a new way of thinking about time and space ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ by Rob Bryanton
--author and research scientist David Jay Brown says: "one of the most brilliantly-conceived and mind-stretching books that I've ever encountered".
--science fiction author Greg Bear says: "a fascinating excursion into the multiverse - clear, elegant, personal and provocative"
We've asked this question before - what would the 3rd dimension look like if you could observe it from outside of the limited "now" of our arrow of time perspective? Here's a trippy video that (in a way) plays with that idea. Check out "Dancing on the Timeline":
In When's a Knot Not a Knot, we looked at the following video and I made this comment: "How would our own reality look if you could see more than just 3D? Watch this interesting video and think about how similar it is to watching a rotating hypercube."
In Playing Games in Extra Dimensions, we talked about a new iPhone/iPod game called Hipercubo that asks you to manipulate a hypercube (or "tesseract"). And in Hypercubes and Plato's Cave we looked at a classic animation of a rotating hypercube. Now, here's a new, better quality rotating hypercube animation put up by a techno artist calling themselves f(x), the soundtrack for this animation is a cut from their new album. The description for this animation says:
The tesseract is a four-dimensional object, and is rotating on the Y and W axes in this animation. Even though it looks like it is morphing, all the edges are the same length, and all angles are 90 degrees. (Thanks to Jason Hise for the image!)
A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4BbHBBZ3hU The youtube channel this clip comes from is Kyodo8, I'm sure you could contact them if you're interested in purchasing their f(x) music tracks.
Finally, speaking of buying music, here's the new video again for my song Crop Circles, but this version has lyrics superimposed. If you'd like to buy a high-quality mp3 of this song, as performed by Rob Bob and Roberta, it's part of a 10 song package available for download from the Tenth Dimension Digital Items Store.
PS - Thanks to my friend Frank, who suggested I go to CropCircleResearch.com to see what some of the "Crop Circles are Real" researchers have to say about the topic.
While we continue in a lighter vein with this set of entries, here's a video for a song called Crop Circles which I performed live in 1997 with my good friends Bob Evans and Roberta Nichol. I go waaaaay back with Bob and Roberta, we first played together forty years ago and have been in a large number of different bands playing different styles of music over the years. We started out playing folk music, and Crop Circles comes from a ten-song set that harkens back to the styles of music you might have heard us play at the Regina Guild of Folk Music back in the day. I wrote eight of the songs, Roberta wrote two, and the three of us took turns singing the lead vocal from song to song.
Are some crop circles fake? No question! But I'm amazed to see comments on youtube for this song saying this is me pandering to the establishment and mainstream science, or me trying to convince people that every single crop circles is fake. Is there something at the core of the crop circle phenomenon that is real? As the lyrics to this song say, "I love a good paranoid conspiracy, alien mystery just as much as any Average Joe", and I'm willing to keep an open mind on this topic.
Sometimes a conspiracy really is a conspiracy, or a mystery is a hoax. But sometimes mysterious things (like dark matter and dark energy!) happen for which the mainstream doesn't have a good explanation. I like this song because it's got a great groove and it makes me smile, and it makes its point about how sometimes we don't know what's really going on without taking itself too seriously. My popular youtube video for my song Secret Societies also looks at such things from a deliberately over-the-top perspective, saying that absolutely everything is a conspiracy:
Other blog entries that have looked at how conspiracies tie into the Imagining the Tenth Dimension approach include Beer and Miracles, When's a Knot Not a Knot?, and Daily Parrying. I'll be posting a version of the video for Crop Circles with lyrics superimposed in a few days... in the meantime, here's the words if you want to sing along.
Crop Circles - words and music by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)
I stand before you today as a fraud A fraud of miniscule proportion perhaps Compared to the great frauds of the century But a fraud nonetheless, now blessed With newfound confirmation that Mankind is indeed a creature who searches Searches for deeper truth and inner meanings And a sucker is indeed born every minute
Now being a prairie-born, prairie-raised prairie boy I too have heard the tales Of miraculous appearances of unexplained phenomena Out in the middle of our golden fields I'm talkin' 'bout crop circles, and who hasn't marveled When the local papers break the news Of a mystified farmer out standing in his field Trying so hard to explain the latest
Crop circles, another mystery for the ages Crop circles, another wonder to behold Crop circles, history writes its pages Now another wondrous story can be told
Now being a prairie-born, prairie-raised prairie boy With two close personal friends Late one night when the moon was bright We concocted ourselves a plan To drive way out and sneak into some farmer's field And perpetrate a little prank Hopin' for anonymous vicarious fame of some sort We intended to make ourselves a few
Crop circles, another mystery for the ages Crop circles, another wonder to behold Crop circles, history writes its pages Now another wondrous story can be told
You take a big piece of rope and a good long stick And you find yourself a field With some tire tracks that'll hide your path As you walk out to the middle Where one of you stands with the rope at the center And another grabs hold and walks around And you flatten out the wheat with the side of your stick Make yourself three or four of them
Crop circles, another mystery for the ages Crop circles, another wonder to behold Crop circles, history writes its pages Now another wondrous story can be told
Now I'm not sayin' that every single circle They find out there's a scam And I love a good paranoid conspiracy, alien mystery Just as much as any Average Joe But when I surf the web and I buy the books And our circles are proudly displayed Right next to all them other circles from around the world...
