IUPAC Large or Small? Some Fractal Character?
Abstract Some of you will have come across delightful pictures of those weird beasts called fractals, whether they be mathematically generated, or those that abound in nature (such as ferns). If you haven’t, then I think you should spend a little time hunting some down on the web. Apart from the almost magical self-similarity at different scales (which means that even if you zoom in you get a picture that looks very similar to that you started with), the other notable feature of fractals is that they have non-integer dimensions. A piece of paper is two-dimensional when laid out flat; a ball is a three-dimensional. A crumpled up piece of paper, an object with some two-dimensional character due to its origin (and the fact that it is still really only a surface) and some three-dimensional character (as it does fill space in some way), is somewhere in the middle. A coastline is more than one-dimensional but less than two dimensional—it too is a fractal. One of the interesting features of fractals, like a coastline, is that the length that you measure depends on the size of ruler you use.