from leaf patterns to stock market fluctuations to the frequency of earthquakes — suggests some sort of common underlying laws, but these remain speculative. T

from leaf patterns to stock market fluctuations to the frequency of earthquakes — suggests some sort of common underlying laws, but these remain speculative. Thats misleading, just because same type of fractal exists does not mean that there is an underlying "universal" law which is followed by stock market as well as atoms in a semiconductor. The sentence gives an idea as if stock market can be predicted [horror] or follows similar law, which is clearly not the case. E.g. Benford's law is observed in many diverse domains, but this does not means that knowledge learnt in one domain can be used for learning in another domains. i.e. just because voter counts in Iranian election and first digit of the prices of products at Walmart have same distribution does not implies that one can be used to predict other quantity. The interesting point of that paper is that, it goes against our understanding of fluids, we assume the spatial distribution of the oxygen atoms should be random due to Brownian motion, yet there appears some kind of fractal pattern in it and that it is related to the temperature of loss of superconductivity. edit: I have access to the paper from Cornell university library, I read it, nothing is mentioned about stock markets, its pure speculation by the journalist, just to end the article on some philosophical note. edit 2: I am sure variation in Stock Market is NOT a fractal! The variation in stock market is Scale Free, [which isn't exactly same as being a fractal]. The journalist seems to be confused between the two terms