Google Suggestions Time Capsule - First Quarter 08

Back at the beginning of this year, I became interested in keeping track of the top Suggestions that Google makes when you type a single letter of the alphabet into the search window, and how those change over time, and how much we might be able to draw from this as a record of the memes that rise and fall in our society over time. The original post is here, and although the post was created in January I have continued to update that entry on a weekly basis since then. A post that talks about the poll question that was started around the same time relating to Google is here.

I've talked before (in my entry Tens, Google and the Expanding Universe) about Google's battle with spammers and scammers trying to vault their particular site to the top of Google's search results, which is part of the feedback loop that becomes Google's awesome responsibility: because once something becomes a top search result, it is more likely to stay there for a while. Do you know about the the "Find Chuck Norris" experiment? You type those three words into Google, push the "I'm Feeing Lucky" button, and you're taken to what at first glance looks like a Chuck Norris joke in the form of a Google error message. It becomes clear as you read further down the page that the window you're looking at is not affiliated with Google, and there are some discussions of viral marketing in the context of the Find Chuck Norris experiment that are linked to from the page.

How long will that page remain as the "I'm Feeling Lucky" result? That's really up to the gatekeepers at Google. Likewise, there are several key phrases related to the tenth dimension project that also show up as the top result in Google. Is that because of some deliberately viral manipulation of the search results on my part, or is it because more people in the world talk about those ideas in terms of the Imagining the Tenth Dimension project than in other contexts? A number of book publishers have looked at my popular animation and website as an example of viral marketing which they would like to emulate. For me, there is nothing nearly as insidious about what has happened here: I have a set of ideas which I am fascinated by, the animation introduces those ideas, and my number one goal was to get those ideas out into the world.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 1 to 10

Click here for the archive of polls 11 to 15.
Click here for the archive of polls 16 to 20.
Click here for the archive of polls 21 to 25.
Click here for the archive of polls 26 to 30.


I've been enjoying Blogger's "Poll" function, and had been leaving all of my old polls up on the page, but it has been pointed out to me this can cause problems for visitors with slower internet connections. So, in the interest of providing an enjoyable experience for all, I'm pulling down the older polls and placing screen grabs of the final results here. Thank you to everyone who cast their votes in these old polls, and for continuing to do so in the new ones, I appreciate your participation!


Poll #1: What is "Imagining the Tenth Dimension" about?
(poll ended Oct 25 2007)
A useful starting point. About half of our visitors voted for the answer I'm aiming for ("All of the Above"), while a third said this project is about Physics and Cosmology, and a fifth said it's about Philosophy and Spirituality. There weren't a huge number of participants in this first poll so a single additional vote would still have caused these relative percentages to jump around somewhat, but nonetheless this helped to make the point I was hoping for: people come to this project with their own sets of interests, some have more specific areas they respond to, some are generalists. All are welcome, but of course this means not everyone will come away from this with the same impression of what it is I'm trying to do here.


Poll #2: Was Kaluza right? Is our physical reality really being defined at the fifth rather than the fourth dimension?
(poll ended Nov. 9 2007)
I was somewhat surprised to see that three quarters said "Yes, we're in the fifth", while one quarter said "No, we're in the fourth". Kaluza's groundbreaking proposal, submitted to Einstein in 1919, suggested that the field equations for gravity and light could be united if they were calculated in the fifth dimension. Einstein eventually gave the idea his full endorsement, and after some additional input a few years later by Oscar Klein, the resulting Kaluza-Klein Theory is well known. While that may be the case, the general public hears very little about the fifth dimension, which is why I was surprised to see such a strong showing for the fifth dimension in this poll. It would appear that since I've been banging the "our reality comes from the fifth dimension" drum for almost two years now, that meme may be more familiar to regular visitors to this blog than it is to the general public!


Poll #3: Will Dark Energy and/or Dark Matter eventually prove the existence of higher dimensions?
(poll ended Nov 29 2007)
The contentious issue of whether we really need extra dimensions above the four of spacetime to describe everything about our reality is an ongoing debate. Experts believe that 96% of the universe is invisible and undetectable dark energy and dark matter! This is the great scientific mystery of our time. While there are hopes that the Large Hadron Collider will reveal more about the underlying structures that might be responsible for some (or all) of the "missing" parts of our reality, I remain convinced that higher dimensions are going to factor into the solution to this very large conundrum for modern physics and cosmology. Eventually we are going to have definitive proof that the extra dimensions are real, and not just a mathematical construct in the minds of theorists.


