Friday, November 30, 2007

Music and the Dance of Creativity


A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnanMfhwbdc


A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIMsoZd76a8

As a composer, I create things for a living. Some people say "oh, I'm not creative." I say "everybody's creative!". The above video is of me chatting with one of my favorite musicians, Jack Semple, about some of the ideas that surround this blog entry, and the ideas I explore in my book.

Creativity is the one thing each and every one of us do every moment of our lives: our conversations are unscripted, our actions unchoreographed, it's all one big creative improvisation. And the process of chance, choice, and circumstance that moves our universe from the big bang to the enfolded end is, at its root, a creative process as well.

Here are two things I have been saying with this project: "life is any process that becomes interested in what happens next"; and "that which ceases to change ceases to exist". In a previous blog entry called "How to Make a Universe" we imagined starting from quantum indeterminacy, selecting a starting point and a successive series of quantum frames which become the line of time for a particular universe. Keeping in mind that for our universe, each quantum frame is a particular "now" that is one planck length away from the next, we can see how the patterns in the Information that becomes our Reality can have groupings and interactions, and places that those resulting interference patterns and shapes begin and end. Whether we're talking about vibrating superstrings, memes, or life itself, the moment that something stops changing/vibrating/interacting as we move from one quantum frame to the next, the thing that is represented by those motions ceases to become part of the timeline being created: which brings to mind an eternal dance of creativity, both at the quantum level and out here at the physical level as we navigate on our fourth dimensional line of time through the fifth dimensional probability space available to us, which is curled up down at the planck length for each successive "now".

In his wonderful and enlightening book, "This is Your Brain on Music", Daniel Levitin (as a neuroscientist and former rock musician/engineer/producer) reveals some startling things about the dance of information that is encoded into music. According to Daniel, in the majority of the world's languages, the verb "to sing" also means "to dance" - which shows us how intimately tied together music and the physical expression of emotion are for we human beings. He also reveals that scans of neural activity in people who are listening to, performing, or even composing music reveal that this is not a primarily-right-brain function as many had surmised: in fact, activities involving music appear to trigger activity in almost all parts of the brain that have been studied in Dr. Levitin's research.

As a composer, of course, I admit to a strong bias towards any research that shows how magical and fully engaging music can be, and any time that I am asked to create a piece of music I marvel at music's power to connect emotions across space and time, to entrain people's heartbeat or breath, to cause them to move in a joyful way or become agitated and fearful. All of this ties in to the ideas that we have been talking about here: we are all patterns in time and space, memes and spimes that are interacting to create life as we know it.

We are also part of really big picture memes, which are patterns in the highest dimensions that have caused our universe as it exists to be the one that we're in, and saying this is not necessarily invoking higher spiritual powers: it is a simple statement of fact to say that our universe exists as one out of many possible universes within the multiverse, and the patterns that organized the information that became our reality are part of the creativity, the grouping and symmetry, that is innate within any pattern, be that random or guided.

There's a great Google Tech Talks video featuring Dr. Stuart Hameroff, who says that modern consciousness research has been exploring how every instant that the brain interacts and processes the incoming data from the external world can be thought of as a "frame" of consciousness, and this is being referred to by researchers as a "bing". According to their studies the average human being is operating at somewhere between 30 and 90 "bings" per second. In my field, this seems significant because the lowest note on a piano is at 28 cycles per second, and video in North America historically has been shown at 29.97 frames per second: both numbers being just on the bottom edge of that "bings per second" range. In other words, for human beings any repetitive pattern that is above 30 cycles per second tends to be perceived as being continuous (musical notes and quantum frames of time, for instance), and vibrations or patterns that repeat more slowly than that begin to be perceived as individual events.

In Imagining the Tenth Dimension, we're playing with ways of visualizing reality that encourage us to think about the really big picture of the underlying structures and patterns that contribute to the universe we live in. In terms of memes as being ideas that are connected across time and space, music is one of the most powerful and flexible tools we have at our disposal for helping us to see how it all fits together in the dance of vibrations and patterns that are part of our beautiful and creative universe. This is probably why one of the reviewers for my book described it as a "strangely 'musical' way of imagining superimposed dimensions".

Whether we're talking about quantum physics or creativity, it all seems to keep centering on our role as conscious observers: our "bings per second" rate shows why, for us, everything above about 30 cycles per second begins to blur together into continuous waves, while everything slower than that dividing line is perceived as individual events. In musical terms, sliding through those more and more separated events would take us through rhythms, note durations, phrases, repeating structures within a composition, entire musical pieces, the other times that same musical piece was performed, the other times in history that elements from within the piece were used, and the connections that those elements have to the big-picture memes that give those elements their emotional or physical connection, again and again throughout the history of our world.

To sing is to dance, to be alive is to be creative, and our universe itself is a creative process. There is a sliding scale of vibrations that can exist within our universe --with the fastest wavelength possible being at the planck length and the slowest being the single cycle from the big bang to the end of the universe-- and with our consciousness right at the center point of that set of vibrations.

Now, here is a version of one of the 26 songs attached to this project which explores that idea: "Big Bang to Entropy". A previous blog lists the lyrics: this is a new version of the song performed by Ron Scott. While our consciousness tends to think of vibrations slower than 30 cycles per second as individual events, it's fun (and perhaps mind-blowing) to also think about expanding our perception to think of those much longer repeating patterns as also being notes and songs, that we really could hear if only we slowed down and expanded our conscious perception of the universe.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Friday, November 23, 2007

E8 and the Semantic Web


A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgB3GrcyutU


A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_KsaOu3LBs

Last blog we imagined the "googleverse": ideas that have shapes and patterns across spacetime, and how this is another way of describing the concept of memes.

Some ideas seem to spring from nowhere, spread instantaneously, then eventually be overtaken by other ideas. The way of imagining reality that we've been playing with here says there is a universe of spimes (things that have a shape in spacetime, which is made of energy and matter), memes (ideas and patterns that have a shape in spacetime), and life (the interference pattern that happens when memes and spimes interact).

