James Gleick's "Chaos" (1987) was also influential to my world view.

I recently played with an old theory of mine involving fractals. While doing field work in the Proterozoic rocks of central Arizona, I was struck by the fractal nature of the tightly folded deformation. Fold geometries were clearly fractal - outcrops looked the same as the maps. By taking simple rules like fold angle and fold limb ratios and applying them to deform a line of set length, doing that operation several times, I was able to recreate the geometries I observed in the field. Including, as you write, some unexpected surprises of the relationship of foliation planes to fold planes and why the foliation was not uniform, but created an inscrutable pattern. It also resolved the space problems of tight (isoclinal) folding. I remember the day I found an outcrop that looked exactly like my construction. Problem was, my coworkers and bosses glazed over when I explained it to them, finally concluding I was a hippie from Boulder who was probably high, and certainly crazy. Every so often I think about publishing my work, at least as an abstract and poster session.