Brains and fractals

This might sound impossible to visualise, but fractals actually occur frequently in nature . The florets of a

It’s easy to see why fractals have been used to explain the complexity of human consciousness. Because they’re infinitely intricate, allowing complexity to emerge from simple repeated patterns, they could be the structures that support the mysterious depths of our minds.

But if this is the ...

Advanced technology means we can now measure quantum fractals in the lab. In recent research involving a scanning tunneling microscope, electrons are carefully a...

One of the most important open questions in science is how our consciousness is established. In the 1990s, long before winning the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for his prediction of black holes, physicist Roger Penrose tea...

Our observations from these experiments reveal that quantum fractals actually behave in a different way to classical ones. Specifically, we found that the spread of light across a fractal is governed by different laws in the quantum case compared to the classical case.

Using state-of-the-art photonics experiments, they were able to reveal the quantum motion that takes place within fractals in unprecedented detail. They achieved this by injecting photons...

This work could also have profound implications across scientific fields. By investigating quantum transport in our artificially designed fractal structures, we may have taken the first tiny steps towards the unification of physics, mathematics a...