The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Bk5KCEt17M

Last blog we talked about the bush-like branching structure of possible "you"s that exist within the wave function of possible outcomes for any person at any particular moment, and this was a continuation of ideas from my Urban Garden Magazine article, "The Fifth Dimension is a Dangerous Idea".

"... if we could "see" the wave function of a person, it would look remarkably like the person himself. However the wave function also gently seeps out into space, meaning that there is a small probability that the person can be found on the moon. (In fact, the person's wave function actually spreads out throughout the universe.) "
- Theoretical Physicist Michio Kaku, from his book "Parallel Worlds", P. 152

"After more than seven decades, no one understands how or even whether the collapse of a probability wave really happens. Over the years, the assumption that the probability waves collapse has proven itself a powerful link between the probabilities that quantum theory predicts and the definite outcomes that experiments reveal. But it's an assumption fraught with conundrums. For one thing, the collapse does not emerge from the mathematics of quantum theory; it has to be put in by hand, and there is no agreed-upon or experimentally justified way to do this. For another, how is it possible that by finding an electron in your detector in New York City, you cause the electron's probability wave in the Andromeda galaxy to drop to zero instantaneously?"
- Theoretical Physicist Brian Greene, from his book "The Fabric of the Cosmos", P. 119

Back at the end of March, the cover story on New Scientist magazine was "The (Un)certainty Principle: Quantum reality isn't random, it just looks that way" (they have scribbled out the "Un" on Uncertainty to make their point). In my blog entry Hidden Variables and the Seventh Dimension I quoted some excerpts from that article.

State Space
In books by the experts such as Kaku and Greene describing the idiosyncrasies of the quantum world, one point often made is that because quantum mechanics says there is a certain amount of chance involved in our reality, it's impossible to rule out the possibility of any one of us popping out of our current location and suddenly appearing on the moon (or wherever). Such fanciful ideas are usually accompanied by a note saying the likelihood of this happening is so small that it would take longer than the life of the universe for such a thing to occur, but it's still a possibility that can't be ruled out entirely. The unlikely possibilities these experts are talking about come from State Space, or the set of all possible states for our (or any other) specific universe, and in my way of visualizing the dimensions, our universe's set of all possible states is the entirety of the sixth dimension, or a point in the seventh.

Probability Space
What we're talking about here, then, is the difference between probabilities and impossibilities. Imagining the Tenth Dimension is a visualization tool which gives people a way to see how our reality is constructed: a way to conceive of the fabric of the cosmos, which by its inherent randomness has created pockets of order and disorder. From those patterns of order, we can see how the underlying information that becomes reality might be organized into a layered hierarchy, a way of stacking one dimension upon another that has its own beautiful internal logic. Does that mean what we're thinking about here is more like a "filing system"? Sure, if that's the way you prefer to think about it. And as with any other set of information, there are many other ways to represent and catalog this data that becomes our universe (a concept from digital physics), each with its own strengths and weaknesses.

No Dice
Einstein was famously unhappy with the implications of randomness within quantum mechanics: "God does not play dice" is one of his well-known quotes. I believe that our universe is not random, it's probabilistic, and this is an important distinction. Time is a direction, not a dimension. Our fourth dimensional line of time is being selected one planck length at a time from from a fifth dimensional probability space, and the fifth dimension is where Kaluza proved and Einstein agreed our reality comes. This means that each of us is observing our own version of the wave function of the universe, and that our universe is part of the wave function of all possible universes existing within the ominiverse.

Still, it should be clear that saying "each of us is observing our own version of the universe" is not the same as saying that we can use the power of our minds, or The Secret, or our What the Bleep Rabbit Hole to change absolutely anything about our observed universe. There are only certain possibilities that exist within our current fifth dimensional probability space, and there are also things that will remain on the "you can't get there from here" list of possible outcomes for each of us. That will continue to be the case until some technology or new development allows us to observe our universe from the sixth rather than the fifth dimension.

Even though the fifth dimension is where quantum entanglement (the "spooky action at a distance" that Einstein also disliked), and other seemingly mysterious underlying connections in our daily lives come from, the fifth dimension isn't magic. It has a logic and a structure to it that explains where the world each of us witnesses comes from: and within the bush-like branching structure of possible future selves, there is still an awesome amount of hope offered to each of us by this way of visualizing reality.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton