiniest end of the quantum foam in fractions of yoctometers, to quarks, atoms, molecules, viruses, cells, animals, mountains, planets, stars, nebulas, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, the local group, the observable universe and the Universe itself, measring several yottameters.

That’s going from 10^-35 to 10^26, and you can travel by dragging the bottom bar with your mouse or using your keyboard, with the left and right arrow keys for greater precision.

As Phil “Bad Astronomer” Plait noted, “my favorite part is on the smallest end, when you have to go through several factors of ten with nothing happening to get to the Planck scale, the smallest scale in the Universe. It’s really quite a forbidding notion.”

Is is merely a coincidence that most of the familiar objects that illustrate the animation are those around our own size, or those that we can view in the sky from Earth? Obviously not. Physical theories suggest an incredible level of complexity at the quantum foam level, and much may be going on between the quantum foam and quarks, and then from quarks to hadrons, and so on. There’s also quite literally a whole Universe to discover in stellar, gallactic scales, with intricacies we have barely grasped. We have almost 60 powers of ten of a very real world to explore scientifically. It’s almost beyond imagination that such complexities may fit inside the head of a person measuring a few dozen inches.

As Carl Sagan said, we barely began exploring the shore of the cosmic ocean. And it extends both away to the stars as well as inside the foam of the sea. “Recently we’ve waded a little way out, and the water seems inviting”.

[Via RicBit, BAblog]

“One of the most highly celebrated and controversial series of photos in the Blue Book files are those taken by an official photographer aboard the Brazilian Navy survey ship, Almirante Saldanha, off Trindade Island, some 600 miles east of Rio De Janeiro”.
[J. Allen Hynek, The Hynek UFO Report]

Hynek criticizes the mocking remarks by the reporting officer regarding Martians and the harsh criticism of the Brazilian government and military. I don’t know much about Martians and tend to agree the sarcasm was undue on an official report, but as an ongoing many years research on the Trindade Island case has shown to me, the Blue Book report is right on the target and fully justified in all of its other conclusions.

Regarding the photographer, for instance, the report mentions that:

“This gentleman has a long history of photographic trick shots and is well known for such items as false pictures of treasure on the ocean floor. Another time he prepared a purposely humorous article, published in a magazine, entitled "A Flying Saucer Hunted Me at Home," using trick photography.”

Amazingly, these hoaxes by the photographer have been downplayed by supporters of the case. For more than half a century, most people didn’t even see these hoaxes. In 2008, thanks to historian Rodolpho Gauthier, we finally publicized Barauna’s joke with flying saucers, and now, through the pages of Tim Printy’s SUNlite, and again thanks to the work of Gauthier, we reveal the details and images of his treasure chest hoax.

The article is embedded above and can also be downloaded.

Once presented with Barauna’s trickery of flying saucer photos, believers claim the joke was in fact a serious, responsible public service promoting critical thinking in which the photographer took part. Very well. It could be so. His treasure chest hoax, however, was part of a deliberate play to deceive, and we have Baraúna first lying, denying the hoax, and decades later, finally confessing “it was indeed a trick”.

That the man who captured one of the few authentic photos of real UFOs was a lying hoaxer of treasure chest tales and proud creator of flying saucer images cannot be downplayed. It’s a serious problem for the case that automatically leads to considerations of how he could have hoaxed the Trindade Island case.

Believers would then mention that the Trindade Island case is not supported solely by the photos or the photographer’s character and that he could not have hoaxed all of the other corroborating evidence.

About that, our still ongoing research may give a different perspective. It will be published soon, but meanwhile I recommend the readers to our already published analysis, and I repeat the statement that all of our research has led us to conclude that the Blue Book report is right on the target and fully justified in all of its conclusions.

Except for Martians, of course.