Poll #4 - In a multiverse filled with every possible timeline, there must be branches we're not on where some of the "End of the World" doomsayers throughout history were right. For our timeline, will 2012 be the real deal or just another Y2K-like fizzle?
(poll ended Dec. 13 2007)
A dead heat, split right down the middle on this one! 50% said "real deal" and 50% said "fizzle". I did get some flack on this poll for the way I worded the question: proponents of the Mayan calendar's accelerated consciousness approaching 2012, or fans of Kurzweil's predicted Singularity, object to being lumped in with doom and gloom end of the world predictions like Y2K, and I accept that. Persons familiar with my writing will know that I have used this example before, and that my song "The End of the World" also mentions positive predictions like "attaining our star bodies". The point here is not whether the prediction of an upcoming break or a Shift for our planet is good or bad, but rather that the multiverse scenario doesn't allow us to look at predictions that have failed in our own past and use that as the argument for why the latest prediction will never come true. I return to this idea several times in my book, here's what I say in chapter 6:

But eventually the deadline for all good predictions of the end has to arrive, and like the celebrated Y2K scenario, its promoters are then left looking a little foolish. In the anthropic viewpoint, we can imagine how those people also exist on different timelines where their predictions did come true. The reason we’re here on our current timeline to question what went wrong with their predictions is because on the timeline where they were right, we would no longer be here. Perhaps there were also people in Atlantis, or Mu/Lemuria, or in the ancient sunken ruins off of Cuba or south of Okinawa, who issued dire warnings of impending disaster, and who got to say one last “I told you so” before the end of their civilizations really did come to pass?

Poll #5: In the Many Worlds Interpretation, as proven by Deutsch's team at Oxford, probabilistic branches exist at both the quantum and macro levels. Do you believe that each choice you make creates parallel universes - the one you're in and the others you're not?
(poll ended Jan 2 2008)
Yikes, quite the wordy poll question! 91% said "yes", the rest said "no". Did I intimidate people into answering with the response I was hoping for, by putting so much of the argument for why I personally would say "yes" into the question? Okay, perhaps I had some influence there... but the idea that there is a parallel universe where I walked out my front door this morning and turned left rather than right seems like such an outlandish claim when you put it in those really simple terms that I confess to wanting to make sure visitors realized we were talking about something which some major physicists do actually support! And while my additional layer I have added to this discussion - that the "bush-like branching structure" of those branches of chance and choice exist in the fifth rather than the fourth dimension - really isn't a requirement for believing Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation, I believe that it's just a matter of time before mainstream science begins to see the light on this one. Our reality comes from the fifth dimension, Kaluza proved it, and those parallel universes resulting from choice, chance, and circumstance become much easier to visualize when we fit them into the picture I've created.


Poll #6 - 2008 is the tenth anniversary of google, our world's premium meme-tracker. How would you say google has changed the way you interact with the information that is our reality?
(poll ended Jan 17 08)
Admittedly this will seem like an odd way to phrase the question if you are not familiar with my favorite quantum mechanics phrase "information equals reality", which I believe is very useful in helping us to understand the underlying fabric of reality, where everything that could happen has already happened - this is the set-of-all-possible-states that Gevin Giorbran described so well in "Everything Forever". From the first three dimensions we build space, from the second set of three we build a spacetime tree of all possible timelines, and in the third set of three we reach the increasingly abstract set-of-all-possible-states where the "information" side of the information equals reality equation becomes dominant.
What does that have to do with google? Because google has, more than any other tool, found ways to quickly organize and catalog information for us, and if information equals reality then the implications of where google could end up really are staggering.
Not too surprisingly, 95% said Google has made their interaction with information "better, more immersive", while the rest said it is "worse, more superficial". Also not surprisingly, no persons voting clicked on "no change from 10 years ago". Google has definitely changed a lot about the world we live in!


Poll #7: From this current "now", there are probabilistic outcomes. In a previous poll 91% said choice creates parallel universes. Do you believe it's possible to predict the future?
(poll ended Feb 1 08)
The answers provided were:
- Yes, because its potential already exists (50% voted for this)
- Only sometimes, and never very far (26% votes for this)
- Never, and if it seems we can it's coincidence (23% votes for this).

For me, this was an interesting question, because everyone has to have some ability to predict the future or they couldn't survive - if I step in front of that speeding bus, it will run me over and I will die. That's the kind of prediction that all of us make every day without even thinking about it, and in some ways that's the process we all have to go through as young children: we learn that hot things burn, that some animals are dangerous, that jumping off of high things can cause bones to break and so on. Most kids, through parental guidance and their own trial and error, develop their predictive capabilities well enough that they make it to adulthood, but darkly amusing projects like the Darwin Awards show us that not all adults appear to have developed their ability to predict the future well enough to avoid doing fatally dangerous things.
This poll questions asks us to consider the possibility that this process of prediction can be integrated into the parallel universes mindset of Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation. And saying that there are probabilistic branches from this moment forward (and backward!) also acknowledges that all of us are probably very lucky to be here, because all of us have near-miss moments in our past where, through bad luck, bad choices, or the actions of others, the more probable outcome was that we didn't survive! That's what my songs "Thankful" and the "The Anthropic Viewpoint" touch on as well: we are all very lucky to live in the universe that we live in.


Poll #8 - Have you ever had an experience where you thought you might have glimpsed a different dimension (through meditation, hallucinogens, dance, intuition, etc)?
(poll ended Feb 18 08)
80% said yes, the rest said no. My song "From the Corner of My Eye" is about this very idea. This is one of the central ideas to this project - if we really are experiencing one timeline out of many, observing a quantum wavefunction which exists at both the quantum and macro level (and Everett preferred to say that we are "observing" rather than "collapsing" the wavefunction because the other possible states continue to exist as potential), then might there be subtle visual or sensory hints that tell us our brain/consciousness is participating in that process? Admittedly, this is one of the more metaphysical concepts, but I was pleased to see how many visitors to this blog were willing to consider this as a possibility. This would also tie to the previous poll question - is it possible to sense the future, and could that be because the possible future outcomes available from our current "now" already exist as potential probabilistic branches?


Poll #9 - Philosophers have said it for millennia, now there are physicists saying it too. But what about you? Do you believe "time is an illusion"?
(poll ended Mar 4 08)
87.8% answered yes, while the remainder said no.
So. We've been imagining a set-of-all-possible-states, a multi-dimensional configuration space which simultaneously encompasses every possible expression of matter, energy, and information. Inside that omniverse of all possible universes, our own particular spacetime is only the smallest of slivers, and this very instant that you read the word "now" is an infinitesimally tinier sliver carved out from that.
One "now" after another, one planck unit after another, we experience time as a probabilistic set of outcomes, but viewing this all from the big picture of timelessness and the underlying fabric of quantum indeterminacy, we can see that what we think of as "time" is really only a very limited viewpoint of where our reality comes from. Does that sound more like philosophy than science? To some it does, but there are a great many scientists in the world today who truly believe this phrase: "time is an illusion". The way of visualizing reality that we're exploring here presents another version of the same idea: time is the way you change from one state to another, and that's true no matter what dimension you're examining. No matter what dimension you're in, how do you get from one state to another? By moving through the next dimension up. That's why we three-dimensional creatures tend to believe time is in the fourth dimension. If we lived in the seventh dimension, we would move from one constrained set to another by moving through the eighth dimension, and therefore tell ourselves that time is the eighth dimension.
So: saying "time is an illusion" is not intended to say that change doesn't happen, or that there aren't useful assumptions that can be drawn from our observations of timelike processes. Rather, "time is an illusion" is our way of acknowledging that there is much more about the underlying nature of reality than just a simple, inexorable and inevitable (!) movement from moment to moment.

Poll #10 - Do you believe that our three-dimensional reality can be thought of as "shadows" of higher dimensional patterns, whatever those patterns end up being proven to be?
(poll ended Mar 19 08)
86% said yes, while the rest said no.
In poll #3, we asked if dark energy and dark matter will eventually be shown to prove the existence of higher dimensions. What we're really talking about here, though, is not just dark energy and dark matter, but absolutely all aspects of our reality being defined as logical subsets from higher dimensional potentials. Poll question 10 was created as a companion to several blogs I created earlier this month: Hypercubes and Plato's Cave, Hypercubes and Plato's Cave (expanded version) and Shadows of Higher Dimensions. This idea also relates to some previous blog entries, like "How to Make a Universe" and "You Can't Get There from Here": it's all about trying to visualize how our particular unique universe is chosen from the set of all possible universes: the reality we see right now is a "shadow" of the higher dimensional shapes and patterns that contribute to its selection from the set-of-all-possible-states, which I refer to as the tenth dimension in its unobserved state, and which can also be thought of as the underlying fabric of quantum indeterminacy.

Does that mean that not just the perceived universe, but every element within it, every expression of mass and energy can be described this way? Absolutely! As I like to say, I am a three-dimensional shadow of shapes and patterns within the higher dimensions... and so are you.


You can also work through these poll archives one poll at a time, start by clicking here, and each entry ends with a link to the next. Again, thanks to all who participated in these polls and I look forward to more of your opinions in the months to come.

Enjoy the journey,


Rob

Update: Click here for the blog discussing polls 11 through 15.

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 10

Poll #10 - Do you believe that our three-dimensional reality can be thought of as "shadows" of higher dimensional patterns, whatever those patterns end up being proven to be? (poll ended Mar 19 08)

86% said yes, while the rest said no.
In poll #3, we asked if dark energy and dark matter will eventually be shown to prove the existence of higher dimensions. What we're really talking about here, though, is not just dark energy and dark matter, but absolutely all aspects of our reality being defined as logical subsets from higher dimensional potentials. Poll question 10 was created as a companion to several blogs I created earlier this month: Hypercubes and Plato's Cave, Hypercubes and Plato's Cave (expanded version) and Shadows of Higher Dimensions. This idea also relates to some previous blog entries, like "How to Make a Universe" and "You Can't Get There from Here": it's all about trying to visualize how our particular unique universe is chosen from the set of all possible universes: the reality we see right now is a "shadow" of the higher dimensional shapes and patterns that contribute to its selection from the set-of-all-possible-states, which I refer to as the tenth dimension in its unobserved state, and which can also be thought of as the underlying fabric of quantum indeterminacy.

Does that mean that not just the perceived universe, but every element within it, every expression of mass and energy can be described this way? Absolutely! As I like to say, I am a three-dimensional shadow of shapes and patterns within the higher dimensions... and so are you.

Next: Poll 11 - Do you believe each of us has an indivisible soul, or is each "soul" created by interlocking patterns and shapes?

