Friday, December 31, 2010

Top 100 Tenth Dimension Blogs - 2010 Report

Other reports on this blog:
. April 08 . May 08 . June 08 . July 08 . August 08 .
. September 08 . October 08 . November 08 . December 08 .
. Top 100 - 2008 Report . End of 1st Quarter 09 . May 09 .
. June 09 . July 09 . August 09 . September 09 . October 09 .
. November 09 . December 09 . Top 100 - 2009 Report .
. January 10 . February 10 . March 10 . April 10 . May 10 .
. June 10 . July 10 . August 10 . September 10 . October 10 .
. November 10 . December 10 .

Here we are at the end of 2010, with a quick recap of another exciting year for this project. Some of the highlights:

  • The Imagining the Tenth Dimension website has now had over 6 million unique visitors, and almost 100 million hits since its launch.
  • My YouTube channel is currently at over 15,000 subscribers, and we just passed the 350 mark for the number of videos I've posted there, which have been viewed a total of over four million times!
  • As we saw in The 5th Dimensional Camera Project, a team of scientists at Oxford were introduced to my way of visualizing the extra dimensions by Anab Jain and Jon Ardern, and one of those scientists participated in a video explaining my concept of the fifth dimension as our "probability space".
  • I was interviewed on live talk shows by Kelly Howell (Theatre of the Mind) and by Kerrace Alexander (BigFish Radio).
  • In October I was invited by the amazingly energetic Dr. Mark Filippi of somaspace.org to attend the 2010 Coherence Conference, which took place at the University of Bridgeport. Unfortunately my schedule did not allow me to attend, but I did submit a five minute video to the conference which you can view at this link: Global Coherence.
  • My company Talking Dog Studios continued to develop expertise in Augmented Reality, and created the AR experience Hollywood's Legendary Pictures used to announce their upcoming 2012 release of their re-launch of the Godzilla Franchise. Meanwhile, our Augmented Reality game ScavengAR Hunt, which can be played on iPhones and Android Phones, is continuing to develop a worldwide audience.
  • Several projects that claimed Imagining the Tenth Dimension as inspiration were released this year: Hipercubo, an iPhone game; Rift, an award-winning game prototype developed by Blake Maloof and his team at the Savannah College of Art and Design; Alexander's Time Illusion, a simple java game created to explore a concept we looked at in Time and Schizophrenia. Plus, Scope DJ, a well-known music producer from the Netherlands, released a track using samples of my voice.
  • As a fun side project, in 2010 I released videos for five of my songs recorded over a decade ago with my good friends Bob Evans and Roberta Nichol: My Computer is My Friend, Crop Circles, Forty Below, Greetings from the Grids, and Gimme the News.
  • Several of my video blogs were translated into Spanish and released on YouTube.
  • O is for Omniverse, my followup book created in collaboration with visual artist Marilyn E. Robertson continues to be available at Omniverse.tv, and other Imagining the Tenth Dimension books, t-shirts, and DVDs are available at www.tenthdimension.com/store. Meanwhile, at www.tenthdimension.com/digital, various files are available for download, including high quality versions of the original animation, books in non-copy-protected pdf format, mp3s of various songs, and the audiobook version of Imagining the Tenth Dimension. The first two sections of the audiobook (the Preamble and the Introduction) are also posted on YouTube.
As we see up at the top here, I've been posting monthly reports with "top ten blogs of the month" and the latest top 26 blogs of all time for almost three years now, and at the end of 2008
and again at the end of 2009 I published a Top 100 Tenth Dimension list. I'd like to continue that tradition this year, so the list below is in the same format as last year's, showing the month the blog entry originates from. Also, just for interest's sake, I've put a number at the end of each line indicating the position that blog entry held in our 2009 report. Thank you tenth dimension fans for your support!


