Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 15

Poll Question 15: "We start with a point. We make another point. We join those points with a line. The line that passes through those points extends to infinity in either direction. Can we call those two directions positive infinity and negative infinity then?" (poll ended June 1 '08)
54% disagreed, while the rest agreed.

Poll Question 13 was another question that dealt with infinity, and that one came out pretty close to a tie. Even though the responses to this current question leaned very slightly more towards "no" throughout the polling period, it still didn't have a clear winner - which, I think (as with Poll 13) reflects the fact that there are a lot of different opinions out there as to what the word "infinity" really means.

With this current poll question, we find another way to wrestle with the mainstream science concept of there being "many roads to infinity", which I discussed in more depth in my discussion of Poll 13. These ideas also tie nicely into Gevin Giorbran's ideas of enfolded symmetry, which I've talked about so many times in this blog and at the tenth dimension forum, and in blog entries like John Wheeler and Digital Physics, Hidden Variables and the Seventh Dimension and Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Dark Information.

If we start with a geometric point of indeterminate size, and infinity is of indeterminate size, then can a point on a line encompass infinity? Usually, when people hear that a geometric point is of indeterminate size, they imagine this to mean that the point is infinitely small: which would make it yet another "road to infinity". With imagining the tenth dimension, we are wrapping all of those concepts together: this means that the point that we start from (at zero) and the point that we end up on (at ten) can, potentially, both be the same thing. Or, in the same way that the infinite set of all even numbers can be a subset of the infinite set of all whole numbers, the zero we start from can be a subset of the omniverse of all possible states of matter, energy, and information that we end up within. Images of Mobius strips, Klein bottles, and doughnut-shaped torus universes all have this same "wrapping back around on themselves" quality that we get to by the time we've imagined the zero and the ten being part of a Douglas-Hofstadter-style self-referential loop that creates consciousness and the world that each of us witnesses each day.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton


Click here for the blog discussing polls 11 through 15.