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 9

Poll #9 - Philosophers have said it for millennia, now there are physicists saying it too. But what about you? Do you believe "time is an illusion"?
(poll ended Mar 4 08)
87.8% answered yes, while the remainder said no.
So. We've been imagining a set-of-all-possible-states, a multi-dimensional configuration space which simultaneously encompasses every possible expression of matter, energy, and information. Inside that omniverse of all possible universes, our own particular spacetime is only the smallest of slivers, and this very instant that you read the word "now" is an infinitesimally tinier sliver carved out from that.
One "now" after another, one planck unit after another, we experience time as a probabilistic set of outcomes, but viewing this all from the big picture of timelessness and the underlying fabric of quantum indeterminacy, we can see that what we think of as "time" is really only a very limited viewpoint of where our reality comes from. Does that sound more like philosophy than science? To some it does, but there are a great many scientists in the world today who truly believe this phrase: "time is an illusion". The way of visualizing reality that we're exploring here presents another version of the same idea: time is the way you change from one state to another, and that's true no matter what dimension you're examining. No matter what dimension you're in, how do you get from one state to another? By moving through the next dimension up. That's why we three-dimensional creatures tend to believe time is in the fourth dimension. If we lived in the seventh dimension, we would move from one constrained set to another by moving through the eighth dimension, and therefore tell ourselves that time is the eighth dimension.
So: saying "time is an illusion" is not intended to say that change doesn't happen, or that there aren't useful assumptions that can be drawn from our observations of timelike processes. Rather, "time is an illusion" is our way of acknowledging that there is much more about the underlying nature of reality than just a simple, inexorable and inevitable (!) movement from moment to moment.

Next: Poll 10 - Is our three-dimensional reality just the "shadows" of higher dimensional shapes and patterns?

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 8

Poll #8 - Have you ever had an experience where you thought you might have glimpsed a different dimension (through meditation, hallucinogens, dance, intuition, etc)?
(poll ended Feb 18 08)
80% said yes, the rest said no. My song "From the Corner of My Eye" is about this very idea. This is one of the central ideas to this project - if we really are experiencing one timeline out of many, observing a quantum wavefunction which exists at both the quantum and macro level (and Everett preferred to say that we are "observing" rather than "collapsing" the wavefunction because the other possible states continue to exist as potential), then might there be subtle visual or sensory hints that tell us our brain/consciousness is participating in that process? Admittedly, this is one of the more metaphysical concepts, but I was pleased to see how many visitors to this blog were willing to consider this as a possibility. This would also tie to the previous poll question - is it possible to sense the future, and could that be because the possible future outcomes available from our current "now" already exist as potential probabilistic branches?

Next: Poll 9 - Do you believe the phrase "time is an illusion"?

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 7

Poll #7: From this current "now", there are probabilistic outcomes. In a previous poll 91% said choice creates parallel universes. Do you believe it's possible to predict the future?
(poll ended Feb 1 08)
The answers provided were:
- Yes, because its potential already exists (50% voted for this)
- Only sometimes, and never very far (26% votes for this)
- Never, and if it seems we can it's coincidence (23% votes for this).

For me, this was an interesting question, because everyone has to have some ability to predict the future or they couldn't survive - if I step in front of that speeding bus, it will run me over and I will die. That's the kind of prediction that all of us make every day without even thinking about it, and in some ways that's the process we all have to go through as young children: we learn that hot things burn, that some animals are dangerous, that jumping off of high things can cause bones to break and so on. Most kids, through parental guidance and their own trial and error, develop their predictive capabilities well enough that they make it to adulthood, but darkly amusing projects like the Darwin Awards show us that not all adults appear to have developed their ability to predict the future well enough to avoid doing fatally dangerous things.
This poll questions asks us to consider the possibility that this process of prediction can be integrated into the parallel universes mindset of Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation. And saying that there are probabilistic branches from this moment forward (and backward!) also acknowledges that all of us are probably very lucky to be here, because all of us have near-miss moments in our past where, through bad luck, bad choices, or the actions of others, the more probable outcome was that we didn't survive! That's what my songs "Thankful" and the "The Anthropic Viewpoint" touch on as well: we are all very lucky to live in the universe that we live in.

Next: Poll 8 - Do you think you might ever have glimpsed another dimension?

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 6

Poll #6 - 2008 is the tenth anniversary of google, our world's premium meme-tracker. How would you say google has changed the way you interact with the information that is our reality?
(poll ended Jan 17 08)
Admittedly this will seem like an odd way to phrase the question if you are not familiar with my favorite quantum mechanics phrase "information equals reality", which I believe is very useful in helping us to understand the underlying fabric of reality, where everything that could happen has already happened - this is the set-of-all-possible-states that Gevin Giorbran described so well in "Everything Forever". From the first three dimensions we build space, from the second set of three we build a spacetime tree of all possible timelines, and in the third set of three we reach the increasingly abstract set-of-all-possible-states where the "information" side of the information equals reality equation becomes dominant.
What does that have to do with google? Because google has, more than any other tool, found ways to quickly organize and catalog information for us, and if information equals reality then the implications of where google could end up really are staggering.
Not too surprisingly, 95% said Google has made their interaction with information "better, more immersive", while the rest said it is "worse, more superficial". Also not surprisingly, no persons voting clicked on "no change from 10 years ago". Google has definitely changed a lot about the world we live in!

