Polls Archive 53 - One to the Power of Infinity

Poll 53 - One squared (1^2) equals one. One to the power of three (1^3) equals one. What does one to the power of infinity equal? Poll ended November 29 2009. By far the most popular answer was "One", with 75.3%. "Infinity" was next, with 10.1%, "None of the Above" with 9.3%, and finally "Zero" with 5.3%.

Interesting! Let's look at the most popular answer first. The logic of this seems pretty simple, doesn't it? One multiplied by itself equals one. No matter how many times you multiply it by itself, the answer is one. Right? Right.

But here's the tricky part. Infinity is not a number. So multiplying one by itself an infinite number of times is different from one multiplied by itself a specific number of times. Does that mean the second-most popular answer is correct? Is the answer infinity?

Here's a link that reveals what mathematicians say about this thorny question. The correct answer, it turns out, is that one to the power of infinity is like dividing zero by zero: in both cases, the answer is "indeterminate".

It's worth noting here, though, that dividing zero by zero is not the same as dividing any other number by zero: the first is "indeterminate", the second is "undefined". What's the difference?

Indeterminate means all answers are possible. Here's a link to another mathforum.org discussion about this idea. It explains that the answer to one to the power of infinity could be one, could be infinity, could be undefined... it's indeterminate. One over zero, on the other hand is undefined only.

What's this all got to do with Imagining the Tenth Dimension? Because the zero we start from and the tenth dimension we end up with are indeterminate. Likewise, "before" and "after" the life of our universe is the same underlying state of indeterminacy.

Indeterminate is not the same as undefined, and that's an important distinction. As we've said recently in entries like You Are the Point, What's Around the Corner, and even last time in Strength of Gravity, Speed of Light, the underlying structures of our reality naturally balance everything out, to a place where all the simultaneous possibilities of that indeterminacy add up together into a big beautiful zero of perfect symmetry, where all answers are possible.

I like to call this underlying state the Omniverse. My followup book to Imagining the Tenth Dimension, O is for Omniverse, plays with these ideas in an unusual way, combining easily digestible poems with some stunning visuals created by Marilyn E. Robertson.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjR69ddBK78

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Poll 54 - Is Time Moving Faster?

Strength of Gravity, Speed of Light

I've talked many times about Gevin Giorbran, who asked me to take over the promotion of his masterful book Everything Forever: Learning to See Timelessness after his death. In a blog entry about time-reversal symmetry called Scrambled Eggs, I showed this graphic from Gevin's book:
This is the beautiful yet simple idea which Gevin proposed - that ultimately the reality we see around us is the result of two kinds of order pushing against one another. From within our entropy-driven arrow of time, we perceive the greatest grouping order to be the highly ordered "big bang" (or whatever phrase you prefer to use to describe the beginning of our universe), and we perceive our universe to be moving away from that beginning towards a highest possible entropy "ending" for our universe. What Gevin made clear is that this "ending" is really just another kind of natural balance, the greatest possible symmetry order state for our universe.

Timelessness
Understanding reality from the perspective of timelessness ties so beautifully into the digital physics "information equals reality" concept I keep returning to. It requires us to jump outside our limited "arrow of time" viewpoint and recognize that those two kinds or order, and all of the states that transition from the one kind of order to another, exist simultaneously.

Like water naturally finding its level, these two kinds of order are a part of nature. Like a scale with one 10 kilogram weight on one side and ten 1 kilogram weights on the other, these two kinds of order are really just two ways of describing the same thing, which is why "before" and "after" the existence of our universe is also really identical when you view this all from the perspective of timelessness.

Dynamic Tension
One thing pushes against another thing, and from that a third thing arises. This is also another way of thinking about constructive interference patterns and the holographic nature of our universe. Such ideas appeal because they speak to the scientific need to find nature's structures and show how the incredible complexity of our observed universe arises from relatively simple underlying structures and patterns. This also speaks to quantum mechanics - the idea that in the underlying quantum structures of reality, there can be one state, an opposite state, and a third in which both states exist simultaneously. Like yin and yang pushing against each other to create a holistic "one", this approach to understanding reality is as ancient as it is leading edge.