Well, it makes me just a little sad
Gimme some of them Crop circles, another mystery for the ages Crop circles, another wonder to behold Crop circles, history writes its pages Now another wondrous story can be told
Crop circles, another mystery for the ages Crop circles, another wonder to behold Crop circles, history writes its pages Now another wondrous story can be told
If you'd like to buy the mp3s of this ten-song set, I'm selling them as a package for only $5 at the Tenth Dimension Digital Items store. And while you're there, check out the O is for Omniverse pdf, which we've reduced to $10 as a special for the month of February.
Enjoy the journey!
Rob Bryanton
Next: Dancing on the Timeline
PS Here's a little bonus for you: Bob Evans is a great musician with a dry sense of humor who always makes me laugh. For more about Bob go to bobevansguitar.com, or check out his youtube channel, AcousticTonic. Here's a couple of videos from him in concert that will give you a sense of how much fun it is to see Bob perform, the first is his introduction to the song, the second is the song.
Last week, in Noein, we looked at a Japanese anime series that took its plot ideas from Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics and the many branching parallel universes that result from that. Of course, this easily relates to my project and we have talked about traveling through this "probability space" as I sometimes call it from a number of perspectives.
I've been noticing a lot of TV commercials lately that show a version of this idea: a person sees themselves right there beside themselves, but in slightly different circumstances as a result of some good or bad decision they've made - just last night, for instance, I saw a Nicorettes commercial where a guy in the bar sees himself right there in the room but he's smoking: so the guy pulls out his Nicorettes and the "other" version of himself disappears. I thought I'd go out on the net and post a few of these new commercials as part of this entry, but didn't have any success finding them. I was then thinking about a much older ad that might be the grandaddy of all these, the "who are you?" "I'm you from the future, retired and living the good life because you invested your money wisely" series of commercials, which have gone on to be widely satirized. I tried to find one of those commercials and ended up with the above amusing piece from the Upright Citizen's Brigade, which I thought was fun to watch even though by now we're completely off the rails of any serious discussion!
Roger tells me he's a long time fan of Imagining the Tenth Dimension. This game allows you to manipulate a four-dimensional hypercube, and if go to Apple's Apps Store, you'll see it's available free in a basic version, with additional levels available for purchase. You'll also see in the description that Roger suggests we could use this game as a way of thinking about how our universe is finite but unbounded (as opposed to infinite), a concept we've talked about in previous blogs like Are We a 3D Sphere on a 4D Hypersphere and Life is But a Dream. In fact, there's a poll question running here at the tenth dimension blog right now that asks whether you support that idea or not.
Music and sound effects for Roger's game are by Cromo.Sonica. I've just downloaded the free version and it's quite the brainbuster, really a fine way to force your brain into thinking about how the shadows of extra dimensional objects behave as you manipulate them. We're going to talk about hypercubes next week again in an entry called Dancing on the Timeline: and one of my more popular blog entries from a couple of years ago called Hypercubes and Plato's Cave also shows my suggestion for a way of visualizing how we could exchange the word "duration" for "length" in imagining the fourth spatial dimension. As we can see in this game, there is no way for us to appreciate the shape of this hypercube when it's static and unchanging. Only by using "time" to manipulate the object can we begin to visualize how, just like with a 3D cube, with this 4D cube every edge is the same length, and each side is at a 90 degree right angle to the next.
Here's another game for you to play online: a 4D Rubik's Cube called Magic Cube 4D. Superliminal Software has a number of interesting links on their pages, check 'em out. The above video shows the 4D cube being solved automatically by the program, it would of course take much, much longer for a human being to solve this crazy-looking puzzle, but there are definitely people out there who have mastered such a feat!
And if you get the hang of this 4D version, then go one further with Magic Cube 5D!
