Poll 89 - Is Many Worlds as True as Natural Selection?

Poll 89: "In "The Hidden Reality", Brian Greene says: 'That the Many Worlds approach leads to an exceptionally rich picture of reality is no more a black mark against it than the rich diversity of life on earth is a black mark against Darwinian natural selection.'" Poll ended December 31, 2011. 78.5% chose "I agree with him" as their response, while the remainder said they did not agree.

Even though it comes from a different starting point, it's interesting to think about how this is a similar question to Poll 87, which asked this question:

"Physicist David Deutsch says that calling Everett's Many Worlds an interpretation "is like talking about dinosaurs as an 'interpretation' of the fossil record". Do you agree with him?" In that case 60.8% agreed with Dr. Deutsch, and in this case an even higher number agreed with Dr. Greene.

What I like about the Brian Greene statement is it gives us a nice reminder of the holy grail scientists continue to search for: what are the building blocks, the underlying steps, that reveal how a universe such as ours is created? That desire to find the elegantly simple process that explains how the beautiful and complex reality we see around us could arise is at the root of any TOE. or Theory of Everything. In past entries like Cymatics, Gravity and Light, Love and Gravity, and Strength of Gravity, Speed of Light, we've looked at some of my project's explorations of what this underlying simplicity might be. I've talked before about Dr. Erik Verlinde's proposal that just as there are no "liquidons" imparting the quality of liquidity to a fluid, there are no "gravitons" imparting gravity to matter. Since gravity is the only force, physicists tell us, that exerts itself across the extra dimensions, what we begin to imagine is that there are places within the underlying information that becomes reality where things tend to be grouped together more strongly - where gravity's strength is stronger - and places where the grouping order is less strong.

"Grouping order", of course, is how Gevin Giorbran liked to refer to the underlying organizing process that reveals itself within timelessness. If I throw a coin ten times and write down H or T for heads or tails, the highest possible grouping order would look like this: HHHHHTTTTT (or TTTTTHHHHH). The other possible extreme would be HTHTHTHTHT (or THTHTHTHTH), which Gevin referred to as being the highest possible "symmetry order". Both of those orders are, when viewed as a whole, identical: they represent a perfectly balanced symmetry, the "zero" that we start from and the "zero" that our universe returns to. The idea that our universe or any other springs from a breaking of symmetry is not unique to Gevin though. Cosmologists refer to symmetry breaking all the time as the answer to this simple question. "Why is there something rather than nothing?"

In the video for Imagining the Eight Dimension, I refer to the idea I've been promoting that ties so nicely to what Dr. Verlinde is proposing, and which Gevin Giorbran also showed us as a way of understanding: gravity is the underlying organizing principle that pulls things together, and the speed of light is the underlying organizing principle that divides things apart, through the planck frames that create our observed reality. As physicist Julian Barbour likes to describe it, each of those frames is unique and separate: and if we were in a part of the underlying information where gravity had nothing in opposition to it, we would be at the highest grouping order version of that information, the HHHHHTTTTT. On the other hand, if we were at the position where there was no gravity, and only the dividing apart that the speed of light reveals, we would be in the highest symmetry order, the HTHTHTHTHT.

Is there a simple process similar to Darwinian Natural Selection that causes our universe or any other to be selected from an underlying timeless whole, an Ultimate Ensemble, an Omniverse? And is Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation an important part of understanding what that simple process would be? 78.5% of the visitors to this blog were willing to agree with that idea.

For those of you who haven't watched the video for Imagining the Eighth Dimension yet, let's take a look at it now to finish today's entry.


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


Next: Poll 90 - Neutrinos and the Laws of Physics

Poll 88 - Is the Sixth Dimension our Phase Space?

Poll 88: "A phase space is defined as 'a space in which all possible states of a system are represented, with each possible state of the system corresponding to one unique point in the phase space.' Is the phase space for our unique universe in the sixth dimension?" Poll ended December 3, 2011. 71% agreed, while 29% disagreed.

"Phase Space" is definitely a phrase I wish I had known about back when I created this project, because its definition conveys so perfectly what we're talking about with not just the sixth dimension, but all of the dimensions as we're visualizing them here. Each dimension has its own unique set of possibilities, each is apparently infinite, and yet each is also a subset of the ones that follow.

If the "point" we start from represents a position within a system, then the "system" defines the nature of each of those points. Many times people visualize a point as only being of infinitesimally small size, which is valid but it's only one possible interpretation: so even a single geometric point, by virtue of being of indeterminate size, has an infinite quality to it, since a point of indeterminate size can be of any size you care to assign to it. So no matter what dimension you're visualizing, there's a way to think of a point within that system as encompassing the entire dimension, while still being only a subset of the possibilities contained in a system where further dimensions are added. Is that hard to visualize? Let's try it from the beginning.

A one-dimensional line is a simple system, which can have a phase space of possible states, or points, that lie upon the line. A two-dimensional plane would have a phase space with even more possible states, or points, that lie within the plane, and the phase space of the first-dimensional line we looked at could be a tiny subset of the second-dimensional phase space. This continues with each additional dimension, and the mind-boggling leap in possibilities from one dimension to the next quickly overwhelms us if we try to hold more than a few adjacent dimensions in our minds at once. Nonetheless, taking this logic one step at time, building one gigantic concept and then letting it become a tiny subset of the following one, is something our brains are more easily adapted to.

The video for Imagining the Sixth Dimension may help you to visualize further what we're talking about here, so for those of you who haven't seen it yet, let's take a look:


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdnhKE95AqM

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Poll 89 - Is Many Worlds as True as Natural Selection?