Where Does Gravity Come From?
Last time, in Holograms and Quanta, we looked at a new cosmology framework recently proposed by Dr. Erik Verlinde of the University of Amsterdam, which suggests that gravity is a property that naturally arises from our reality, rather than being a force which is transmitted. He likens gravity to the liquidity of water: there is no "liquidon" particle that transmits this quality of liquidity from one water molecule to another. In the same way, this would mean there is no "graviton" particle transmitting gravity throughout our universe - this theoretical particle would never be observed because it doesn't exist (we're running a poll question about that idea here at this blog right now, what do you think?).

In the New Scientist article about Dr. Verlinde's approach, it states that gravity arises from entropy, which might give the impression then that since the highest level of entropy is at the "ending" of our universe, gravity must come from the future! I would say that such a conclusion ignores the underlying timelessness that is the truer picture of our reality. I would like to propose an approach that relates to both Gevin's ideas and Dr. Verlinde's.

Gravity is the natural organizing principle where things tend to be grouped together. Dr. Verlinde's approach says that in a probabilistic universe, there is a higher likelihood of two large objects like a planet and its sun to be attracted to each other rather than repulsed.

What is Time?
"Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once." This well-known phrase, attributed variously to Einstein, John Wheeler, and Woody Allen, makes us wonder a similar thing about space here - if gravity is a natural outcome of the probabilistic nature of our universe, then why isn't the most likely outcome that everything is gradually collapsing to a single point? There must be some other organizing pattern that is keeping everything apart. While dark energy is often used to explain what is causing the accelerated expansion of our universe, I'm sticking to my supposition that eventually both dark matter and dark energy will be shown to be caused by the extra-dimensional effects of gravity, coming from the other universes and the other organizing structures that are "outside" of our spacetime.

So what's the force that pushes against gravity? If gravity is drawing things together, what is pushing things apart, keeping them from collapsing into a single point? With this project, I'm proposing that it's the speed of light. In entries like How to Make a Universe and What's Around the Corner?, we've talked about how, in the multiverse landscape of all possible universes, we could move from one position to another and be moving through different values for these two constants. Selecting a different strength of gravity and a different speed of light would result in some other universe completely different from our own. Many of those would be unstable or short-lived or completely static, but in some the dynamic tension between those two forces would be balanced in a way to allow interesting patterns to emerge in the same way that our universe has.

In entries like You Are the Point and More Slices of Reality I've suggested the frame rate defined by the planck length for our universe could be thought of as being akin to a strobe light - when a strobe flashes at certain rates, it reveals interesting patterns in other repeating structures. Since the speed of light defines the size of the quanta --the granularity-- of our 4D spacetime, that would mean the planck length would be longer if we were in a universe with a slower speed of light, and so on. Perhaps, then, it would be more accurate to say that "the speed of light is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once"? That's what I'm suggesting.

And, just as Dr. Verlinde suggests that gravity arises naturally, I am suggesting the same thing for the speed of light. Moving through the multiverse landscape would be moving through different values for these two fundamental organizing patterns, and everything else about our universe or any other, would arise from that selected position. How "sticky" and how "granular" are the resulting patterns going to be across all the dimensions as defined by a particular position within the multiverse landscape? Will they be balanced in a way that allows interesting things like a universe to emerge?

The Dynamics of Creation
So. One thing pushes against another thing, and out pops a third thing. When that third thing is consciousness, an observer such as you or I, we are back to the conclusion I reached in my book: that ultimately there are three organizing patterns interacting with each other, two of which are just "there" within timelessness, and a third which is actively engaged, through constructive interference, in the process of ongoing creation. This places each and every one of us within our own version of a cosmic dance that creates the beautiful universe that we are each observing right this very instant.

And if you're not enjoying the journey... why not?

Rob

Next: Poll 53 - One to the Power of Infinity

PS - These "three patterns interacting" we're talking about here tie in an interesting way to Karl Popper's Three Worlds. We're going to talk about Popperian Cosmology in a poll question we're looking at in about ten days about whether Imagining the Tenth Dimension can be compared to "lying to children".

Holograms and Quanta

Here we are on the way to the fourth anniversary of the July 2006 launch of this project, currently there've been about five and a half million unique visitors to my website. The original animation, posted at revver.com, is now at almost 1.4 million views and has climbed to within thirty of being that site's most-watched video of all time. That same animation at youtube is also well on its way to a million views, and googling the title of my book in quotes, "Imagining the Tenth Dimension" reveals around 2 million separate references to my project on the net. Wow!

