From Coulton's blog:

Now this is awesome - I just got a very sweet letter from a 10th grade class in Minnesota who made a video for Mandelbrot Set. They’re from Sobriety High, a sober school for kids who have gone through chemical dependency treatment and want to finish up high school in a place without the standard high school temptations. They researched fractals and Benoit, drew pictures, took photos and put the whole thing together just to make me cry like a little baby. The project is detailed on their website. It makes me very happy.

I believe that scientific research into quantum mechanics is like zooming into the mandelbrot set, you will keep finding systems of infinite complexity the further you go. I don't think a quantum 'floor' exists.

Hm.. according to the author, the original mandelbrot is the size of the universe when we reach the first mini-brot, about 37 seconds in.

The final frame is at a magnification of E89. That is a ratio far greater than the smallest elementary particle to the size of the known universe. The animation took an entire year to render on three dedicated machines running Fractint. The last frame alone took 18 hours to render. I downloaded a slightly different version of this at 640x480, and wow, it really really boggles the mind.

His webpage is here: http://www.fractal-animation.net/ufvp.html

The YouTube title of this video is "A Mandelbrot the size of the known universe". I think that this might qualify for understatement of the year. I expect that the original mandelbrot, in comparison to the size of an average screen, surpasses the size of the visible universe within about 30 seconds. The magnitude of this zoom is absolutely jaw-dropping.

O.M.G.

I don't know how I missed this sift before. Anybody want to take a stab at how this video was created?

After watching it once, my best guess is that this is a Julia set that is at some high level of zoom, and then has its coresponding Mandelbrot coordinates changed very VERY small amounts, creating the very bizarre warping that is going on in this video. I'm definitely very intrigued. What a great video. The music is very fitting as well. Awesome.

Oh WOW! That is an incredibly small mandelbrot! This is way deeper than Xaos goes, so I have to wonder how the author of this video found that minibrot. I can remember spending hours and hours searching for ones like this with Fractint 10 years ago. I would love to know how long this video took to calculate.

Great find!