The Flipbook Universe

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc_VliIuPhQ

The "flipbook universe" analogy says that our spacetime universe is being created one planck frame at a time. Without this change from frame to frame, I would say we revert back to the information side of the information equals reality equation (type "information equals reality" into google for more about this idea, which also relates to the field of "digital physics" we discussed last time). Modern theories of cosmology like loop quantum gravity are based upon this same idea: what we experience as "time", even though it feels continuous to us, is actually granular, or quantized in nature.

The additional layer that I have added to this idea is that our 4D spacetime is actually being created from probability sets that exist within the fifth dimension, which is where Kaluza proved and Einstein eventually agreed that the field equations for gravity and light for our universe can be united. The string theory concept of the fifth dimension being "curled up at the planck length" from our 4D perspective can then also be easily incorporated into this way of visualizing reality: it only appears that way because our physical "window" into the fifth dimension is just one planck frame at a time.

Here's a phrase I coined years ago which I have used in my book, the tenth dimension forum, and this blog: "that which ceases to change ceases to exist". If something is in "this" set of pages from our flipbook universe, then stops being in the probabilistic set of upcoming pages, it has ceased to change, ceases being part of our observed timeline: it ceases to exist. That's true whether you're talking about a rock, a planet, a person...

... or a gene or a meme.

And by the time you start to imagine genes and memes within the context of the omniverse, you are thinking about something very big indeed. Last blog, we reviewed some of physicist John Wheeler's ideas about how living creatures or quantum observers might actually have fine-tuned indeterminate parts of the initial conditions of the universe through a reverse causal effect: a challenging idea that takes some getting used to. Dr. Wheeler passed away just a few days ago, but as a respected and visionary leader of the physics community, his ideas will live on for years to come. There are three ideas from Imagining the Tenth Dimension that I would like to touch on right now:

1. As per Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation, multiple timelines exist from this moment forward. Those timelines are not random, they are based upon probabilistic wavefunctions, but our free will is part of what creates which timeline each of us ends up traveling upon.

2. As per Feynman's "sum over histories" or "sum over paths", there are also probabilistic branches that we could have travelled upon to get to this moment in time: and while "sum over paths" tells us there is one path that is the most likely, that may not be the path that was actually taken. Since the Oxford team under the direction of Dr. David Deutsch have proved this "branching parallel universes" concept is just as true at the macro level as it is at the quantum level, this should mean there is more than one way any one of us might have been able to get to this moment in time.

3. John Wheeler encouraged us to think of the two above ideas in the really big picture - not only are we creating our future, but we might also be able to fine tune our past. This is not to say that my free will can allow me to jump to the parallel universe where it's the end of April 2008 and John Wheeler is still alive, but is to imply that there might be other subtle ways that we each can change our trajectories as we twist and turn in the fifth dimension, creating our flipbook universe one planck length at a time: and a particular future might become more probabilistically likely if we were to fine-tune our past through the quantum observer processes John Wheeler was suggesting.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

P.S.: Another blog entry that talks about the Flipbook Universe concept is Tens, Google, and the Expanding Universe