So, with all the chatter that's been out there, we have some naysayers who have proclaimed my project to be a scam, to be completely wrong, even to be dangerous! Some of these attacks have been downright vicious. What prompts such outrage? Part of it is a knee-jerk reaction: "this is not what I learned so it must be wrong". I guess the phrase "a new way of thinking about time and space" doesn't mean anything to those people. Meanwhile, more and more people keep seeing ways that this approach to visualizing the dimensions can be aligned with their own understanding of reality, and that's why the audience for this project continues to grow.

This time around, let's talk about the "person observing the waveform" as seen in the above graphic from my animation, and look at some of the new theories and new discoveries that are gradually moving the mainstream towards my "new way of thinking"

Two important ideas are represented in the above graphic.

1. The idea that the quantum and the macro worlds are in some way completely separate, and that there is a dividing line where we are either in one realm or the other, is starting to fall by the wayside. Demonstrations of quantum entanglement and superposition with increasingly large molecules move us towards understanding that this is a continuum, and research indicating that algal photosynthesis and even migratory birds' navigational abilities are using quantum effects argue against the old idea that our "warm and wet" macro world is completely separate from the quantum one. Advances are also continuing in quantum computing - did you hear that Google is now demonstrating a quantum computing system that can recognize and sort individual images by their content? More and more, visualizing the underlying wave structure of our reality is essential to our understanding of what we are observing.

2. The idea that there is something holographic about our reality, with the fifth dimension holding the many different possible states for our universe, and interference patterns causing one version or another to be observed at any particular instant is also going through a resurgence. In the 1970s, both Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein explored holographic approaches to cosmology. Michael Talbot's popular 1991 book The Holographic Universe created much excitement about the work of physicists David Bohm and Karl Pribram, both of whom had also independently come up with holographic models, but that excitement seemed to be overshadowed as string theory and then M Theory became the dominant research models over the following years. Still, the idea didn't go away, with notable physicists like Juan Maldecena, Leonard Susskind and Gerard 't Hooft suggesting important holographic concepts during the 90s. In this blog we've talked about a number of holographic universe theories that have been advanced in the last few years, and some of these models do incorporate quantum mechanics and string theory. Last week, in More Slices of Reality, we mentioned an exciting new approach from string theorist Erik Verlinde of the University of Amsterdam which explains gravity using a blend of string theory, quantum mechanics, holograms, and the key idea that when you look at the underlying structures of our universe, information equals reality.

In the New Scientist article on Dr. Verlinde's new approach, they sum it up like this:

"Like the fluidity of water, gravity is not ingrained in matter itself. It is an extra physical effect."

To which I would add, if there are parts of the multiverse where gravity is stronger, than we could liken that part of the multiverse landscape to syrup rather than water, and perhaps we could liken low gravity regions to water vapor.

One of the side effects of Dr. Verlinde's approach would be to disprove the need for the theoretical graviton particle. I am currently running a poll question here about that idea: will the graviton ever be observed?

If you read the above article, you will see the suggestion that with this new approach gravity and thermodynamic entropy are related. Since there is more entropy in the future than the past, would that mean that gravity comes from the future? Again and again, I return to Einstein's proposal that the distinction between past, present, and future is ultimately meaningless. I think this article on Dr. Verlinde's approach could have used a good dose of that timelesness in its analysis: eventually, I believe, it will be shown that gravity comes from both the past and the future simultaneously. That will prove to be related to the fifth dimensional probability space that we are navigating within, where the past is as fluid as the future, but some events are more likely than others to occur or to have occurred. Understanding that information equals reality requires us to think about the space where everything that can occur does occur, simultaneously, outside the constraints of our 4D spacetime. This also requires us to understand that any events that are currently impossible for our own version of our universe must reside outside of our fifth dimensional probability space.

Dr. Verlinde's approach has attracted at a lot of initial attention, although he cautions people to understand that this is not a fully developed theory yet, but is offered as a framework that should now be explored. This is something I've always said about my approach to visualizing the dimensions as well: I have offered it to the world as a framework for discussion, and a great many other people around the world have enjoyed playing with these ideas.

Next: more about the underlying ideas to my approach: Strength of Gravity, Speed of Light.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

PS - You should follow me on twitter here.

Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs - February 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 .

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.