This image is from the web page for Magic Cube 5D, which is posted at Gravitation3D. I love what they say in the text above this image:
In the spirit of taking things too far, here is a fully functional 5-dimensional analogue of Rubik's cube.
"In that blessed region of Four Dimensions, shall we linger on the threshold of the Fifth, and not enter therein?"
I hope you enjoy playing Hipercubo and these extra-dimensional Rubik's Cube puzzles! Next time we're going to keep things on the lighter side with something that ties back to our last entry: "I'm You From the Future".
Based upon number of views, here are the top blogs for the last thirty days. As always, the number in brackets is the entry's position in the previous month's report.
And as of January 26th, 2010, 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.
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. And as always, here's a reminder that the Tenth Dimension Forum is a good place to converse with other people about these ideas.
What would you say to this as a description of my project?
Imagining the Tenth Dimension makes use of several interpretations of quantum physics, particularly Hugh Everett's Many-Worlds Interpretation, which views the universe as branching off into an infinity of possible states of varying probability. It also draws from the Copenhagen Interpretation, which suggests that an observer or measurement is important in determining the decoherency of the probability.
I would say this description fits quite well. But the above description is actually from the wikipedia article on a Japanese anime series from a couple of years ago called Noein. Watch this two minute clip from the series:
One small quibble with the wikipedia description above: the Copenhagen Interpretation says observation collapses the wavefunction, causing all other possible outcomes to disappear. I side with Everett on this one: his theory says we don't collapse the wavefunction, we merely observe it in a particular state, and the other "many worlds" continue to exist as part of the wavefunction for our universe even though we're not observing those other possibilities. Here's more from that wikipedia article on Noein:
In the anime, Haruka possesses "supreme observer" status in the multiverse, thus enabling her to determine the sole outcome of an event just by "observing" one of the possible futures of the event. These themes also underpin an existential ideology that permeates the anime.
Regular readers of this blog may remember another anime series with a similar theme which I talked about almost two years ago in an entry called Anime, Gaming and Cusps: that series was called The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. In the video I made for that blog entry I played a clip from the show, watch from about the 1:50 mark if you just want to see a bit of this other anime series:
There seems to be something about Japanese culture that makes them more inclined to embrace as their entertainment the heady extrapolations that can be drawn from modern quantum theory. I suspect this is because there is something essentially holistic about the conclusions that can be drawn, making these ideas easier to align with ancient Eastern philosophy. As I've mentioned before, though, many North American teenagers and young adults have been introduced to related concepts in the Japanese video games they have played as youngsters. In Placebos Becoming More Effective?, we discussed the scientific evidence that placebos are twice as effective as they were a few decades ago. Could the Eastern viewpoints that have been introduced to the western world over the last few decades through entertainments like Noein be part of that shift?
On a more serious scientific note, here's a paper by physicist Max Tegmark called "Many Lives in Many Worlds". Many lives in Many worlds-Max Tegmark
Other blogs where we've talked about Max Tegmark include Polls Archive 24, Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?, and Quantum Suicide. We're going to continue exploring these extra-dimensional ideas from a more playful perspective next time with an entry called "Playing Games in Extra Dimensions".
Photograph: Andy Fossum/Rex Features. As seen in The Guardian UK article referenced below.
Sometimes we talk about ideas that seem to contradict each other. In a number of entries, like Jumping Jesus, Evolution's Fast Lane, and The Stream, we've looked at mounting evidence that we're in a constantly accelerating meme-space, where ideas are connecting together more and more quickly, and the amount of information that each of us is asked to process on a daily basis is constantly increasing. In Placebos Becoming More Effective? we talked about an editorial the New York Times published earlier this month called "Old Fogies at 20". This article suggests that university age students are seeing a generation gap between them and their high-school aged siblings: particularly in the world of technology and the internet, trends and expectations are changing so quickly now!
It can be hard to perceive an acceleration when you're within a system where everything is accelerating, but we do catch glimpses. So on the one hand we talk about The Stream, The Singularity, Transhumanism, Artificial Intuition, Conscious Computers, and so on. On the other hand, we talk about time being an illusion and parts of each of us being connected to patterns that exist well outside of the limits of the "now" of our 4D spacetime. How do the two ideas fit together? First of all, let's look at some recent examples of these big picture patterns.
We've talked a few times about the deep underlying connections of sacred geometry and how the Golden Ratio has been considered a thing of beauty for thousands of years. Like fractals, shapes and patterns such as these occur naturally, and perhaps that's why we're so attracted to them, because they represent deeper connections to reality that are outside the limits of our observed spacetime. Here's a Science Daily article from earlier this month that extends this idea even further: it suggests that scientists have now discovered evidence of the Golden Ratio in the quantum world!
