Thoughts Concerning the Origin of Our Fractal Universe

During the past few decades, it has become clear that the distribution, sizes, and masses of cosmic structures are best described as fractal rather than homogeneous. This means that an entirely different formalism is needed to replace the standard perturbation model of structure formation. Recently, we have been developing a model of cosmology that accounts for a large number of the observed properties of the universe. A key component of this model is that fractal structures that later regulated the creation of both matter and radiation came into existence during the initial Planck-era inflation. Initially, the vacuum was the only existence and since time, distance, and energy were uncertain, its only property, the curvature (or energy), was most likely distributed randomly. Everything that happened after the Planck era can be described by the known laws of physics so the remaining fundamental problem is to discover how such a random beginning could organize itself into the hierarchy of highly non-random self-similar structures on all length scales that are necessary to explain the existence of all cosmic structures. In this paper, we present a variation of the standard sandpile model that points to a solution. Incidental to our review of the distributions of cosmic structures, we discovered that the apparent transition from a fractal to a homogeneous distribution of structures at a distance of about 150 Mpc is a consequence of the finite size of the universe rather than a change in the underlying statistics of the distributions.