1. Jumping Jesus (October 09) (1)
2. What's Around the Corner? (October 09) (6)
3. Mandelbulbs (December 09) (41)
4. An Expanding 4D Sphere (August 09) (7)
5. Just Six Things: The I Ching (August 09) (8)
6. Roger Ebert on Quantum Reincarnation (August 09) (11)
7. Creativity and the Quantum Universe (February 09) (2)
8. The 5th-Dimensional Camera Project (May 10)
9. How to Time Travel (December 09) (97)
10. Light Has No Speed (September 10)
11. Vibrations and Fractals (April 10)
12. Poll 44 - The Biocentric Universe Theory (September 09) (9)
13. Dancing on the Timeline (February 10)
14. Our Universe Within the Omniverse (April 10)
15. Monkeys Love Metallica (January 10)
16. Magnets and Morality (April 10)
17. Consciousness in Frames per Second (December 09)
18. Poll 43 - Is the Multiverse Real? (August 09) (24)
19. Alien Mathematics (July 09) (13)
20. 10-10-10 Look Before You Leap (October 10)
21. Polls Archive 54 - Is Time Moving Faster? (March 10)
22. Seeing Time, Feeling Colors, Tasting Light (September 09) (22)
23. Simultaneous Inspiration (August 10)
24. When's a Knot Not a Knot (August 09) (15)
25. Flow (January 10)
26. The Quantum Solution to Time's Arrow (September 09) (18)
27. Beer and Miracles (September 09) (25)
28. Augmented Reality (January 09) (3)
29. You Are the Point (January 10)
30. Complexity from Simplicity (September 10)
31. The Big Bang is an Illusion (July 09) (21)
32. Poll 46 - Big Bang an Illusion? (September 09) (27)
33. Fourth Spatial Dimension 101 (April 10)
34. Norway's "Reverse Deja Vu" (August 09) (26)
35. Entangled Neurons (May 10)
36. The Holographic Universe (January 09) (4)
37. Three Becomes One (May 10)
38. Slices of Reality (January 09) (5)
39. Poll 45 - Conscious Computers (September 09) (33)
40. Time is in the Mind (December 09)
41. The Map and the Territory (August 09) (32)
42. The Long Undulating Snake (July 09) (31)
43. Placebos Becoming More Effective? (January 10)
44. The Fifth Dimension if Spooky (October 09) (38)
45. Playing Games in Extra Dimensions (January 10)
46. Alien Life and Sea Dragons (November 09) (89)
47. Our Universe as a Dodecahedron (May 10)
48. The Statistical Universe (September 09) (37)
49. Entangled Awareness and OBEs (May 10)
50. Suffering in the Multiverse (July 09) (35)
51. Ringing in the Brain (October 09) (47)
52. Our Universe as a Point (May 10)
53. Life is But a Dream (December 09)
54. I'm You From the Future (February 10)
55. The Flexi-Laws of Physics (July 09) (39)
56. What's South of the South Pole? (July 09) (44)
57. Poll 41 - Is Creativity a Quantum Process? (August 09) (40)
58. The Forest (April 10)
59. Poll 49 - Are We a 3D Sphere on a 4D Hypersphere? (November 09) (95)
60. Temporal Mass (October 09) (60)
61. The Biocentric Universe Part 2 (July 09) (46)
62. Nothing is Real (January 10)
63. Poll 48 - Amazing Psychic Readings (September 09) (49)
64. New Video - Magnets and Morality (October 10)
65. Theatre of the Mind (May 10)
66. Poll 65 to 68 - Thinking Big (October 10)
67. Holograms and Quanta (March 10)
68. Cymatics, Gravity and Light (September 10)
69. Tenth Dimension Books on Bit Torrent (July 09) (45)
70. Skhizein (January 10)
71. Constructive Interference and the Quantum Observer (September 10)
72. Vibrations (April 10)
73. Polls Archive 60 - Quantum and Macro a Continuum? (April 10)
74. Tenth Dimension on boingboing (August 09) (48)
75. O is for Omniverse - G to J (November 09) (96)
76. Quantum Suicide (October 09) (62)
77. News From the Future (May 09) (50)
78. Computers and Consciousness (June 09) (54)
79. Ice Age in 4D (July 09) (51)
80. Dark Flow (January 10)
81. Strength of Gravity, Speed of Light (March 10)
82. Love and Gravity (July 10)
83. Urban Garden Magazine (February 09) (10)
84. Coconut Carrying Octopus (December 09)
85. Nassim Haramein (June 09) (53)
86. Poll 42 - Does Twitter Connect or Distract? (August 09) (57)
87. Do Animals Have Souls? (June 09) (56)
88. New Animation - The Forest (October 10)
89. ExpandAR - Augmented Reality (February 10)
90. Changing Reality (May 10)
91. The Very Model of a Singularitarian (December 09)
92. Logic vs. Intuition (June 09) (58)
93. Jumping Jesus on YouTube (August 10)
94. We Start (August 10)
95. 3 Books That Could Change Your Life (February 10)
96. Surveillance (June 09) (59)
97. O is for Omniverse - A and B (November 09) (98)
98. Placebos and Biocentrism (September 10)
99. More Slices of Reality (February 10)
100. O is for Omniverse - C and D (November 09) (99)