Next: Poll 7 - If the future already exists as a set of probabilistic states, is it possible for us to predict it?

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 5

Poll #5: In the Many Worlds Interpretation, as proven by Deutsch's team at Oxford, probabilistic branches exist at both the quantum and macro levels. Do you believe that each choice you make creates parallel universes - the one you're in and the others you're not?
(poll ended Jan 2 2008)
Yikes, quite the wordy poll question! 91% said "yes", the rest said "no". Did I intimidate people into answering with the response I was hoping for, by putting so much of the argument for why I personally would say "yes" into the question? Okay, perhaps I had some influence there... but the idea that there is a parallel universe where I walked out my front door this morning and turned left rather than right seems like such an outlandish claim when you put it in those really simple terms that I confess to wanting to make sure visitors realized we were talking about something which some major physicists do actually support! And while my additional layer I have added to this discussion - that the "bush-like branching structure" of those branches of chance and choice exist in the fifth rather than the fourth dimension - really isn't a requirement for believing Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation, I believe that it's just a matter of time before mainstream science begins to see the light on this one. Our reality comes from the fifth dimension, Kaluza proved it, and those parallel universes resulting from choice, chance, and circumstance become much easier to visualize when we fit them into the picture I've created.

Next: Poll 6 - Information equals reality. Has Google changed the way you interact with information?

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 4

Poll #4 - In a multiverse filled with every possible timeline, there must be branches we're not on where some of the "End of the World" doomsayers throughout history were right. For our timeline, will 2012 be the real deal or just another Y2K-like fizzle?
(poll ended Dec. 13 2007)
A dead heat, split right down the middle on this one! 50% said "real deal" and 50% said "fizzle". I did get some flack on this poll for the way I worded the question: proponents of the Mayan calendar's accelerated consciousness approaching 2012, or fans of Kurzweil's predicted Singularity, object to being lumped in with doom and gloom end of the world predictions like Y2K, and I accept that. Persons familiar with my writing will know that I have used this example before, and that my song "The End of the World" also mentions positive predictions like "attaining our star bodies". The point here is not whether the prediction of an upcoming break or a Shift for our planet is good or bad, but rather that the multiverse scenario doesn't allow us to look at predictions that have failed in our own past and use that as the argument for why the latest prediction will never come true. I return to this idea several times in my book, here's what I say in chapter 6:

But eventually the deadline for all good predictions of the end has to arrive, and like the celebrated Y2K scenario, its promoters are then left looking a little foolish. In the anthropic viewpoint, we can imagine how those people also exist on different timelines where their predictions did come true. The reason we’re here on our current timeline to question what went wrong with their predictions is because on the timeline where they were right, we would no longer be here. Perhaps there were also people in Atlantis, or Mu/Lemuria, or in the ancient sunken ruins off of Cuba or south of Okinawa, who issued dire warnings of impending disaster, and who got to say one last “I told you so” before the end of their civilizations really did come to pass?

Next: Poll 5 - Do you believe each choice made creates parallel universes?

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 3

Poll #3: Will Dark Energy and/or Dark Matter eventually prove the existence of higher dimensions?
(poll ended Nov 29 2007)
The contentious issue of whether we really need extra dimensions above the four of spacetime to describe everything about our reality is an ongoing debate. Experts believe that 96% of the universe is invisible and undetectable dark energy and dark matter! This is the great scientific mystery of our time. While there are hopes that the Large Hadron Collider will reveal more about the underlying structures that might be responsible for some (or all) of the "missing" parts of our reality, I remain convinced that higher dimensions are going to factor into the solution to this very large conundrum for modern physics and cosmology. Eventually we are going to have definitive proof that the extra dimensions are real, and not just a mathematical construct in the minds of theorists.

Next: Poll 4 - What's your stand on 2012?

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 2

Poll #2: Was Kaluza right? Is our physical reality really being defined at the fifth rather than the fourth dimension?
(poll ended Nov. 9 2007)
I was somewhat surprised to see that three quarters said "Yes, we're in the fifth", while one quarter said "No, we're in the fourth". Kaluza's groundbreaking proposal, submitted to Einstein in 1919, suggested that the field equations for gravity and light could be united if they were calculated in the fifth dimension. Einstein eventually gave the idea his full endorsement, and after some additional input a few years later by Oscar Klein, the resulting Kaluza-Klein Theory is well known. While that may be the case, the general public hears very little about the fifth dimension, which is why I was surprised to see such a strong showing for the fifth dimension in this poll. It would appear that since I've been banging the "our reality comes from the fifth dimension" drum for almost two years now, that meme may be more familiar to regular visitors to this blog than it is to the general public!

Next: Poll 3 - Will dark energy/dark matter eventually be the proof of extra dimensions?