1. Monkeys Love Metallica (new)
2. Placebos Becoming More Effective? (new)
3. Dancing on the Timeline (new)
4. Nothing is Real (new)
5. Dark Flow (new)
6. Playing Games in Extra Dimensions (new)
7. I'm You From the Future (new)
8. Noein (new)
9. Crop Circles (new)
10. Greetings from the Grids (new)

And as of February 28th, 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.

1. Jumping Jesus (1)
2. Creativity and the Quantum Universe (2)
3. What's Around the Corner? (4)
4. Augmented Reality (3)
5. An Expanding 4D Sphere (6)
6. Just Six Things: The I Ching (8)
7. The Holographic Universe (5)
8. Slices of Reality (7)
9. Roger Ebert on Quantum Reincarnation (10)
10. Mandelbulbs (18)
11. Poll 44 - The Biocentric Universe Theory (9)
12. Polls Archive 43 - Is the Multiverse Real? (14)
13. Alien Mathematics (12)
14. Urban Garden Magazine (11)
15. Seeing Time, Feeling Colors, Tasting Light (13)
16. When's a Knot Not a Knot? (17)
17. The Quantum Solution to Time's Arrow (15)
18. Modern Shamans (16)
19. The Big Bang is an Illusion (21)
20. Beer and Miracles (23)
21. Poll 46 - Big Bang an Illusion? (24)
22. The Comedian (19)
23. Scott McCloud and the Brothers Winn (20)
24. The Shaman (22)
25. Norway's Reverse Deja Vu (new)*
26. Our Non-Local Universe (25)

Which means that this worthy submission is leaving our top 26 of all time list this month:

26. Astrotometry (26)

* It's worth noting an unusual occurrence this month - "Norway's Reverse Deja Vu" first appeared on our top 26 list in October 2009, but was bumped out last month. For some reason it has picked up steam and made it back onto the list again this month, something that hasn't happened before in the couple of years since I've been keeping track of these lists.

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.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Holograms and Quanta

expandAR - Augmented Reality

For the last month or so we've been keeping things lighter, looking at some extra-dimensional games, a Japanese anime about the multiverse, a humorous video about time travel, and some songs of mine recorded with my friends Roberta Nichol and Bob Evans. Let's finish off this series by talking about a new Augmented Reality visual toy we've just launched here at Talking Dog Studios: "expandAR". You can try it out yourself at expandar.com.


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

Here's what it says on the website:

"expandAR" is a visual toy that uses face tracking and augmented reality for some hilarious and mind-altering effects. Once you've made note of the keyboard combinations for the effects you like you can call them up whenever you like. You can also play with this toy with more than one person - with practice you can play "ExpandAR Pong" and throw the effect from one face to another and back again.

Share your best expandAR photos with us! Just email your pictures to us and we'll put them in our gallery of crazy pictures made with this site. And once a month, the person who sends in our favorite picture will win a prize!

If you watch the above video for a few seconds at the 0:45 mark, you'll see an effect that's reminiscent of the video feedback effects we've used in quite a few of my video blogs. This one in particular reminds me of the effect we used in Randomness and the Missing 96 Per Cent.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBDaZiMF8jg

The subtitle for expandAR says "Expand Your Reality". Since Imagining the Tenth Dimension is all about visualizing the hidden patterns that connect things together, this toy does seem to have some resonances with this project. There are also some effects within expandAR that temporarily alter your perception of the world around you in ways similar to the "waterfall illusion", which we discussed in Illusions and Reality.

But first and foremost, what we're looking at is an open-ended plaything, something to stimulate your creativity and let you explore the possibilities. So have fun with expandAR, and enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Holograms and Quanta

3 Books That Could Change Your Life

You know the old question - if you knew you were going to be stranded on a desert island what three books would you like to have with you? Have you ever tried to narrow it down to just three? I would find that very very hard, there's so many books that I love.

Today I'm reminded of the time a couple of years ago when I came across a LiveJournal entry created by Violet from Liverpool, who, in trying to explain how diverse her interests are said this about the three books she likes to keep around:

normally on my desk i have copy's : # the art of war (Sun Tzu) # the prince (Machiavelli) and # imagining the ten dimensions (Rob Bryanton)

And there's this blogger from Singapore who was celebrating the arrival of their birthday wish list for these three books:

The books are The Art Of Deception by Kevin Mitnick, Imagining The Tenth Dimension by Rob Bryanton and A Brief History Of Time by Stephen Hawking. PURE AWESOMENESS!!

