Bergson and Epsilon Zero
The drawing above is my attempt to illustrate my intuitive understanding of Epsilon Zero, the limit of the transfinite ordinal sequence (although here conceived as an extension of how far we might go with the Banach-Tarski paradox). I wrote about this in A Visceral Feeling for Epsilon Zero.
It occurred to me today that my crude drawing resembles a description of evolution from French philosopher Henri Bergson's once famous (now neglected) book, Creative Evolution.
Bergson opened chapter II of Creative Evolution thus:
The evolution movement would be a simple one, and we should soon have been able to determine its direction, if life had described a single course, like that of a solid ball shot from a cannon. But it proceeds rather like a shell, which suddenly bursts into fragments, which fragments, being themselves shells, burst in their turn into fragments destined to burst again, and so on for a time incommensurably long.
Bergson is, essentially, describing a fractal in this passage, though he doesn't yet have the term or the concept, which had to wait for another Frenchman, Benoît Mandelbrot.