Our world is changing, and as it changes more and more people are becoming interested in this project. To everyone out there, I send you my best wishes and fond regards for the upcoming year. Enjoy the journey in 2011!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Living in a Simulation

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs, December Report

Previous lists:
. April 08 . May 08 . June 08 . July 08 . August 08
. September 08 . October 08 . November 08 . December 08 .
. Top 100 Blog Entries of 2008 . May 09 . June 09 . July 09
. August 09 . September 09 . October 09 . November 09 .
. December 09 . Top 100 Blog Entries of 2009 .
. January 10 . February 10 . March 10 . April 10 . May 10 .
. June 10 . July 10 . August 10 . September 10 . October 10 .
. November 10 .

Based upon number of views, here are the top blogs for the last thirty days.

1. Psychedelics and Spacetime
2. Just Geometry
3. Poll 69 - Bees and Tangential Thinking
4. Is Reality an Illusion?
5. Poll 71-73 - More Tangential Thinking
6. Neurons and Extra Dimensions
7. Extra Dimensions and OBEs
8. Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 53 to 73
9. Infinite Division
10. Dancing in the Tenth Dimension


And as of December 26th, 2010, here are the twenty-six Imagining the Tenth Dimension blog entries that have attracted the most visits of all time. Items marked in bold are new or have risen since last month.

1. Jumping Jesus (1)
2. What's Around the Corner? (2)
3. Mandelbulbs (3)
4. An Expanding 4D Sphere (4)
5. Just Six Things: The I Ching (5)
6. Roger Ebert on Quantum Reincarnation (6)
7. Creativity and the Quantum Universe (7)
8. The 5th-Dimensional Camera Project (8)
9. How to Time Travel (9)
10. Light Has No Speed (23)
11. Vibrations and Fractals (10)
12. Poll 44 - The Biocentric Universe Theory (11)
13. Dancing on the Timeline (12)
14. Our Universe Within the Omniverse (13)
15. Monkeys Love Metallica (14)
16. Magnets and Morality (16)
17. Consciousness in Frames per Second (15)
18. Poll 43 - Is the Multiverse Real? (17)
19. Alien Mathematics (18)
20. 10-10-10 Look Before You Leap (new)
21. Polls Archive 54 - Is Time Moving Faster? (21)
22. Seeing Time, Feeling Colors, Tasting Light (19)
23. Simultaneous Inspiration (25)
24. When's a Knot Not a Knot? (20)
25. Flow (24)
26. The Quantum Solution to Time's Arrow (22)


Which means that this worthy submission is leaving our top 26 of all time list this month:

Augmented Reality (20)


By the way, if you're new to this project, you might want to check out the Tenth Dimension FAQ, as it provides a road map to a lot of the discussions and different materials that have been created for this project. If you are interested in the 26 songs attached to this project, this blog shows a video for each of the songs and provides more links with lyrics and discussion. The Annotated Tenth Dimension Video provides another cornucopia of discussion topics to be connected to over at YouTube. And as always, here's a reminder that the Tenth Dimension Forum is a good place to converse with other people about these ideas.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Top 100 Tenth Dimension Blogs 2010

Friday, December 24, 2010

Gravity and Love


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qkq3IIxUEjQ

Now is the time of the year when all of us should be thinking about the power of love. The above video accompanies one of my favorite blog entries of 2010, Love and Gravity. It wraps up a lot of the ideas we've talked about this year into a nice little package, and I hope you enjoy it.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, all the best of the season to you and yours. No matter what your personal belief system is, may you feel the power of love now and throughout the coming year.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Top 100 Tenth Dimension Blogs of 2010.

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Time Travel Paradoxes


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-x8qCX78MVk


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

The above video accompanies my previous blog entry Just Six Things, which was published earlier this year. It connects to the video we looked at last time in Bees and the LHC, in which we considered the possibility that bees can somehow perceive the sixth dimension (as has been proposed by a scientist analyzing the "waggle dance" they perform to communicate to each other), and the controversial leap I made that perhaps the declining bee population of the world is connected to their sixth-dimensional perception.

In entries such as Just Six Things, I've been relating the quantum mechanics concept of there being a wave function of all possible states for our universe to my way of describing the sixth dimension, the entirety of which then becomes a point in the seventh dimension, which gives our universe a certain location within the multiverse landscape. Thinking that there is a set of all possible states that already exists for our universe leads some back to the idea that free will is an illusion, since within that wave function we can see that everything that can happen already has happened from the perspective of timelessness.

