answer:Mountains are not cones, clouds are not spheres, trees are not cylinders, neither does lightning travel in a straight line.—Benoit Mandelbrot, who died in October He coined the term “fractal” to describe the complexity of forms we see in nature. The salient feature is self-similarity, which means that each small part of the structure has the same overall form as the structure itself—scale invariance. Keep zooming in or out and it looks largely the same. We see this in everything from coastlines to blood vessels. Non-linear dynamic systems, which have inherently unpredictable behavior known as chaos, because the structure of their so-called attractors in phase space, which describe their behavior, have fractal structure. This discovery dashed the hopes of those who previously believed that, given enough detailed data about the present state of a system, one could predict the future of the system with arbitrary precision. This is now know to be impossible. That’s why we can’t solve a 3-body problem or other seemingly simple aspects of nature. That’s why things like weather forecasts will always be problematic. Technically “chaotic” isn’t the same as “random” (the former is deterministic, the latter is not) but functionally they amount to the same thing. The book to read is Chaos by James Gleick. Not sure what you mean by “opportunity across time.”