Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs - January Report

Previous lists:
. April 08 . May 08 . June 08 . July 08 . August 08
. September 08 . October 08 . November 08 . December 08 .
. Top 100 Blog Entries of 2008 . May 09 . June 09 . July 09
. August 09 . September 09 . October 09 . November 09 .
. December 09 . Top 100 Blog Entries of 2009 .
. January 10 . February 10 . March 10 . April 10 . May 10 .
. June 10 . July 10 . August 10 . September 10 . October 10 .
. November 10 . December 10 . Top 100 Entries of 2010 .
. January 11 . February 11 . March 11 . April 11 . May 11 .
. June 11 . July 11 . August 11 . September 11 . October 11 .
. November 11 . December 11 . Top 100 Entries of 2011 . 


Based upon number of views, here are the top blogs for the last thirty days.


1. Wrapping it Up in the Tenth Dimension
2. Why Only Ten?
3. New video - Poll 80 to 82 - Right Angles and Reality

4. What is Life?
5. Rob on the Peake Experience
6. New video - Poll 83 - Is Energy Not Conserved?
7. Psychedelics and Surprises
8. Connecting Zero to Ten
9. Timelessness and the Ultimate Ensemble
10. New video - Imagining the Second Dimension

And as of January 26th, 2012, here are the twenty-six Imagining the Tenth Dimension blog entries that have attracted the most visits of all time. Items marked in bold are new or have risen since last month.

1. Jumping Jesus (1)
2. What's Around the Corner? (2)
3. Mandelbulbs (3)
4. Is Reality an Illusion? (5)
5. The 5th-Dimensional Camera Project (4)  
6. The Pencil Visualization (17)
7. An Expanding 4D Sphere (6)
8. Just Six Things: The I Ching (7)
9. Gravity and Love (8)
10. Vibrations and Fractals (11) 
11 Bees and the LHC (9) 
12. Light Has No Speed (10) 
13. 10-10-10 Look Before You Leap (15)
14. Time Travel Paradoxes (13)
15. Roger Ebert on Quantum Reincarnation (12)
16. Changing Your Brain (14)
17. Our Universe Within the Omniverse (16)
18. Magnets and Morality (18)
19. How to Time Travel (19)
20. Creativity and the Quantum Universe (21)
21. Dancing on the Timeline (20)
22. Simultaneous Inspiration (22)
23. Complexity from Simplicity (23)  
24. Monkeys Love Metallica (24)
25. What is Reality? (26) 
26. Polls Archive 54 - Is Time Moving Faster? (25) 



Which means that no entries are leaving our top 26 of all time list this month.


By the way, if you're new to this project, you might want to check out the Tenth Dimension FAQ, as it provides a road map to a lot of the discussions and different materials that have been created for this project. If you are interested in the 26 songs attached to this project, this blog shows a video for each of the songs and provides more links with lyrics and discussion. The Annotated Tenth Dimension Video provides another cornucopia of discussion topics to be connected to over at YouTube. Also, a lot of people are enjoying discussing these ideas with me on my facebook page: facebook.com/rob.bryanton .

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Poll 87 - Many Worlds, Fossils and Dinosaurs

Brain Pickings

   

"A kind of scientific expressionism and creative exploration of curiosity, Imagining the Tenth Dimension might not rewrite the theories of Stephen Hawking, but it is certain to give you pause."

- Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

Brain Pickings (www.brainpickings.org) has just posted a nice review of my book, here's a link to the article:

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/01/25/imagining-the-tenth-dimension/

And here's some info about Brain Pickings from their site:

Brain Pickings is the brain child of Maria Popova, a cultural curator and curious mind at large, who also writes for Wired UK, The Atlantic and Design Observer, among others. She gets occasional help from a handful of talented contributors.

Brain Pickings is a human-powered discovery engine for interestingness, culling and curating cross-disciplinary curiosity-quenchers, and separating the signal from the noise to bring you things you didn’t know you were interested in until you are.

Thanks for your kind words, Maria!

Next: Poll 87 - Many Worlds, Fossils and Dinosaurs

New Video - Imagining the Eighth Dimension

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDNO6vv1SjE

Next: Brain Pickings

Poll 86 - Impossible to see the 3rd dimension?

Poll 86 - "The third dimension is space without time. This means it's actually impossible for us to see the third dimension by itself, because even with our hand in front of our face it takes a certain amount of "time" for the light to travel to our eye." Poll ended October 6, 2011. 80.9% agreed, while 19.1% disagreed.

This was an idea discussed in Imagining the Third Dimension, and I'll end today's blog with the video for that entry for those of you who haven't watched it yet. This speaks to how easy it is for us to forget that "time" is part of what we're looking at every moment, so seeing space by itself is really impossible - the space we're looking at has to have a duration or it's not possible for us to see it.

With the way this poll question is phrased, it seems to me that it should be an open-and-shut case, but nearly one out of every five persons answering this poll question don't agree. Is it possible to ask this question any more simply? If the third dimension is space without time, and the fourth dimension is space with time, how can we talk about the third dimension by itself? In other words, how can we view anything in the third dimension without taking a certain amount of "time" to do so?

Sure, we can have abstract discussions about 2D objects that have length and width but no depth, but there still have been many hours of debate over whether it would be possible for anyone to see something that has no depth, to the point where some people say this means the second dimension can't exist. By the same token we can talk about 3D objects that have length width and depth while we ignore the fourth dimension. But if a 3D cube had no duration, shouldn't exactly the same question come into play?

