Thinking Bigger

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

This is the video accompanying my text blog from earlier this year, Our Universe Within the Omniverse.

Ah yes, our old friend the omniverse. Connecting the idea of there being extra dimensions with the idea of there being an omniverse containing the many different forms of multiverse and parallel universes that various cosmological theories have advanced would certainly fall under the category of Thinking Bigger, wouldn't you agree? To be clear, not all multiverse theories posit the necessity of there being extra dimensions, but (as I've always said) when you add extra dimensions it becomes much easier to visualize how there could be other universes just as real as our own, existing within their own versions of spacetime, and yet completely inaccessible from "here". "Here" is our unique universe's position within the multiverse landscape.

In my most popular blog of all time, Jumping Jesus, I embedded Google Video windows showing the amazing Frank Theys documentary "TechnoCalyps" (yes, that's how he spells it). My facebook friend Sean Dickinson recently sent me a link to a ten minute YouTube clip from that same movie which I think does a nice job of expanding these Thinking Bigger conversations beyond physics and beyond technology, through the questions of Simulism and into the realms of the spiritual and the mystical.

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

Some theorists propose that there is only one dimension, and this is an idea we've played with before. In entries like "An Expanding 4D Sphere" and "Our Universe as a Point", we've tried to show how ultimately each dimension is enfolded by the next: the 2D circle contains the 1D line, the 3D sphere contains the 2D circle, the 4D hypersphere contains the 3D sphere, and so on. By the time we're talking about hyperspheres constructed from four or more spatial dimensions, we're rapidly moving beyond what our monkey brains are capable of visualizing! But if our reality is defined at the tenth dimension, that tenth dimension contains a 9D hypersphere as a subset, which contains an 8D hypersphere as its subset, and so on. Wheels within wheels, spheres within spheres, a logic that continues all the way to the tenth dimension: and if a theorist says there is only one dimension, then I would say they are somehow pointing towards the enfolded nature of all of these structures considered simultaneously.

We're going to continue this line of reasoning in these upcoming entries: Extra-dimensional Geometry, Thinking Biggest, Psychedelics and Spacetime, and Tangential Thinking.

Till then, enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Dancing in the Omniverse