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 1

I've been enjoying Blogger's "Poll" function, and had been leaving all of my old polls up on the page, but it has been pointed out to me this can cause problems for visitors with slower internet connections. So, in the interest of providing an enjoyable experience for all, I'm pulling down the older polls and placing screen grabs of the final results here. Thank you to everyone who cast their votes in these old polls, and for continuing to do so in the new ones, I appreciate your participation!

Poll #1: What is "Imagining the Tenth Dimension" about?
(poll ended Oct 25 2007)
A useful starting point. About half of our visitors voted for the answer I'm aiming for ("All of the Above"), while a third said this project is about Physics and Cosmology, and a fifth said it's about Philosophy and Spirituality. There weren't a huge number of participants in this first poll so a single additional vote would still have caused these relative percentages to jump around somewhat, but nonetheless this helped to make the point I was hoping for: people come to this project with their own sets of interests, some have more specific areas they respond to, some are generalists. All are welcome, but of course this means not everyone will come away from this with the same impression of what it is I'm trying to do here.

Next: Poll 2 - Was Kaluza right about the fifth dimension?

Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Dark Information

96% of our universe is invisible and undetectable. Isn't that astonishing?

According to the experts, it breaks down like this: 4% is the energy and matter that creates our perceived universe. 22% is dark matter, and 74% is dark energy. How can it be that our universe, as unimaginably huge and ancient as it is, can only be four one hundredths of what's really creating the reality we're in? This is a very, very large elephant in the room for modern science.

A number of articles have been published recently suggesting that the Large Hadron Collider, when it goes on line later this year, could reveal some new insight into why most of our universe is "missing". Some suggest that the LHC's ultra-high energy conditions could even reveal information about the extra dimensions. What if both turn out to be correct? What if, as I've been saying, dark energy and dark matter turn out to be the proof that higher dimensions really do exist, and are not just mathematical constructs existing solely in the minds of theorists?

"No matter what dark matter and dark energy are, these two phenomena are likely not independent of each other." - Dr HongSheng Zhao, of the University of St. Andrew's School of Physics and Astronomy, commenting on his recent papers published in Astrophysical Journal Letters and Physics Review.

It's All About Gravity
Gravity is a bending of spacetime. Gravity is the only force that exerts itself across the extra dimensions. Gevin Giorbran described gravity as coming from the grouping order of our universe. Randall and Sundrum suggest that gravity is a localized effect, and that in other regions of the higher dimensions gravity would have different values, and create other universes completely different from our own. I believe these are all ideas that tie into my way of visualizing how our reality is constructed.

When quantum computing expert Seth Lloyd asks us to think of the big bang as being the very first binary yes/no, his ideas relate strongly to Giorbran's idea of grouping order - out of all possible states, a fluctuation creates the initial conditions, and a particular universe is born. Other universes with different basic physical laws would be born out of different initial conditions, different groupings, all of which exist as potential. Information Equals Reality.

What does this have to do with dark matter and dark energy? Gravity. Gravity, when exerted from the dimensions above the fifth, can become a repulsive force: think of a first dimensional line, think of the third dimension, and you can imagine how an attractive force from the third dimension would appear to be pulling that first dimension from every side. But the attractive force of gravity, for us, comes from the fifth dimension: when 4D spacetime is bent, what is it being bent through? The fifth dimension, where Kaluza proved that the field equations of gravity and light are united.

It's All About Information
In the biggest picture of all, information equals reality. The mystery that confronts science is that we can't see where the dark matter that has kept our universe from flying apart too quickly, and the dark energy that now causes our universe's expansion to accelerate, are coming from. I believe that's because they come from the dimensions above spacetime, and that thinking of those highest dimensions as being weighted towards the "information" side of the information/reality equation makes it easier for us to imagine how this could be true.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Gevin Giorbran - Gone but Not Forgotten

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=-SI5MgGnP1g

My good friend Gevin Giorbran passed away unexpectedly this week. Gevin had some amazing insights into the nature of reality and the ultimate fate of the universe, this and much more can be found in his book "Everything Forever: Learning to See Timelessness".

At the core of Gevin's ideas is a beautiful and simple concept, one which ties together very nicely with my own thinking about how our reality is constructed, and Gevin and I had many lively conversations about the ramifications of this over the past year. The above video was recorded in December, and our intention was to do more of these in the months to come but now that is not to be. Please take a look, and also go to Gevin's website www.everythingforever.com for more insight into this man's marvelous mind.

Is Gevin enjoying the journey even now? That's a painful question to consider, but I do believe that we are all patterns in the information that is reality, and parts of the pattern that once was Gevin Giorbran now continue on through his writing, and our memories of him - whether that be through videos like the one in this blog or other more personal memories.

But is the very specific pattern that was Gevin still with us now on this particular timeline, or has that pattern been subsumed back into the larger whole, the Omega state of enfolded symmetry that he wrote about so beautifully? That is a large question indeed.

