It's all a matter of scale

Rock and sand have the most wonderful fractal properties. Are we looking into a fledging cave in a cliff at the top of the beach,  or are we looking at a close-up view of a stone in the wall of a byre? Well, what do you think?

Thinking about the problems of scale I was taken back 30 years or so when people started to think about Benoit Mandelbrot's work on the mathematics of scale and fractals. At that time a good friend who was mathematically gifted and computer literate wrote a program to visualise the Mandelbrot set on his BBC computer; it took 3 days to do the job! The "extra" shows a Mandelbrot set that I produced with a modern program running on my Mac. It took much less time  than the blink of an eye to produce the goods. How computing has advanced!