The imagining-the-tenth-dimension meme, then, has survived and flourished not because it's the scientifically approved Theory of Everything, but because it's a mind-expanding way of holding in your mind what most people would have thought is unimaginable - the underlying fabric of reality. Like other visualization tools, it has its strengths and weaknesses, but it's still a fun way of getting people started thinking about those "really big picture" ideas.

As I've described it, the tenth dimension is equivalent to the unobserved fields of quantum mechanics, and the ninth dimension can contain the ways of beginning to organize those fields that can't be expressed as physical matter: the "really big picture memes" that express a preference for one way of organizing reality over another, but which are too broad or too contradictory to create a physical expression. This means that according to my way of visualizing reality, the 8th dimension would be the highest dimension for a reality to spring from.

http://www.arxiv.org/abs/0711.0770

Now we have Garrett Lisi, who is creating a huge stir in the physics world with a new proposal for a Theory of Everything that uses "E8" - a complex, eight-dimensional pattern with 248 points. Here's a youtube animation demonstrating some of the rotations that can happen within an E8 construct:



As visually appealing as this animation is, its implications are startling: Lisi has demonstrated that there is a way to place the various forces and elementary particles (including their possible quantum spin values)on E8's 248 points. Rotating Lisi's model in various ways reveals the explanation for a variety of interactions, some of which (like the clustering of quarks into families of three) are natural outcomes from this structure. Some points in his model are currently occupied by particles which have been theorized but which have yet to be seen, and there is some hope that the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland may reveal some of those particles when it goes online next year.

Whether this theory proves the existence of higher dimensions or not is open to interpretation - Lisi himself says this geometric pattern, although it is based upon an 8 dimensional construct, could be fully realized within our 4D spacetime without requiring additional dimensions. In an article in this week's New Scientist magazine, string theorist Sabine Hossenfelder (of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics) points out that this could be complimentary to string theory, which she says also uses E8 to describe the Calabi-Yau manifold, the higher-dimensional shape that string theory says our universe is derived from.

As Einstein liked to say, our description of the universe should be "as simple as possible, but no simpler". That's why the idea that our entire 4D universe can be defined from a geometric projection like the one seen in the above video is so appealing. But whether our 4D universe is a lower-dimensional shadow cast by higher-dimensional patterns, or whether those higher dimensions are imaginary because we can't ever see them may really be nothing more than two different ways of thinking about the same idea.

Last blog we also looked at the idea that there is an acceleration happening in our world, as ideas seem to spread faster and faster. Tim Berners-Lee's Semantic Web project is a great example of the tools that are arising now to help keep us all from being buried under a sea of rapidly rising and falling memes, which threaten to become an incomprehensible and overwhelming white noise. Perhaps E8 and the Semantic Web will become useful as ways to organize and rotate through the information of the world?

As simple as E8 may be, I've been trying to visualize something even simpler here. Personally, I have long been a fan of the idea of helix shapes derived from stacked dodecahedrons, and the implied six degrees of separation concept within that idea.
I was surprised to learn from the article I'm referring to in New Scientist magazine, then, that Garrett Lisi has also been using G2 rotations, a hexagon-based system which is a subset of E8. Apparently G2 can be used, for instance, to describe the relationship between quarks, antiquarks, and gluons.

If the Semantic Web eventually allows us to understand the googleverse of ideas as being derived from the interrelationship of Just Six Things, will we have passed the threshold of "simple as possible but not simpler"? It's an interesting exercise: try to come up with the six categories under which you should be able to put everything about your life and everything you know. If the Semantic Web could ultimately be used to connect together our knowledge into something as simple as that, we would really have reached a seemingly impossible goal. But even E8 as an overlay might be a very useful tool in our desire to keep the accelerating meme-space we are swimming through from becoming too much to fathom.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

PS - for a more hands-on experience of where the Semantic Web could take us, sign up for an account at Twine.com.

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Tens, Google and the Expanding Universe

Are we approaching some sort of global shift in consciousness, and could that be triggered from higher dimensions?

2008 will be the tenth anniversary of the surprising announcement that the expansion of our universe is accelerating, an idea that seems counter-intuitive: if our universe started from high energy/high order (the big bang) and is moving towards low energy/low order (maximum entropy), that implies the image of a clockwork toy that is winding down, and that image does not fit with a universe of accelerating expansion.

This month's Scientific American features a great article about "branes" and how the accelerating expansion of the universe may be proof of the existence of higher dimensions (I propose this as a possible explanation in my book as well). The article, by Cliff Burgess and Fernando Quevedo, is called "The Great Cosmic Roller-Coaster Ride": please check it out.

2008 is also the tenth anniversary of Google, the search engine that has changed the way we interact with information more than any other invention in the history of mankind. "Don't be evil" is their unofficial motto, and that's a great one: the power of Google to inform and guide the general public's impression of what ideas are important and what ideas are popular is immense, and the on-going war from get-rich-quick scammers and spammers who try to manipulate Google's search results for their own profit is a huge part of that story.

The Imagining the Tenth Dimension way of visualizing reality can be used to tie all these ideas together. "Information Equals Reality" has been the prime focus for my blog entries in the last few weeks: this basic idea from quantum physics shows us how "everything fits together", and the desire to find a unity within a diverse range of ideas is what this project is all about.

If Information Equals Reality, then absolutely everything about our reality can be thought of as patterns and shapes in the information that is the underlying fabric of quantum indeterminacy. Subatomic particles, fractals, life, consciousness, and our observed universe are all patterns that result from the flip-book of third-dimensional "now"s that we are stringing together from one frame of planck time after another.

In the Imagining the Tenth Dimension animation, sound is an important part of the information being conveyed: for instance, no matter what dimension we are exploring there is the arrow sound effect representing a particular point, a scrape indicating lines being constructed from joining one point to another, and the card-riffling sound effect to show that anything we think of as a continuous line is actually being constructed one point at a time, if we can only look close enough.