Music and sound also seem to connect us together in powerful ways that speak to a more timeless perspective. In The Big Bang and the Big O, I referred back to sections in my book where I discuss how certain sounds seem to reach us at a primal level: could the dreaded chalkboard squeal connect us to genetic memories of some ancient flying predator who swooped down from the sky making a similar sound? Here's a great TED Talks video featuring sound consultant Julian Treasure, it's called The Four Ways Sound Affects Us. It speaks very effectively to the idea that we are all connected together by the ways we react to sound. Watch this five minute video:
Julian is the chair of the Sound Agency, a firm that advises worldwide businesses -- offices, retailers, hotels -- on how to use sound and music more effectively. This leads us to the title of this entry, Monkeys Love Metallica. Okay, I admit it, "love" is overstating the case for dramatic effect but here's a link to a New York Times article my friend Pete Chema of Ten Feet Deep sent to me a couple of weeks ago, please check it out: "Music for Monkeys".
...will help psychologists understand the evolutionary roots of music and its effect on the brain, the authors said.
"The emotional components of music and animal calls might be very similar, and from an evolutionary perspective, we are finding that the note patterns, dissonance and timing are important for communicating affective states in both animals and people," said Chuck Snowdon, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Now, what Dr. Snowdon is talking about here seems to easily connect to ideas we've talked about in entries like The Geometry of Music and Disorders of the Mind: music, like the the other patterns we've just looked at, connects in ways that go beyond the limits of our 4D spacetime. But at first glance, the results of Dr. Snowdon's study seem to contradict the ideas he tells us he was exploring.
According to the Guardian article, the monkeys didn't exhibit any clear response to these piece of music one way or another, except for the Metallica song,which had the unexpected effect of calming them down.
Interestingly, the New York Times article claims the scientists saw a similar soothing effect on the monkeys with the Tool song, but most of the other articles I found reporting on this study appear to only single out Metallica. Frankly, I have to suspect that most reporters covering this story grabbed on to the "Monkeys Like Metallica" angle because it makes for a more memorable story. Unfortunately, singling out Metallica from Tool does create some misperceptions here, though.
The monkeys did not respond one way or another to the other pieces of music. Does this mean that farmers who play classical music to their cows to keep them calm might be kidding themselves? Shouldn't Adagio for Strings have made these monkeys sad? If animals are part of the same continuum that we are, shouldn't they respond in ways similar to we humans to the joy, the sorrow, the anger, the range of human emotions that we can hear in a powerful piece of music?
Perhaps what we're talking about is more related to this accelerating generation gap we looked at above. Are our more subtle responses to music mainly cultural, mainly a learned behavior? In the same way that a young child might now expect that all viewing screens are multi-touch displays, perhaps our varying emotional responses to the music of the last four hundred years or so is something we've been trained into through repetition?
The key here is understanding that the monkeys responded to the highly rhythmic music of Tool and Metallica, and didn't respond to the long phrases and more free tempos of the other two pieces. What is the common denominator behind the development of music? Repeating structures. The drum. Patterns that can entrain the heartbeat and breath, that make a creature feel a certain way when they move along with the music. Adagio for Strings, then, is just a too subtle for our monkey friends to hear as a communication of emotion: this a generation gap of a different magnitude but similar nonetheless.
Certainly, this music sounds odd to our ears, but the tamarins responded as you might expect: they lounged around and ate more when the first piece of music was playing, and became upset when the second piece played. Any film soundtrack composer exercises their creativity in plugging into these same underlying connections, finding ways to soothe us, or ways to upset us with the palette of sounds, the melodic shapes and the rhythmic structures they choose. Clearly, Dr. Snowdon would have to experiment with a much larger range of musical compositions that are generally agreed to communicate a variety of specific emotions to humans, and I'm certain that such experiments would help to reveal what is primal and what is learned in modern humans' reactions to music of all kinds.
So, do Monkeys Love Metallica? Definitely a gross generalization, even if it's fun to use as a headline! But can monkeys respond emotionally to some kinds of music? This scientific study points to "yes".
Although our universe may effectively appear to be infinite, it is in reality "finite but unbounded".
Pharma companies are wrestling with the fact that placebos have grown twice as effective in drug trials over the last few decades. This is evidence that something is changing about our interface with reality.
The so-called "dividing line" between the quantum and the macro realms is completely artificial, it is really all part of the same continuum.
With which prediction do you more agree? 1. 10/10/10 (October 10th 2010) is going to be a very significant date for our planet. or 2. 10/10/10 will be an unremarkable day.
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