Everett's "Theory of the Universal Wavefunction" (also referred to as "Many Worlds") is the way out of this quandary, which brings us to today's topic.

A YouTube user named Lee Ann recently asked me a question about time travel paradoxes, and here's how I responded to her:

Hi Lee Ann, that's a great question.

I subscribe to Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, because it allows a logical consistency to such discussions, and avoids the Grandfather Paradox issues. I presume you're familiar with the Grandfather Paradox where someone goes back in time, kills their grandfather, which means they were never born, so the grandfather is not killed, so the person is born and goes back and kills the grandfather, and so on?

Everett's interpretation makes more sense to me. So to answer your question specifically, assuming reliable time travel technology now exists it's December 2010 and you and your son climb into your time machine. There will be two main branches of you created now: the one where you go back in time (B) and the version that said "I choose not to go back in time" (A). Version A continues on with their life, no time travel occurred so things happen accordingly with their life from there on.

Version B goes back to 1992 and does something - carves their name in a tree, blows up their house, whatever you care to imagine. They could meet with and talk to themselves --the 18 years younger versions of themselves-- but in doing so they would be creating a new timeline, a version C of themselves who in December 2010 remembers that time 18 years ago when the time travelers appeared.

Does version A ever see the carving in the tree? No. Does version B become the 18 years younger version of themselves when they travel back in time? No. And as time travelers are they able to cause things to happen like causing their parents to never fall in love so they're not born (a la Back to the Future)? No.

In fact, here's a couple of paragraphs from my book on the Back to the Future question:

It should be clearer now that "Back to A Future" might have been a better title for this movie trilogy, since anyone who goes into their own past will never be able to get back to the present they had started from--because in that present time they started from they had never traveled to their own past. Their action of traveling to the past automatically puts them on a new timeline, the one where they had been in their own past, which might end up arriving at a present extremely similar to their original timeline, but is more likely to be completely different. Paradoxes such as this are built into any discussion of time travel--but agreeing that all possible pasts and futures really do exist is still easier to deal with than the alternative, which would be to imagine that there is only one real timeline and every aspect of the past and future is already carved into stone. If each of us is correct in our belief that we have free will, then the future must be filled with options, not just a single track.

There could be a whole other set of "Back to A Future" movies created where the inherent paradoxes are explored--for instance there is the plot where Marty travels to the new and improved future (the ending of the original movie), and discovers a family and friends who have lived a happy life with some other "timeline twin" of Marty, who we will call "New Marty". "Old Marty" realizes that "New Marty" must exist, because otherwise his new and improved family wouldn't have recognized him, and would have chased him out of the house as a stranger. So "Old Marty" has a gruesome task ahead of him: he must find and kill "New Marty" and dispose of the body before anyone finds out they both exist. The rest of the movie would entertain us with the hilarious slip-ups as "Old Marty" then tries to interact with his new and improved family despite never having shared any of their past years together.
Next time we're going to discuss one of my favorite blog entries of 2010, which finally has a new video up on YouTube: the entry will be called Gravity and Love.

Till then, enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Saturday, December 18, 2010

Bees and the LHC


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzhLlsk1k78

Have astronomers finally found direct evidence of other universes? Read this Technology Review article for more on that.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTtGcNk7Rhs

The above newly published video accompanies a blog entry from earlier this year, called "Are Bees More Sixth-Dimensional?". More recently, we talked about bees, Terence McKenna, and Stephen Hawking (an unlikely trio if ever there was one) in Bees and Tangential Thinking. Do bees sense the sixth dimension, and that's why the "waggle dance" they use to convey the presence of food sources to each other make sense when analyzed using six dimensional flag manifold geometry, the same geometry which can be used to analyze the actions of quarks at the subatomic level? It's fascinating to consider! But at this point there are still mainstream scientists not convinced that extra dimensions even exist.

The June issue of Scientific American, as shown here, had as its cover story "12 Events That Will Change Everything". As you've probably guessed, the one that stood out for me was the event described by George Musser: the discovery of definite evidence of extra dimensions. Here's a few paragraphs from Mr. Musser's excellent article:


As fantastic as extra dimensions of space sound, they might really exist. From the relative weakness of gravity to the deep affinity among seemingly distinct particles and forces, various mysteries of the world around us give the impression that the known universe is but the shadow of a higher-dimensional reality. If so, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva could smash particles together and release enough energy to break the shackles that keep particles in three dimensions and let us reach into that mind-blowing realm.