Poll 87 - Many Worlds, Fossils, and Dinosaurs

Poll 86: "Physicist David Deutsch says that calling Everett's Many Worlds an interpretation 'is like talking about dinosaurs as an 'interpretation' of the fossil record'. Do you agree with him?" Poll ended November 5 2011. 60.8% agreed, while 39.2% did not.

As I said recently in Imagining the Fifth Dimension, I have the utmost respect for David Deutsch, who has been a strong proponent of Everett's theory for many years. The quote we're talking about here was found in Peter Byrne's excellent The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III: Multiple Universes, Mutual Assured Destruction, and the Meltdown of a Nuclear Family, a book we've talked about in this blog before, including in an entry called The Quantum Observer.

Like "interpretation", words like "theory" can mistakenly fall into similar territory: in the general public, after all, theory has a fairly loose definition. I could say "I have a theory about what happened to my missing sock" but there's nothing rigorous implied by that statement. A scientific theory, on the other hand, is not just a guess for what might explain the phenomena being studied. As it says in wikipedia:

A scientific theory is a set of principles that explain and predict phenomena.Scientists create scientific theories with the scientific method, when they are originally proposed as hypotheses and tested for accuracy through observations and experiments. Once a hypothesis is verified, it becomes a theory.

Why do we refer to Everett's work as an interpretation, then? In fact, Everett himself called his work the "Theory of the Universal Wavefunction", so he wanted us to understand that what he had produced was much more than supposition. It was, after all, backed up by the equations of the Schrödinger wave function, which underlies the most successful scientific theory of all time: quantum mechanics. As I've said before in this blog, any self-respecting theory of everything has to have quantum  mechanics incorporated within it if it's to be taken seriously.

So what we're left with here is Dr. Deutsch's sly swipe at the Creationist argument that the world was created less than 10,000 years ago, and the fossils must therefore have been placed in the earth at that time. Is that an "interpretation" of the fossil record? Sure it is, whether you agree with it or not. Particularly in the US, this viewpoint does have many supporters as we see in the wikipedia article on level of support for creationism:

According to a 2007 Gallup poll, about 43% of Americans believe that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so." 

In that same article we see that while creationism has strong support in the US, there is a sliding scale of other countries around the world where this is not as prevalent a belief (for instance, about 20% believe this in Italy, sliding down through Norway, Spain, the U.K., Denmark, Sweden, France, and Japan, to Iceland, where less than 10% hold this belief). We also see that amongst persons in the US with education in the relevant earth and life sciences, the level of support for creationism is much much lower: according to a 1987 Newsweek poll of 480,000 scientists, creationism was given support by only 700 respondents, which represents about 0.146%.

So. If one approaches the fossil record from the pre-conceived notion that the earth is only thousands of years old, then a particular interpretation becomes more likely to occur. Why am I going on about all this?

From the outset of this project, I've said that I want to show people ways in which science and spirituality, physics and philosophy, can find common ground. But all of the above appears to point out one of the places where this is not really achievable: either you believe dinosaurs walked the earth millions of years ago or you think the earth was created a much shorter length of time ago than that. Isn't it clear that there's no easy meeting place where those two viewpoints can be reconciled?

Personally, I believe the universe really can be traced back to 13.7 billion years ago. But I've also said that the big bang is an illusion, and the extraordinary initial events of inflationary cosmology are better described as being a part of the process that selects a universe such as ours, though symmetry breaking, from a timeless whole that we might call the omniverse, or which Tegmark calls the Ultimate Ensemble. Still, you may be surprised that there actually is a way to find a meeting between these two viewpoints. Here's what I said in my book back in 2006:

What we’re saying, then, is where you actually began to observe becomes irrelevant. If it tickled your fancy, you could place that first observer at, for example, 6000 years ago. To do so would mean that prior to that time all potential physical realities remained possible within the wave function, and that at that point the observer turned their attention upon our universe and collapsed the quantum wave function into the reality we see around us, complete with the impression that time had actually extended out for billions of years prior to that. But why stop there? It could also be possible then that the universe didn’t actually exist until one second ago, which is when the observer turned their attention upon our universe and collapsed the probability wave function into what we now perceive as our reality, complete with a history which each of us believes we remember. Whether the observer came into existence 13.7 billion years ago or one second ago, the result will be the same: out of all the possible timelines which could have existed prior to this moment, through the act of observation we are now experiencing one of them as our own present, and our own history.

Is the above paragraph just a Rob Bryanton fantasy? No,  retro-causality is now gaining acceptance within quantum physics. In Evidence for Seeing the Future, we looked at a November 2010 New Scientist article about new papers quantum computing expert Seth Lloyd and Aephram Steinberg of the University of Toronto, expressing the same idea:

But if quantum particles can't discriminate between things that affect them forward and backward in time, that means specifying a final condition can determine what happens before it. "Mathematically, there's no reason why final conditions can't be 'givens' as well and everything has to follow logically from them," Steinberg says.

This all ties together with the multiverse of possible universes, commonly known as Everett's Many Worlds. Since Everett's "Interpretation" fully agrees with the underlying quantum nature of our reality, I would say that Everett's critics are left with finding other ways to explain what physicist Raphael Bousso called the "mother of all physics problems":

"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."

- from an article published in the October 2008 edition of Seed magazine

Is there more than one parallel universe resulting from the quantum wavefunction? Is there a multiverse of other universes, perhaps ten to the power of five hundred other universes as some string theorists have predicted? This is the interpretation that makes the most sense to me, and this is what Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation also tells us.

Where does that leave us? If you don't believe in the multiverse, then my project is not likely to find much that resonates for you, and you and I are going to have to simply agree to disagree. There is a multiverse of other universes, and there are multiple pasts and futures which connect to any particular "now" you or I are observing. While I'm all for finding common meeting grounds between different belief systems, this is where I have to draw the line.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Poll 88 - Is the Sixth Dimension our Phase Space?

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