Another Direction

I almost went back to edit the last post regarding a point that I later became less sure about. The pervasiveness of recursion was the point. All of the examples I could think of seemed to be based in biological sciences, so I was going to add that perhaps it was something basic to life, as opposed to the universe in general. But I've been continuing to fiddle around looking at recursion, which led me to Douglas Hofstadter (the connection having been a tongue in cheek definition of recursion, which I curiously followed to the unknown name).

Much like Chomsky, his bio reads like a buffet. He currently is a professor at the University of Indiana - Bloomington where he is a "'College of Arts and Sciences Professor' in both Cognitive Science and Computer Science, and also ... Adjunct Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and Psychology". The point here, is his initial post-graduate work was in Physics. At the University of Oregon he wrote a paper predicting that "the allowed energy level values of an electron in a crystal lattice, as a function of a magnetic field applied to the lattice, formed a fractal set." Later experimentation confirmed the prediction, and the fractal set was named "Hofstadter's Butterfly" which was the first Fractal found in physics. Which provides at least one example from the non-organic.

And as a side effect of poking around at this, I just purchased three of Hofstadter's books:

Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
Metamagical Themas: Questing For The Essence Of Mind And Pattern
I Am A Strange Loop