Nature Likes Recycling Too

I was sent an email today with the subject line "Fascinating" and a link to the following image (click to enlarge):

As it would just so happen, I wrote a few paragraphs recently about how as you zoom out from the smallest of small things (sub-atomic) to the biggest of big things (galaxies), you go through a sort of pattern with regards to "how things look" at each scale along the way.

There are scales where things seem nice and orderly (an atom, an object in your hand, a solar system, a galaxy, etc) and scales where things seem very disorderly (sub-atomic particles, large collections of molecules, a pile of dirty clothes, asteroids, a cluster of stars, etc). As you "zoom out" from one of the scales where everything is orderly, things become chaotic as more and more of these "orderly" things come into view, until all of a sudden you reach a point where things are orderly again, just on a different scale. It's interesting that nature seems to "reorganize" itself periodically like that.

And so I think the image above goes along very nicely with this idea, and even suggests that some of the ideas are "recycled" as you jump from one scale of order to the next. Fascinating indeed.