More Slices of Reality

Two weeks ago, in Dancing on the Timeline, we looked at some fanciful ways of imagining what our spacetime reality might look like from "outside" the tiny planck-length window of our arrow of time. And a while back, in Imagining the Omniverse: Addendum we looked at some of the other visualizations that are out there to help us imagine how the interplay between the granular nature of spacetime and extra-dimensional waveforms might result in the reality we see around us. In one of my earliest blog entries, Death?, and again in Magnets and Souls, we looked at moire patterns and a fascinating physics demonstration people like to call the "corn starch monster": two examples of what happens when one pattern and another pattern interact, and the complex, fluid, and sometimes even life-like patterns that can result as a result of constructive interference. Here's a video I came across not long ago which shows a really creative use of constructive interference:


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5xtRdLOopU

There's a series of kids' books out that use the same technique pictured in the above movie, if you watch the following video for Imagining the Omniverse: Addendum from about the 1:15 mark you'll see a demonstration of one of those books.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MptYznkv14

More and more theories of reality are agreeing that our universe is defined by the non-continuous nature of our 4D spacetime. This is what I was talking about in Slices of Reality, here's the video for that entry again:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nheaNclVe2Y

Holograms are created by interference patterns, as we said in The Holographic Universe, and some theories very specifically tell us that our non-continuous 4D spacetime universe is the shadow of a fifth dimensional hologram. Again, it's important to keep in mind that holograms need an interference pattern to come into view, and the 5th dimensional hologram that defines the wave function of probabilistic outcomes for our universe comes into view for us as a result of the one-planck-length-after-another nature of our spacetime. In You are the Point, I recently suggested that this non-continuous nature of our spacetime is akin to a rapidly vibrating strobe light, creating interesting patterns in ways very similar to the interactions we see with the thin black lines in the above "optical illusion" video, or with the seemingly life-like motions created by the rapid oscillations applied to a corn starch solution - they reveal the nature of underlying extra-dimensional structures.

Ernst Chladni was a German physicist and musician, who published a book in 1787 demonstrating his discovery of the nodal patterns that can become visible when fine particles such as sand are sprinkled on a vibrating metal plate. In Chladni's time, he would use a violin bow to cause his "Chladni Plate" to vibrate. In modern times this is usually done with a signal generator hooked to a speaker mounted under the plate, and the interesting figures that emerge are sometimes called "Chladni Patterns":

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wmFAwqQB0g

In 1967, Hans Jenny published a book called Cymatics: the Study of Wave Phenomena which developed Chladni's ideas much further. Keeping in mind that quantum mechanics tells us that the underlying mode for matter is that it is a wave until it's observed, Cymatics has far-reaching applications. The following two videos relate to Cymatics, plus in both of these videos our old friend the corn starch monster makes an appearance once again.


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


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4shodbQMcmM

As I mentioned, it seems the holographic nature of our reality is being talked about more and more these days. New Scientist magazine recently published a story called "The Entropy Force: a New Direction for Gravity" which describes an exciting new approach from string theorist Erik Verlinde of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Dr. Verlinde bases his ideas upon the information equals reality paradigm that I'm always promoting, and invokes the underlying holographic nature of our spacetime as part of a new explanation for gravity.

We'll talk about interference patterns and gravity some more next week in an entry called Holograms and Quanta.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

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