Burgess and Quevedo's article explains how our universe might be the result of the interactions of a three-dimensional brane with a seven-dimensional brane, with the ends of certain superstrings constrained by branes they are sliding around within. To use my flipbook analogy, then, we can see how the illusion of continuous reality that we are experiencing is actually a series of 3D states for our 3D universe interacting with a 3D brane, and each observed state is one planck length away from the next: each observed state can be thought of as a page in a gigantic cosmic flipbook. The flipbook from the big bang to "now" appears to be one specific set of flipbook pages (which we think of as the 4D line of time), but each "next available now" page that could possibly be selected for our flipbook comes from a fifth dimensional probability space, and the fifth dimension is where Kaluza proved our reality is defined. Every parallel universe that could have resulted from our big bang, whether it is observed or not, exists as a potential "flipbook" in the sixth dimension, and all of those possible states are locked together by the seventh-dimensional brane our universe is also interacting with.

The idea I advance of our universe's basic physical laws being a result of our specific "location" in the multiverse (as a "point" in the seventh dimension, or as a result of our interaction with a 7D brane), then, can be tied into this concept. As usual, though, I will take pains here to caution readers that I am not claiming my way of visualizing the dimensions is the explanation for string theory, any more than it is the explanation of Kabbalah, zero-point field theory, Japanese anime and videogame plots, metaphysics, or any of the other diverse range of belief systems which fans of the tenth dimension project keep pointing me towards as having interesting resonances with my way of visualizing reality.

From moment to moment, day to day, Google has been tracking the information that makes up our reality for almost ten years. Ideas that can be tracked across time and space are known as "memes", and physical objects that can be tracked across time and space are known as "spimes": which means that the flipbook of "now"s we have imagined from the big bang to today can be thought of as a spime that represents the story of our current universe from its inception... and that idea is a very powerful meme.

I've always marveled at the audacity of Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" button: the idea that out of all the information in the world, Google might be able to show you the very best link of all still seems like mysterious magic to me, and I admit to never wanting to use that button because I like to have choices. Still, the Google toolbar's Suggestions window is a great example of the accelerating information space we live in now: try typing in just the letters of the alphabet one after another into that window, and read the top ten suggestions (there's that number again!) that come up for each. This gives you a snapshot in time of what is important, what is talked about, what is the dominant set of memes within our culture right now. Both memes and spimes are multi-dimensional shapes, each with a beginning and an ending someplace out there in the timeless multiverse.

The feeling that we live in times that are accelerating towards something larger, as a result of the rapidly accelerating meme-space we live in, might be connected to the same higher-dimensional effects that are causing our universe to accelerate its expansion as well: I believe both are eventually going to be shown to be the result and the proof of higher dimensions in the information that is creating our reality.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Is God in the Seventh Dimension?

The tenth dimension site is averaging two million hits a month now. The meme that was set in motion since this project was launched in the summer of 2006 keeps growing, as people continue to view the animation, read the book, and discuss these ideas around the world.

By far the most-viewed and most-discussed question at the tenth dimension forum has been this: "Is God in the Tenth Dimension"? Other topics rise and fall in popularity from week to week (as memes often do), but this deep question is the one that people keep coming back to with their own unique views on the matter. I have put my own two bits in from time to time but the discussions there have been passionate and widely varied, and that is all I am interested in doing here: promoting the discussion of ideas.

Regular visitors to this blog or the forum will know that this is the idea I advance in my book: if we are imagining that our universe comes from an indeterminate quantum state, and that (as quantum physicists say) "information equals reality", then everything is just patterns in that information. What's wrong with giving those patterns a name? But the corollary to that idea has to be to accept that calling what we're thinking about "God" makes some people uncomfortable. Giving the exact same thing a name that they are comfortable with doesn't change what we're talking about, it just changes the name. Since I'm such a fan of Richard Dawkins, I say this knowing full well that what I am proposing here flies directly in the face of his book "The God Delusion": sorry about that, Dr. Dawkins.

Ultimately, asking if God is specifically in the Tenth Dimension is not the point of these discussions: what we're really talking about is whether there is a way for the ideas of spirituality and science to co-exist, each acknowledging that ultimately they are talking about the same thing. But this time, let's work through the framework for discussion that I've advanced for how to visualize the dimensions and see where "God" works as a name for the pattern that created our universe.

The tenth dimension as I have portrayed it is the timeless void of quantum fields, the unobserved whole that is "outside the system", and therefore unimaginable to us from within the system. Seems like a good place for an omnipotent being, and in the sense that God can be all things to all people, and that God can be thought of as the summation of everything that is and ever shall be, this is an obvious place to start. The only fly in the ointment here, I think, is that any attempt to observe any aspect of the tenth dimension spills us into the reality of the dimensions below. So, if we leave God up in the tenth dimension exclusively, I would say we're imagining a God who never actually does anything... as I've said before, imagining the "all-vibrations-simultaneously/white light" of the tenth dimension by itself is really the most boring part of the discussion.

Another discussion that has happened recently at the forum is whether the tenth dimension as I've portrayed it should be called a dimension at all, since what I'm really saying is that the tenth dimension can be thought of as the entirety of the ninth dimension, but viewed as a single point of indeterminate size. A visitor named "Alyssa" argued that this is deceptive, and other visitors to the forum then suggested that she think of dimensions 1 through 9 as each being an additional layer of an onion; to which I added the Zen-like idea that we could think then of the ninth dimension as being what happens when you look at the entire onion, and the tenth as being what happens when you don't look at the onion. Clearly, imagining something that is unobservable is tricky whether you're talking about the indeterminate fields of quantum mechanics, or whether you're talking about God. But if we're portraying a God who causes absolutely everything to happen, then the ninth dimension would certainly be a place for Him/Her to be.

My way of visualizing the dimensions suggests that the ninth, eighth, and seventh dimensions show us how to imagine the big-picture memes that organize the information that eventually becomes reality. From the ninth down to the seventh, the ways of expressing energy/mass are gradually narrowed down, until we arrive at our unique universe as an unwavering point in the seventh dimension. In my previous blog entry ("How to Make a Universe") I touched on one of the ideas from my book: if the multiverse contains 10 to the power of 500 other universes (a possibility inferred from string theory), some of those other universes would be much less stable than our own, instantly exploding into nothingness or collapsing back in upon themselves. So here's another possible location for God: we might be imagining that out of all the possible universes, God chose to create the one we're in because He/She prefers creativity over destruction, life over no life, order over disorder, and so on. Are those phrases also big-picture memes, ways of organizing the information that becomes our reality? Sure. But the question then becomes, if those other less productive universes do really exist out there within the multiverse, did our God create them? Or are there other Gods out there who created those other universes, because of their own preference for a different kind of universe than the one we live in? A pantheon of Gods both benevolent and malevolent spring to mind then, a distasteful idea to some, an appealing idea to others.