A way out of this conundrum would be to suggest that we're assuming that an abstract object like a 3D cube has infinite duration: like the original description of a meme as defined by Dawkins, the cube would then be an information pattern which can be transmitted across time and space, from one mind to another, instantaneously. Does that mean that it would be safe to assume that a 2D object has infinite duration in the third dimension, and that's how we would be able to see and talk about such an object? If we're talking about abstract forms similar to a plane or a cube, that reasoning follows.

But what about 3D objects like a human being, or a planet? Clearly, they don't have infinite duration, they have a point where they start to exist, and another point where their existence ceases. This, then, is where we can get into difficulties of language. If I say "this is a cube", am I referring to an abstract concept, or am I referring to a physical object like a child's building block? "This is a cube" could apply to either, but the two have very different expressions within the dimensional constructs that we're exploring here.

This confusion continues as we add dimensions: a tesseract is a four-dimensional hypercube. If I say "this is a tesseract", what am I referring to? A concept? Or something that really exists as an object which has a specific duration within the fifth dimension? Therein can lie some of the pitfalls of language - we need to make it clear which interpretation we're using, or these discussions can sometimes seem contradictory.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-D4swzK4sKk

So remember - the next time someone tells you the second dimension can't exist because something with no depth is impossible, tell them the third dimension has the same problem. If you're talking about something that has length, width and depth, but no duration in the fourth dimension, then that would be impossible for us to see. And clearly, what you and I are a looking at right now with our eyes and their "3D" atoms and molecules, is something larger than the third dimension.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: New Video - Imagining the Eighth Dimension

Poll 85 - No Quantum/Classical Divide?

Poll 85: "Do you agree with this idea from the June '11 issue of Scientific American? The division between the quantum and classical worlds appears not to be fundamental...few physicists now think that classical physics will ever really make a comeback at any scale." Poll ended September 8, 2011. 71.2 % agreed, while 28.8% did not.

This has been an interesting metamorphosis: in 2006, when my book was published, a number of people criticized it for being so cavalier with taking the concepts of quantum mechanics and applying them to our "warm and wet" macro/classical world. What does Feynman's sum over histories have to do with the choices you and I make? How do the instantaneous connections of quantum entanglement relate to consciousness and life? These questions do not seem quite as far "out there" now as they did back then, and the burgeoning field of quantum biology is a great example of the kind of paradigm shift we're talking about here.

For more discussion about these ideas, here's a link to Poll 60, which back in March 2010 asked whether people accepted that the so-called "dividing line" between the quantum and macro world is a completely artificial construct. The results were similar: a very large majority agreed with this idea back then as well. I would also refer you to an entry from a couple of months ago called "We are All Quanta", in which I said this:

No matter where we end up, we need to acknowledge that quantum mechanics is the most successful theory of reality devised so far, so whatever Theory of Everything we're trying to get to, we should keep in mind the truth about the underlying quantum nature of the universe we're in.

Ultimately, we are all quanta. We are created by constructive interference, so saying that we're wavicles also works, but each of us is a unique pattern, and a subset of something larger.

Is Imagining the Tenth Dimension a Theory of Everything, a TOE? At best it points the way to where a theory might lie, which is why I prefer to call it a "new way of thinking".  But if classical physics is really destined to never "make a comeback", then it seems apparent that any self-respecting TOE has to acknowledge the underlying quantum nature of our reality, end of story.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton


Next: Poll 86 - Is it Impossible to See the Third Dimension?

Poll 84 - The Multiverse and Many Worlds

Poll 84: "Physicists Leonard Susskind and Raphael Bousso say in their new paper that the multiverse and the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics are formally equivalent. Do you agree with them?" Poll ended August 11, 2011. 87.1% agreed, while the remainder disagreed.

I've used this quote from Raphael Bousso before, this comes from an article published in the October 2008 edition of Seed magazine: "This may seem laughable, but without the multiverse our finest theories predict that empty space should contain about 10 to the power of 123 times more energy than it actually does. This has been called the 'worst prediction in the history of science' and the 'mother of all physics problems'.”

And in entries like Holograms and Quanta and The Holographic Universe, I've talked about related theories by Leonard Susskind. To see these two leading-edge cosmologists put their heads together to come up with a proof that ties directly to the contentions of my project was a great thrill for me in 2011.

Are we a shadow of the fifth dimension, an extra-dimensional version of Plato's Cave? That is the conclusion I believe we can draw from these Holographic Universe theories. And as we saw in my video Imagining the Fifth Dimension, if Everett believed that the different parallel universe outcomes for our universe reside in a subspace which is orthogonal to space-time, isn't that also another way of describing how our reality comes from the fifth dimension? This is still a controversial idea from my project, but I believe Bousso and Susskind are pushing us closer towards reaching that understanding, and I'm happy to see how many visitors to this blog accepted the basic thesis of their paper.

The Scientific American blog entry describing my project so favorably was also a great thrill for me in 2011. As we now begin the fabled year of 2012, I can't wait to see what happens next. Enjoy the journey!

Rob

Next: Poll 85 - No Quantum/Classical Divide?

New video - Imagining the Seventh Dimension

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FWRndF01xI

Next: Poll 84 - The Multiverse and Many Worlds