I will continue to support Gevin's ideas: I believe he was a visionary thinker whose theories will one day be confirmed by the mainstream, and I am grateful to be able to say that I knew him as a friend.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob

Shadows of higher dimensions

I am a three-dimensional shadow
of my fourth-dimensional spime
which is selected from a fifth-dimensional wavefunction
of branching chance and choice, parallel universes of Everett's Many Worlds,

Which is a subset of a sixth-dimensional spacetime tree
created from all possible timelines
for our particular different-initial-conditions universe
which is confined within a seven-dimensional brane.

Other different expressions of matter/energy/information
can be found in the seventh/eighth/ninth dimensions
and the tenth dimension is the unobserved fabric of quantum indeterminacy,
where information waits as potential to create
the multiverse of all possible universes in the dimensions below.


Matter and energy, reality and information, everything fits together,
and my selfish genes and selfish memes make me as I am right now:
A three-dimensional shadow of my fourth-dimensional self.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

For more about how all these ideas fit together, check out the Tenth Dimension FAQ.

Hypercubes and Plato's Cave

Edit: We've explored the visual ideas in this entry from a number of perspectives since it was published, here are some more recent entries:
Playing Games in Extra Dimensions
O is for Omniverse G to J
What's Around the Corner?
When's a Knot Not a Knot?
Imagining the Omniverse - Addendum
The Holographic Universe
Slices of Reality
Why Do We Need More Than 3 Dimensions?
Time in 3 Dimensions


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xN4DxdiFrs

One of the most common questions about this way of visualizing dimensions is whether the four dimensions of spacetime really are four spatial dimensions, or just three spatial plus one of time. I argue that for us "time" really is in the fourth spatial dimension which we, as creatures built from chemical reactions obeying the laws of entropy, are experiencing in a unique way. This relates closely to a phrase that is being uttered by many physicists nowadays: "time is an illusion". Saying that time is an illusion doesn't mean that we don't experience time from moment to moment, but rather it means that what we are experiencing as time is only a tiny window into a much greater underlying fabric, which ultimately encompasses the multiverse of all possible universes and quantum indeterminacy.

Hypercubes
The above youtube video shows what is commonly known as a four-dimensional cube: a hypercube, or tesseract. Before you click on the "play" button, we are not really "seeing" the hypercube, because a 4D object needs to be rotated for us to appreciate its higher dimensionality. In other words, without adding a time element to our appreciation of the shape shown in this animation, a significant part of what makes this a unique shape remains unseen.

In the above animation, we are looking on our computer screen at a flat 2D representation of a 3D shadow of a 4D object. Confused? If you go to the bottom of this blog entry there is another youtube movie, again showing a rotating hypercube. In this one, if you move your eyes so close to the monitor that your left eye sees the left half of the image and your other eye sees the right, your brain (with a bit of practice) can then merge those two halves into a stereoscopic visualization, from which you can get a hint of what we're really talking about here: "shadows" of a 4D shape being seen from the 3rd dimension.

Plato's Cave
Are you familiar with the allegory of Plato's Cave? It tells of some hypothetical people who spend their lives trapped in a cave, unable to see out into the real world, and all that they can surmise about reality is based upon the shadows cast upon the cave's walls as objects or people pass by the entrance to the cave. Trying to visualize higher dimensions is a similar exercise: our 3D reality is created by higher dimensional patterns, and what we witness from moment to moment, from day to day, from big bang to entropy and beyond those two extremes, is really just shadows of those higher-dimensional shapes and patterns. Ultimately, all of those shapes and patterns exist as potential within the underlying fabric of quantum indeterminacy.



Enjoy the journey,

Rob

For a more expanded version of this blog entry, click here.

Hypercubes and Plato's Cave +

Edit: We've explored the visual ideas in this entry from a number of perspectives since it was published, here are some more recent entries:
Playing Games in Extra Dimensions
O is for Omniverse G to J
What's Around the Corner?
When's a Knot Not a Knot?
Imagining the Omniverse - Addendum
The Holographic Universe
Slices of Reality
Why Do We Need More Than 3 Dimensions?
Time in 3 Dimensions


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xN4DxdiFrs

One of the most common questions about this way of visualizing dimensions is whether the four dimensions of spacetime really are four spatial dimensions, or just three spatial plus one of time. I argue that for us "time" really is in the fourth spatial dimension which we, as creatures built from chemical reactions obeying the laws of entropy, are experiencing in a unique way. This relates closely to a phrase that is being uttered by many physicists nowadays: "time is an illusion". Saying that time is an illusion doesn't mean that we don't experience time from moment to moment, but rather it means that what we are experiencing as time is only a tiny window into a much greater underlying fabric, which ultimately encompasses the multiverse of all possible universes and quantum indeterminacy.

Hypercubes
The above youtube video shows what is commonly known as a four-dimensional cube: a hypercube, or tesseract. Before you click on the "play" button, we are not really "seeing" the hypercube, because a 4D object needs to be rotated for us to appreciate its higher dimensionality. In other words, without adding a time element to our appreciation of the shape shown in this animation, a significant part of what makes this a unique shape remains unseen.