What about the fifth dimension? If our universe of spacetime is being constructed one frame at a time, by quanta that are each one planck length away from the next, then I have proposed that the probability space of the "next available branches" is contained within the fifth rather than the fourth dimension. This means that as we are constructing what feels like a fourth dimensional line of time, we are actually twisting and turning in the fifth dimension, which gives us a way to imagine how the fifth dimension and above could appear to be curled up down at the planck length for us, and yet those higher dimensions could also contain the astonishingly large concept of the multiverse-filled-with-universes which we have come to imagine.

If everything from the beginning of time within our specific universe is the result of an observation of the quantum wave function, then the fifth dimension looks like a great location to place God, and to see how we are all connected together though the consensual reality that we share, each as our own quantum observer. In other words, the combined quantum observer effect that creates our universe right from the Big Bang to "now" could be God. As I say in my book:


The reader may notice here that it would be very easy to substitute “God” or “The Creator” in place of “the observer” in the above paragraphs. In fact, if the reader is comfortable with the concept of each of us being an expression of God, “created in His/Her image”, each with a holy spark within, then the two viewpoints are quite compatible. On the other hand though, the image of a God who is separate from, standing in judgement of, and meting out punishment to us all is much less compatible. What we are describing here is a reality where each of us is creating an expression of a specific aspect inferred within the “white noise” of the tenth dimension through our individual roles as quantum observers. If the reader finds it easier to accept the phrase “I am an aspect of God” than they do the previous sentence, then they should feel free to use that as their jumping off point instead. As we discussed before, the tenth dimension as we are conceptualizing it here is really the boring part of our discussion, because it simultaneously contains all possibilities. If we choose to imagine a Creator-God who is manifesting Himself/Herself through each one of us, we are imagining an observer who is cutting cross-sections out of the tenth dimension to examine the much more interesting and highly detailed subsets of reality which are contained within the dimensions below.


People who say that God works in mysterious ways, and that what feels like bad luck may actually be part of God's master plan, would be fine with leaving God in the fifth dimension. Personally, here's where I stand with that idea: try as I might, I can't imagine a God who has deliberately created a world that allows evil and inequity to exist as part of His/Her plan. Is there a force for destruction and selfishness and chaos that helps to make our world less beautiful than it could be? For any specific universe, I have placed all the timelines that could potentially have existed (but some of which are now unavailable because of what has come before or what comes after) out in the sixth dimension, and if we are going to imagine that there are forces doing battle to create the world we live in, then that battle must be raging in the sixth dimension. The good guys don't always win, and bad luck happens to the best of us: which would mean the chaos and deliberately chosen paths that cause one part of our world to prosper while so many others suffer is part of the temptations and bad choices that each of us have to acknowledge exist out there in the sixth dimension for our specific universe.

Which leads me back to the seventh dimension. If God is the pattern that created the world and the universe we live in, I think that's the best place to find Him/Her. But I can see arguments for placing God in other dimensions, including the tenth, or even across all dimensions, depending on your own point of view.

I'm attaching two videos that are relevant to this discussion, both of which are in previous blogs which include their lyrics. One is called "The Unseen Eye": if our reality is created by a quantum observer, then there is an Unseen Eye which began collapsing the wave function right from the Big Bang. The other is "What Was Done Today": if the fifth dimensional probability space we are navigating through has been defined by what has already come before, then there are possible futures we can no longer get to because of chance and circumstance, and deliberate choices that have already been made.



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK29fTLXEf0



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ikj7ozGMQM

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Monday, November 12, 2007

How to Make a Universe


A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqsmKfh4loY


A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCLv9ncGG7U

We start with the unobserved quantum wave function: this is where (as quantum physicists say) information and reality are equivalent. Although quantum physics has no specific requirement for there to be ten spatial dimensions in order for us to imagine this unobserved state, what we are talking about here is the multiverse (or even "the omniverse"): the timeless place where the potential for all possible and impossible universes exists simultaneously.

Now we make our first observation. Quantum computing expert Seth Lloyd, in his book Programming the Universe, suggests that we can think of the big bang as the very first yes/no, and that is what we are thinking about here. Out of all potential expressions of reality contained within the timeless multiverse, we place the very first point, which begins the creation of a universe.

Physicists tell us the only force that exists across all dimensions is gravity. So one of the things that we are likely to have already done with that very first yes/no point of entry is to choose a value (or at least define a range of values) for what gravity is going to be in the universe we are planning to make.

Let's call that first point the beginning of time. With our first point, we are narrowing down what the force of gravity can be for the universe we want to create. But before we can define a second point, we need to choose a value for the speed of light.

No matter what dimension we are thinking about, or how many dimensions we are imagining, "time" is the way that we change from one state to the next. But time is not a continuous line, it's actually a series of points, one after the other. For our own universe, those points are each one planck length away from the next: so, much the same as a movie is made up of frames that are being shown at a certain number of frames per second, we know that our universe is also being observed at a certain number of frames per second, and in quantum physics those frames are called quanta. The length of time between those frames is entwined with the specific speed of light for our universe, and the idea that our universe is being created one frame at a time at the speed of light gives us a way to explain why it's impossible to exceed the speed of light within our universe. This also explains why it's impossible to observe anything smaller than the planck length, which is about 1.6 times 10 to the minus thirty-five metres: attempting to do so puts us back to where we started, between those frames of time and back into indeterminacy and the timeless multiverse landscape.

Back in 1919, Kaluza sent a startling proof to Einstein, stating that the field equations for gravity and light can be resolved if they are calculated in the fifth dimension. Einstein ruminated on this idea for two years, then gave it his full endorsement. Here's what this tells us about our own universe then: it is being defined at the fifth dimension by the specific values it has for the strength of gravity and the speed of light.

What if we wanted to create some other universe that had a different value for gravity and the speed of light? We would back all the way out to the indeterminate quantum field, choose a different point of entry, and choose a different frame rate for some other universe to be observed. We could even try making universes that had gradually changing, or oscillating values for gravity and the speed of light, although most of those universes would not be nearly as stable as the one we live in.

There could be other values that are also being determined by our point of entry, but just how many of the finely tuned constants that create any specific universe and its specific distribution of matter are a result of nothing more than the push and pull between the strength of gravity and the speed of light, and how many of those other constants are not related to these two basic values is a debate better left to the experts. Still, this leads us to an important question: how did we get so lucky as to be in a universe specifically tuned to create life as we know it? String theory is sometimes criticized because it can be used to explain not just the universe we live in, but ten to the power of 500 other universes as well, each with their own collection of particles and forces. But if all those possible universes we're imagining really do exist out there in the multiverse, just as real as the one we're living in, then there are no doubt organized collections of information or expressions of matter in some of those other universes that are asking themselves the very same questions. In any particular universe, we can imagine "life" as being the stuff that becomes interested in "what happens next" as their universe is moving along its own line of time, being created one quantum frame after another: and that leaves us with a very open definition of life that works well for our own universe, but allows us to imagine a great many other things that also could be called life in those other universes.

In September 2007, a team of scientists at Oxford University, under the leadership of physicist David Deutsch, published a proof equating the bush-like branching structure of possible quantum states with the branching choices that each of us within our own physical universe are making as we move through time. This means that whether we realize it or not, at both the quantum level of frames that are one planck length away from each other, and out here in our physical reality, the actions of chance, choice, and circumstance are moving us down what we think of as a fourth dimensional line of time. But curled up down at the planck length, we are actually twisting and turning through the available paths that the Deutsch team have proved really do exist. Imagining that there are parallel universes where each of us make decisions that are different from the ones we make in this one is the outcome of that proof that some physicists are simply not comfortable with, but it is an implication that I have been promoting since I first came up with this way of imagining the dimensions twenty years ago.

In my book Imagining the Tenth Dimension, I have suggested a way to blend the concepts of the multiverse, quantum indeterminacy, Kaluza's idea that we are in the fifth dimension, and the M-theory idea that our reality comes from ten spatial dimensions plus one of time. Mainstream physics tends to keep these ideas separate from each other, so my idea of mashing them up into one big concept is not what you would be taught in a university physics class. That's why I call my book "Imagining" the Tenth Dimension, subtitle it "a new way of thinking" about time and space, and say in promotion for the book that it is "not about mainstream physics".

What I do say about my new way of thinking though, is that it's "a mind-expanding journey that could change the way you view this incredible universe in which we live". And a great many people around the world seem to agree: the tenth dimension website, launched in July 2006, continues to grow in popularity, and at the end of 2007 is now averaging 2 million hits a month.


"Let there be light!": it's fun to think about all of the possible universes that started from a point in the void, then defined a value for the speed of light and that's what caused those universes to spring into existence. While it's true that the echoes of these ideas in ancient philosophy and spirituality may be coincidence, I believe this is showing us that human beings have intuitively believed basic truths about the nature of reality long before modern science was able to demonstrate their inner workings. This is why my book deals with so many more "out there" topics that most scientists are not comfortable with, but the general public are more willing to embrace: this includes ideas about consciousness and spirit, memes and creativity, conspiracies and the end of the world, and so on. Since I'm a composer, not a physicist, I also have 26 songs about the nature of reality attached to the project, most of which are now available as videos on youtube and revver.com .

By the time you have this way of imagining the dimensions in mind, you have a way to see how everything fits together within the timeless multiverse. People who have worked through this set of ideas most commonly call it "mind blowing", which is flattering. For those purists who dislike any blending of disciplines outside your own area of interest, I appreciate your criticism but that is not what we are pursuing here... and despite the best efforts of those critics, my tenth dimension meme that was set in motion in the summer of 2006 is continuing to grow as a result of the increasingly connected world that we live in.

No matter what universe we imagine ourselves making, it has the potential to be expressed in unique ways from the tenth dimension down to the first, with a "point" moving through it that we can think of as time, or the quantum observer. Let's work through the hierarchy of dimensions as I've portrayed them, this time moving from the "top" down:

10. The timeless multiverse/quantum indeterminacy/the unobserved quantum "information" that is potentially energy and mass
9. Big-picture memes, ways of organizing/grouping/subdividing the "information", including those which cannot be expressed as physical realities
8. Ways of expressing mass/energy that encompass multiple fine structure constants
7. Ways of expressing mass/energy that encompass only one sliding variable (the seventh dimension as a line), or ways of expressing mass/energy where all fine structure constants are locked in (which would be the seventh dimension as a point, with our universe being one example). When we say that our universe is "locked in" at the seventh dimension then (one of the ideas that are unique to this way of imagining the dimensions), we are also saying that it is locked in from the seventh dimension all the way up to the tenth. The fact that string theory says our universe is created by the interaction of a seven dimensional brane interacting with a three dimensional brane within a Calabi-Yau manifold is probably just a coincidence, but an entertaining sidebar to this discussion.
6. All possible timelines for the universe we have created, including ones that may never actually be observed but which remain as potential.
5. All branching timelines both forward and backward from the particular point that we call "now". Thinking back to how we created our universe, the branches from the very first "point", then, would be the same in both the fifth and sixth dimension, but for every other quantum frame the fifth dimension would not be able to include every possible expression contained within the sixth because of the limitations introduced by choices that had already occurred.
4. One very specific set of frames, from the big bang to "now", or in the biggest picture of all, one very specific timeline out of all of the possible timelines from the beginning to the end of the universe we created.
3. A specific expression of the 3D space that is a quantum frame as per our description above.
2. A specific expression of one of the 2D planes that can be contained within the quantum frame we're examining.
1. A specific expression of one of the 1D lines that can be contained within the quantum frame we're examining.
0. Not a dimension, but a point of indeterminate size, which could be infinitely small as in geometry, or could be infinitely large, encompassing in the most extreme case all of the dimensions. Some people like to think of the "0" as time, some like to call it the quantum observer, some people like to think of it as being nothing more than the way that you move to a specific subset of the dimensions below the tenth. All of these, I believe, are different ways of expressing the same idea.

