Our Fractal Universe

A microscopic worm has 959 cells. The Milky Way galaxy contains roughly the same number of stellar nursery cavities. The two are separated by twenty-four orders of magnitude in size—yet their proportions match almost exactly.

This is not the only such pair. From protons to stars, from bacteria to galactic structures, from cities to the cosmic web, the same organizational pattern keeps repeating across forty-two orders of magnitude. A 200,000-trial statistical test of seven such pairings returned p = 0.000055—odds of about 1 in 18,000.

Our Fractal Universe takes the reader from the smallest things we can see to the largest, asking what it means that the same structures keep appearing wherever we look.

You may finish this book unsure what to believe. You will not finish it seeing the universe the same way.

Chris Lehto is a former F-16 pilot, U.S. Air Force crash safety investigator, and materials science graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy.