Wet Paint Page This page is devoted to works-in progress - Terry Bailey
I'm playing with fractals, kaleidoscopes and resolution
Currently on this page are images and details of images that I am playing with using fractals and kaleidoscopes. The detail is completely resolution-dependent: the more resolution (i.e. pixels per inch of detail), the more detail I can include in my images. I am restricted then, of course, by the size of my canvas. Conceivably, I could paint someting with a resolution detail size of the universe, but this, of course, would be impossible to print or to create a canvas for. It is annoying, of course, that I have run into a wall of limitations. So, instead, I am thinking about it theoretically: what would this look like, and what would it mean, if I could create and print something the size of a wall, a city, a continent, a planet, the universe?
Since I know that the universe is comprised of fractals (mathematical patterns), I realized that this says a great deal about our ability to understand or to predict the universe. Ultimately, it is all a pattern, but we humans are simply too deeply embedded in a tiny detail of that pattern to see or comprehend the whole. Nor is it a matter of us just having to get further away from, say, our planet, to see the whole. For no matter how far "away" we travel, we will always be living at the same resolution! This, then may be a way we can imagine the infinite dimensions that physicists have predicted: If I live in 72dpi (dots per inch) resolution land, I can never see the universe from a 300dpi, or, infinite dpi vantage point!