Each additional dimension adds a degree of freedom, and each additional dimension is only a subset of the remaining ones above it. So a 1D line can be drawn within any dimension, a 2D plane can be a slice out of the other dimensions but can't exist within the first, a 3D space can be part of the probability space of the 4D line of time and above but can't be expressed in the first and second, and so on. The logical hierarchy of what is being imagined here is what keeps people wanting to explore these ideas, and for that I am very grateful.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Thursday, November 8, 2007

Welcome to the Fifth Dimension

Our poll question closing today was as follows:

"Was Kaluza right? Is our physical reality really being defined at the fifth rather than the fourth dimension?"

I'm pleased that a significant majority (75%!) of visitors to this blog have agreed with me - we're actually in the fifth dimension, not the fourth. In last week's blog entry, "Information Equals Reality" I talked about Kaluza's proposal to Einstein back in 1919 that our reality is created within the fifth rather than the fourth dimension. Einstein considered this idea for two years, then gave it his full endorsement. Here is how I believe my way of visualizing the dimensions fits in with that.

Physicists and philosophers keep saying the same thing: "time is an illusion". For me, this is easily translated to the world of quantum mechanics, because we have to realize that the illusion of continuous reality we experience as "time" is actually a series of frames, or quanta: a discrete series of "now"s being created one planck length away from the next.

This is where we get to David Deutsch and his team at Oxford, who have offered a proof that each next "now" is chosen from a bush-like branching structure of multiple choices that are probabilistic, and that this is equally true whether we are looking at the quantum world, or our physical reality - all of those choices exist within the quantum fields of the multiverse.

So: I have proposed, and many visitors to this blog appear to agree with me, that Kaluza was right about the fifth dimension. The leap of logic that I then take is that Deutsch's probabilistic bush-like branching structure actually is in the fifth dimension... and this is where critics of my book and my animation say that I stop making sense. Even though time feels like a one-dimensional one-way arrow, they say, there is no reason to propose that higher dimensions are needed to allow for quantum indeterminacy or free will. But what about Kaluza and Einstein's agreement on our reality coming from the fifth dimension then?

If our probabilistic "next available choices" are always one planck length away, and the probabilistic nature of those branches means that there are always many available choices, but only one is actually observed, then this is how I fit the string theory idea of the higher dimensions being curled up on themselves down at the planck length into my way of imagining the dimensions. This is also how we get to the idea that we are twisting and turning in the fifth dimension, choosing one "now" after the next while we feel ourselves to be experiencing a "one-way-arrow" line of time in the fourth dimension. As a way of visualizing, this can be equated with the idea of a flatlander travelling on a mobius strip: down at the planck length, our fourth-dimensional line is twisting and turning as we make our choices from the fifth dimension, but we are unaware of that motion down here in the dimensions below.


Physicists tell us that gravity is the only force that exerts itself across the higher dimensions. Because I'm willing to acknowledge the possibility of things like intuition, prescience, new ideas that suddenly sweep the world, conscience, instinct, voices of the ancestors (and so on), this seems to imply that I believe gravity is not the only way that our current reality can be affected by other dimensions... but that is where memes come in, and I have talked about memes a lot in my book, in this blog, and at the tenthdimension forum.

Still, gravity when combined with memes does offer a lot of possibilities, particularly if you are willing to think about memes as simply being ways of organizing the Information that is our Reality. In the big picture of timelessness, gravity is the force that draws us towards "not change" as opposed to "change" - for instance, my idea that all of the possible timelines for our own universe occupy a specific position in the multiverse implies that they would have their own cumulative "gravity" effect within the higher dimensions to keep our physical reality locked in down here in the dimensions below... hence, the reason why no amount of choice, chance, circumstance or quantum observation moves us out of the specific different-initial-conditions universe we are a part of.

My song Change and Renewal takes the idea of higher dimensional meme-shapes that could be making themselves felt down here in spacetime and plays with that idea in new and creative ways that, as usual, are far outside the realm of mainstream physics, but fun to think about nonetheless.



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blVNWkbPlII

CHANGE AND RENEWAL
words and music (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

Water of life, flow through me
Water of life, renew me
Water of life, surround me
Water of life, astound me


Every minute of every day
I keep changing, I keep changing
Nothing ever stays the same
All replacing, rearranging
Every cell that’s in me now
Was not the same when I was born
In an endless constant flow
Renewing when they’re old and worn

Every minute of every day
We are water, we are water
Swimming in an endless sea
Mothers, fathers, sons and daughters
Molecules of H-2-O
That move around and move between
In an endless constant flow
Connecting us in ways unseen

Change and renewal
Incarnations
Change and renewal
Inspiration


Every minute of every day
All around us, all around us
There’s a sea of new ideas
Waiting out there to astound us
Innovation coinciding
Simultaneous discovery
Flowing out there, waiting for us
Just as easy as can be

Change and renewal
Innovation
Change and renewal
Inspiration


Every minute of every day
Pay attention, pay attention
Open up to what’s around you
Endless paths to new invention
When you hit a roadblock
It’s as easy as can be
You can drink a glass of water
Find a new idea

Change and renewal
Imagination
Change and renewal
Inspiration
Change and renewal


Water of life, flow through me
Water of life, renew me
Water of life, inspire me
Water of life, rewire me
Water of life, surround me
Water of life, astound me


Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Vibrations and Energy

Last blog I explored one of the key ideas behind quantum physics: "Information Equals Reality". As I often do, I started with that basic hard science fact and then ran with it far past the edges of where most mainstream scientists would be comfortable, taking it through the ideas of Richard Dawkins and on out into the metaphysical fringe. Why do I keep doing that? Why do I suggest that there should ever be any links between reality as depicted by mainstream science and, for instance, ancient philosophy? Well, as I often say, I'm not a physicist and I'm not pretending to be one: as long as fans of the tenth dimension project understand that we're exploring ideas that are beyond the periphery of the mainstream, just for the joy of playing with ideas, then speaking personally I see nothing wrong with getting creative.

