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