In the above animation, we are looking on our computer screen at a flat 2D representation of a 3D shadow of a 4D object. Confused? If you go to the bottom of this blog entry there is another youtube movie, again showing a rotating hypercube. In this one, if you move your eyes so close to the monitor that your left eye sees the left half of the image and your other eye sees the right, your brain (with a bit of practice) can then merge those two halves into a stereoscopic visualization, from which you can get a hint of what we're really talking about here: "shadows" of a 4D shape being seen from the 3rd dimension.

Plato's Cave
Are you familiar with the allegory of Plato's Cave? It tells of some hypothetical people who spend their lives trapped in a cave, unable to see out into the real world, and all that they can surmise about reality is based upon the shadows cast upon the cave's walls as objects or people pass by the entrance to the cave. Trying to visualize higher dimensions is a similar exercise: our 3D reality is created by higher dimensional patterns, and what we witness from moment to moment, from day to day, from big bang to entropy and beyond those two extremes, is really just shadows of those higher-dimensional shapes and patterns. Ultimately, all of those shapes and patterns exist as potential within the underlying fabric of quantum indeterminacy.

Spimes
When Bruce Sterling talks about "spimes", he is talking about data that can be attached to a 3D object along a 4D timeline that gives us a 4D shape - RFID tags attached to items from a store's inventory give the store a "spime" representing each object's history, its locations in time and space from manufacture to sale. When I talk about the "long undulating snake" representing a particular person's body from conception to death, that's really just another spime. And at any particular moment in time, the person I see in front of me or the pair of pants I see at Wal-Mart can be thought of as really just a 3D shadow being cast from the 4D spime representing that person or object.

This is why it makes so much sense to think of time as really being in the fourth spatial dimension. Physicists use phrases like "time reversal symmetry" and "closed timelike curves" to reveal more about the fourth dimension as just another spatial dimension that could be manipulated and navigated within. It's also important to realize that our experience of time, the fourth dimension, as being continuous is an illusion. Our fourth-dimensional line is actually being constructed one planck length at a time, and any attempt to look at the universe in finer intervals than that kicks us back out to that underlying fabric of quantum indeterminacy in its unobserved state, which I refer to as the tenth dimension.

Shadows of Higher Dimensions
Because we are made out of 3D atoms and molecules, each higher spatial dimension is increasingly difficult for us to visualize. Like the hypercube, we can look at other visualization tools that help us to imagine those higher dimensional shapes, and the Calabi-Yau manifold is a good example of that. Garrett Lisi's E8 rotation may well be another, as it contends that all of the forces and particles within our universe are derived from an 8 dimensional matrix. And of course, my 11-minute animation contends that my way of visualizing reality could be a way for us to imagine how our 3D physical reality is derived from vibrating superstrings in the ten dimensions: but as I have always tried to make clear, my unique way of imagining the dimensions is not the proof for superstrings, it just has many interesting tie-ins.

String theorists say that for us the fifth dimension and above are curled up down at the planck length. This is why my animation talks about the 2D creature on the mobius strip, twisting and turning in the dimensions above but from his experience he is just traveling in a straight line. We 3D creatures feel like we're traveling down a straight line of time in the fourth dimension, but that line is being constructed one planck length after another from probabilistic outcomes available to us as a result of chance and choice in the fifth dimension. Let me say that again: we are really twisting and turning in the fifth dimension, but we think we're traveling on a straight line in the fourth dimension. This can be related to Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, which says we are merely observing one state out of many possible states, all of which are contained within the quantum wavefunction: the many other versions of the universe where you and I made other choices continue to exist as potential within the multiverse. I'm proposing that those other outcomes are just different fifth-dimensional twists and turns.

"Time is an Illusion"
Now that a team of scientists at Oxford under the direction of physicist David Deutsch have published a proof equating the probabilistic outcomes at the quantum level with the parallel universes resulting from choice and chance out at the macro level (saying that both are equivalent and part of the same continuum from the quantum to the macro), what I'm portraying has more theoretical evidence to support it. The important insight that I'm adding here is that by realizing that the wavicles (simultaneous waves/particles) are in the fifth dimension, we tie in Kaluza's revelation about gravity and light in the fifth dimension, and we can see how those other parallel universes are just as real as our own but inaccessible/decoherent to the wave function for our own universe in its currently perceived state.

Many Worlds and many theories
What I'm portraying here is a way of visualizing the higher dimensions that ties together many different schools of thought: quantum mechanics and Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation are at the core, but there are many other possible tie-ins. String theorists say our universe is created by the interaction of a 3D brane and a 7D brane, my way of visualizing says that our 3D-universe-and-all-of-its-possible-timelines is locked in at the seventh dimension. Is our universe as we witness it just shadows of higher-dimensional holograms, a concept proposed by physicist Juan Maldacena as an extension to string theory? Whether our perceived reality is the shadows of superstrings, or a hologram, or an E8 rotation, or many other possible explanations, remains to be proved.

When physicists say that time is an illusion, they are saying that time as we experience it is just a shadow of what's really happening: just like the image of a hypercube being projected on a flat computer screen, we are looking at shadows cast by higher dimensional shapes as we go from instant to instant in our 3D universe.



Enjoy the journey,

Rob