Persons who criticize this project because it's not about what is currently being taught in mainstream physics, then, are totally missing the point. As it says on the back of my book, this is "a mind-expanding exercise that could change the way you view this incredible universe in which we live". You might as well walk into your favorite bookstore and level the same criticism at almost every book in the place - "these books are not about mainstream physics, they don't claim to be about mainstream physics, so I'm going to criticize them because they're not about mainstream physics!" - what a strange line of reasoning to pursue.

Now, here's a link to a serious physics blog called "The Reference Frame", which showed its readers my introductory animation last week. The blog is hosted by Luboš Motl from the Czech Republic, and he describes his blog this way: "The most important events in our and your superstringy Universe as seen from a conservative physicist's viewpoint".

I'm grateful to Luboš for giving his serious physics readers a chance to see and comment on my fanciful way of imagining the dimensions, and for his generosity in calling it a "fun clip". The comments were plentiful, some from those who appreciated my intentions, but a number were critical. Let me quote from the very first comment, posted by "Bee":

I've seen that before... Well, I guess it depicts problems one runs into with higher dimensional mind maps :) Either way, if I recall the ads on the website correctly it was a pseudo-scientific explanation of 'how you can influence your future and be happy ever after', obviously only if you buy this book, or purchase this CD or whatever. This is in a certain sense the saddest outcome of scientific research I can imagine. Being abused to sell crap.


Here is a note I posted there, not specifically in response to Bee's comment above, but in recognition that she set the tone for those comments that were the most negatively disposed:

Hi, I'm the guy who created this video. I have always been careful to say that my video is not the accepted explanation for string theory (as per the text at the end of the animation). Also, if you visit the tenth dimension website you will easily find a "Preamble" and a "Forum" link where I immediately make it clear what the intent of this project is: a discussion of a new set of ideas, some of which are connected to mainstream physics and some of which are connected to philosophy, and many of which attempt to straddle both worlds.
My book is called "Imagining" the Tenth Dimension, subtitled "A New Way of Thinking" About Time and Space, and the description at online bookstores says "not about mainstream physics": I really don't know how I could make this more clear.
Am I one of those crazy people who think that there is ultimately going to be an explanation for the universe that encompasses the multiverse, string theory, quantum mechanics, memes, ancient philosophy, and the "observer" role our consciousness plays in all this? Yup, that's me. But I'm not a physicist, I'm a composer, and this project for me started as a set of 26 songs I had written about my intuitions as to how this all fits together. The booklet I started to write to accompany the CD became the popular book my website is promoting.
I welcome all the comments above from people who have criticisms of my ideas and the way I present them: because that's what I'm interested in, the discussion of ideas. My project does seem to have struck some sort of chord with people, as the tenth dimension website continues to attract an average of over 1.7 million hits per month...

Meanwhile, I have my own hopes that the many science-curious kids and teens out there who watch my video and find it fascinating will find they like thinking about those "really big picture" ideas, and follow the links I regularly provide to books by the mainstream experts from cosmology and quantum mechanics on these topics.


I do find Bee's comment about this being "a pseudo-scientific explanation of 'how you can influence your future and be happy ever after'" to be interesting: pseudo-scientific is fair enough, since I'm not a scientist and I'm presenting new ideas, but there's actually very little of what she calls "happy ever after" talk in this blog, in my book, or on the tenth dimension website. Nonetheless, I find it hard to imagine how anyone can argue with simple statements like "attitude affects outcome". Is it really pseudo-scientific to say that a negative/depressed mindset causes people to choose less favorable paths for themselves, and a positive outlook causes people to make more optimistic choices? What is so dangerous about expressing simple and self-evident ideas like these? Still... if, as David Deutsch's team at Oxford have now proven, the branching possibilities of choice, chance, and circumstance can be equated with the wave functions of quantum mechanics, then all I am suggesting here is that for each of us our choices are selected from the available probability space, which I believe is an obvious outcome of the Deutsch team's proof.

Last blog I talked about the energy/matter dichotomy, and how the quantum mechanics idea of "Information Equals Reality" allows us to see not just how great art and music can be plugged into this way of imagining, but also how metaphysical ideas like auras and vibrations could be seen as patterns within the Information that is ultimately our reality. My song "Positive Vibes" takes that pseudo-scientific hippy-dippy idea and frames it within the context of my way of imagining the dimensions.




A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZp1KYboC3Q

POSITIVE VIBES
words and music (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

Positive vibes, I will be sending
Positive vibes your way
Sure can’t hurt, and it just might help
To send you positive vibes - every day

And isn’t it a mystery
How it all goes together
Looking back through history
Have you ever wondered whether
When a country falls
Or somebody succeeds
What was causin it all
Was it just their deeds?
Or was there something more in behind?

Positive vibes, I will be sending
Positive vibes your way
Sure can’t hurt, and it just might help
To send you positive vibes - every day

Not tryin to get all mystical
But I’ve always had a suspicion
That there’s more than just the physical
Hidden in the composition
Of the things we do
What we think and feel
I believe it’s true
I believe it’s real
That we can help to make things all right

With positive vibes, I will be sending
Positive vibes your way
Sure can’t hurt, and it just might help
To send you positive vibes - every day

There are things that we can never know
There are places we can never go
There are things we have to just believe
And this is what works for me:

Positive vibes, I will be sending
Positive vibes your way
Sure can’t hurt, and it just might help
To send you positive vibes - every day


Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Friday, November 2, 2007

Information Equals Reality


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-bAAZRp82M

How does music (or any other artform) communicate universal ideas?

Here are quotes from two quantum physics experts who would probably be surprised to hear me insist that they are providing the answer to that question.


"...quantum physics requires us to abandon the distinction between information and reality."
- Anton Zeilinger, professor of physics at the University of Vienna, from the book "What We Believe But Cannot Prove"


"The conventional history of the universe pays great attention to energy: How much is there? Where is it? What is it doing? By contrast, in the story of the universe told in this book, the primary actor in the physical history of the universe is information. Ultimately, information and energy play complimentary roles in the universe: Energy makes physical systems do things. Information tells them what to do."
- MIT Professor and quantum computing expert Seth Lloyd, from his book "Programming the Universe".