Hey, what can I say? I'm human and it makes me amazed and proud when people say things like this. Now. here's a very short video someone posted to Youtube a couple of days ago that tickled my ego for the same reason. The video is called "3 books that could (possibly) change your life":


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9AnpweIywk

A few weeks ago I went out on Bit Torrent to see how my book is doing there: it appears that almost 100,000 people have downloaded copies of the pdf version of my book now! Isn't that amazing? That would put me on the New York Times Best Seller list if these weren't all free downloads. I trust that there's lots of people out there who are getting some entertainment and having their minds opened to new possibilities as they look at all those downloaded copies. And just a reminder, if you'd like to purchase your own copy of the book in either hard cover or soft cover you can get it at my store, or you can download a pdf from my digital items store.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: expandAR - Augmented Reality

More Slices of Reality

Two weeks ago, in Dancing on the Timeline, we looked at some fanciful ways of imagining what our spacetime reality might look like from "outside" the tiny planck-length window of our arrow of time. And a while back, in Imagining the Omniverse: Addendum we looked at some of the other visualizations that are out there to help us imagine how the interplay between the granular nature of spacetime and extra-dimensional waveforms might result in the reality we see around us. In one of my earliest blog entries, Death?, and again in Magnets and Souls, we looked at moire patterns and a fascinating physics demonstration people like to call the "corn starch monster": two examples of what happens when one pattern and another pattern interact, and the complex, fluid, and sometimes even life-like patterns that can result as a result of constructive interference. Here's a video I came across not long ago which shows a really creative use of constructive interference:


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5xtRdLOopU

There's a series of kids' books out that use the same technique pictured in the above movie, if you watch the following video for Imagining the Omniverse: Addendum from about the 1:15 mark you'll see a demonstration of one of those books.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MptYznkv14

More and more theories of reality are agreeing that our universe is defined by the non-continuous nature of our 4D spacetime. This is what I was talking about in Slices of Reality, here's the video for that entry again:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nheaNclVe2Y

Holograms are created by interference patterns, as we said in The Holographic Universe, and some theories very specifically tell us that our non-continuous 4D spacetime universe is the shadow of a fifth dimensional hologram. Again, it's important to keep in mind that holograms need an interference pattern to come into view, and the 5th dimensional hologram that defines the wave function of probabilistic outcomes for our universe comes into view for us as a result of the one-planck-length-after-another nature of our spacetime. In You are the Point, I recently suggested that this non-continuous nature of our spacetime is akin to a rapidly vibrating strobe light, creating interesting patterns in ways very similar to the interactions we see with the thin black lines in the above "optical illusion" video, or with the seemingly life-like motions created by the rapid oscillations applied to a corn starch solution - they reveal the nature of underlying extra-dimensional structures.

Ernst Chladni was a German physicist and musician, who published a book in 1787 demonstrating his discovery of the nodal patterns that can become visible when fine particles such as sand are sprinkled on a vibrating metal plate. In Chladni's time, he would use a violin bow to cause his "Chladni Plate" to vibrate. In modern times this is usually done with a signal generator hooked to a speaker mounted under the plate, and the interesting figures that emerge are sometimes called "Chladni Patterns":

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wmFAwqQB0g

In 1967, Hans Jenny published a book called Cymatics: the Study of Wave Phenomena which developed Chladni's ideas much further. Keeping in mind that quantum mechanics tells us that the underlying mode for matter is that it is a wave until it's observed, Cymatics has far-reaching applications. The following two videos relate to Cymatics, plus in both of these videos our old friend the corn starch monster makes an appearance once again.


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


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4shodbQMcmM

As I mentioned, it seems the holographic nature of our reality is being talked about more and more these days. New Scientist magazine recently published a story called "The Entropy Force: a New Direction for Gravity" which describes an exciting new approach from string theorist Erik Verlinde of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Dr. Verlinde bases his ideas upon the information equals reality paradigm that I'm always promoting, and invokes the underlying holographic nature of our spacetime as part of a new explanation for gravity.

We'll talk about interference patterns and gravity some more next week in an entry called Holograms and Quanta.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

PS - You should follow me on twitter here.

Next: 3 Books That Could Change Your Life