I'm going to deal with my question about artforms and how this all ties in to my way of imagining the dimensions, but first I'd like to work through some steps... so please bear with me here.

One of the commonly-leveled objections against any theories requiring there to be additional dimensions past spacetime is that those dimensions are not observable, and so there is no way to verify any predictions made by such theories: this is one of the central themes of Lee Smolin's book "The Trouble With Physics".

Quantum mechanics, then, is the golden child of science from the past one hundred years - because it makes predictions and paints a picture of reality which, although often portrayed as unimaginably strange, has stood the test of time: quantum effects are observable and verifiable, and all without the need to theorize the existence of additional dimensions.

But this is where it starts for me: because I've been proposing that quantum mechanics shows us that we are not actually on a limited one-dimensional line of time. Instead, observable phenomena such as quantum interference patterns, and demonstrations of entanglement of widely separated particles shows us that we are actually in a fifth dimensional probability space, where our fourth-dimensional reality twists, turns, and folds without us being aware of it, just as the two-dimensional Flatlander on the mobius strip is unaware of his motions in the higher dimensions.

The question of whether our reality is created in the fifth dimension or the fourth has been the subject of this week's poll here at the tenth dimension blog. What do you think? Way back in 1919, Kaluza proposed this idea to Einstein - that the field equations for gravity and light could be united if they were calculated in the fifth dimension. Einstein ruminated on Kaluza's radical idea for two years, and then gave it his full endorsement. If Einstein believed our reality originates in the fifth dimension, why is this not common knowledge for the general public?

With "E=mc squared", Einstein firmly established in our minds the equivalence between energy and matter, and how our universe is just an interplay between those two states. Now, experts like Anton Zeilinger and Seth Lloyd are telling us we can take a step even further back: our reality is just an expression of the information encoded within the underlying fabric of quantum fields.

Okay, information equals reality, and we're in the fifth dimension rather than the fourth. If we can accept those ideas, then where does that lead us?

I'm proposing that this is the key to understanding how our currently observed reality is a pattern within the multiverse of all possible universes. If there is a data set out there that could represent every possible timeline for our universe and for all other possible universes, then each of us is navigating through that data set. And with the recently published proof from David Deutsch's team at Oxford, we have a way to see how that is just as true at the quantum level as it is for us at the physical level, as each of us navigates through the available paths of our fifth-dimensional data set though choice, chance, and the actions of others.

But I take all this even further: if our reality is information, then like any other data set there are many ways of analyzing that data. Richard Dawkins showed us how we can think of our genes as a "river out of Eden": a continuous pattern of information conveyed from generation to generation back to the primordial beginning of life. He also introduced us to the concept of memes: ideas that are transmitted across time and space. Imagining memes within the information vs. reality paradigm is an important part of the ideas I play with in my book: and the concept of memes is how we get to the question of how music and art communicate emotion.

Memes connect emotions and ideas across time and space: so the song you loved when you were 18 will still have an emotional connection for you when you're 40. But memes are not just learned, they are deeper than that, because they are part of our shared experience as human beings. This is how we communicate to each other through body language: a joyful physical presence or a depressed stance are part of the tools that any actor or dancer uses to express emotion, and these are memes that work across time and space. But we're not just talking about human beings here: this is how we can recognize emotions in the vocalizations of other living creatures - the rising question of a cat asking for food, the pained yelp of a dog who has been kicked, the sorrowful keening of a mother bear who has lost her child, are part of the same vocabulary of memes that allow us to recognize whether a piece of music is happy or sad, energetic or peaceful. The connection between blues phrasing, in terms of melodic shape and timing, to the speech of someone expressing the same emotions, is an easily recognized example of how both are part of the same meme-set. And the fact that the vocalizations of other non-mammal creatures are much harder for us to recognize the emotion within (is that frog's croak happy or sad? I'm not sure) shows us how near or far we are from other creatures not just with our shared genes, but with our shared memes as well.

We can use that same vocabulary to move ourselves to different trajectories within our probability space. Try this one: imagine a warm ball of energy starting at the base of your spine, gradually working its way up your back, making you sit up straighter, creating a radiant glow out through your shoulders and the top of your head that opens your eyes wider and makes you feel more alert. Do you feel it? It really is that simple to change your energy, because it's all just information. Think about this: just standing up straighter, you might say, improves your body mass index (my son the med student will say "not really", but he's the one who said this to me as a joke, and I still think it's a useful idea)!

Metaphysical ideas of auras and vibrations, energy transference, entrainment (or "like attracts like") are all part of this picture as well. If information equals reality, all we are talking about is recognizing the patterns that are encoded within that information.

Here, now, is one of the more tongue in cheek songs from the collection of 26 songs attached to this project, whose lyrics are printed at the end of the book: try to imagine this one with Spinal Tap performing the verses and oh, I don't know, Jimmy Buffett performing the choruses. The song is called "What I Feel For You".




And here are the lyrics:

WHAT I FEEL FOR YOU
words and music (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

Much greater minds than mine
Have tried to figure out
The secrets of the universe
And what it’s all about
Masters of the abstract
Seekers of the spell
That fits it all together
I know the quest so well

But it all keeps coming back
No matter what I do
The only thing that’s real for me
Is what I feel for you

And what I feel for you
Is what makes me carry on
My world would be so pointless
My reality so wrong
The secret gears and levers
That spin behind the scenes
To make what’s here before us
Must only do one thing

Cause it all keeps coming back…


Much greater minds than mine
Have tried to figure out
The secrets of the universe
And what it’s all about
Masters of the abstract
Seekers of the spell
That fits it all together
I know the quest so well

But it all keeps coming back
No matter what I do
The only thing that’s real for me
Is what I feel for you
The only thing that’s real for me
Is what I feel for you

Some of the previously discussed songs from this project that touch on similar ideas include Everything Fits Together, Connections, Big Bang to Entropy, and Change and Renewal (these song titles are hotlinked to previous blog entries featuring those songs). Or some of the videos created for those songs are below.









Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton


Tenth Dimension Vlog playlist