Proof of extra dimensions “would alter our whole notion of what reality is,” says cosmologist Max Tegmark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who in 1990 wrote a four-dimensional version of the video game Tetris to get a taste of what extra dimensions might be like. (You keep track of the falling blocks using multiple 3-D slices of the full 4-D space.

In modern physics theories, the main rationale for extra dimensions is the concept of supersymmetry, which aims to unite all the different types of particles into one big happy family. Supersymmetry can fulfill that promise only if space has a total of 10 dimensions. The dimensions could have gone unnoticed either because they are too small to enter or because we are, by our very nature, stuck to a 3-D membrane like a caterpillar clutching onto a leaf.

To be sure, not every proposed unified theory involves extra dimensions. So their discovery or nondiscovery would be a helpful data point. “It would focus what we do,” says physicist Lisa Randall of Harvard University, who made her name studying the caterpillar-and-leaf option.

...If the LHC produced subatomic black holes, they would be immediate proof of extra dimensions, because gravity in ordinary 3-D space is simply too weak to create holes of this size. For geometric reasons, higher dimensions would strengthen gravity on small scales. They would likewise change the small-scale behavior of other forces, such as electromagnetism. And by dictating how supersymmetry operates, they might lead to distinctive patterns among the masses and other properties of particles. Besides the LHC, scientists might find hints of extra dimensions in measurements of the strength of gravity and in observations of the orbits of black holes or of exploding stars.

The discovery would transform not only physics but also its allied disciplines. Extra dimensions might explain mysteries such as cosmic acceleration and might even be a prelude to reworking the entire notion of dimensionality—adding to a growing sense that space and time emerge from physical principles that play out in a spaceless, timeless realm.

In Bees and Tangential Thinking, we looked at Terence McKenna's proposal that perceiving extra dimensions is the more natural state for living creatures, but that as complex creatures like us evolved there were certain evolutionary advantages to limiting awareness to the "here" of 3D space and the "now" of our point within 4D space-time. In Are Bees More Sixth-Dimensional? I made the somewhat whimsical suggestion that bees could now be disappearing from the planet because of their sixth-dimensional awareness, which might be a confirmation of McKenna's ideas. Commenters at YouTube were quick to point out that the most popular theory is that it's a fungus which is decimating the honeybee population of the world, but the jury seems to still be out on that one, as this recent article from Ars Technica explains. Microbes? A fungus? A virus? Pesticides? Coincidences that bees in different parts of the world are dying off at the same time, but from different causes?

And finally, how would being able to see sixth-dimensionally protect a honeybee from these popularly stated causes? Perhaps there would be no advantage, or no disadvantage, since the bees (like us) are physically constrained to the 3D atoms and molecules of their bodies.

The interesting information remains that there may be creatures on our planet able to perceive extra dimensions, and that in itself should be added to the evidence that we expect to mount in 2011 that the extra spatial dimensions are physically real, and not just "mathematical masturbation" as some critics have claimed.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Time Travel Paradoxes

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Evidence for Seeing the Future?


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wo_Mq6LKhI8


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVzyickQ2Fo

The above video accompanies a text blog published in June, called "Gravity and Entrainment". If gravity is the only force that exerts itself across the extra dimensions, and my supposition that quantum effects will eventually be proved to be more easily understood because these "spooky" actions are occurring as a result of patterns of connectedness across the extra dimensions, then what are the implications?

Here are two recent science news stories that may relate to this. The first is an article published in November in New Scientist, written by Peter Aldhous, and titled "Is This Evidence that We Can See the Future?". Here's a few paragraphs about a new research paper:

The paper, due to appear in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology before the end of the year, is the culmination of eight years' work by Daryl Bem of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. "I purposely waited until I thought there was a critical mass that wasn't a statistical fluke," he says.

It describes a series of experiments involving more than 1000 student volunteers. In most of the tests, Bem took well-studied psychological phenomena and simply reversed the sequence, so that the event generally interpreted as the cause happened after the tested behaviour rather than before it.

In one experiment, students were shown a list of words and then asked to recall words from it, after which they were told to type words that were randomly selected from the same list. Spookily, the students were better at recalling words that they would later type.

In another study, Bem adapted research on "priming" – the effect of a subliminally presented word on a person's response to an image. For instance, if someone is momentarily flashed the word "ugly", it will take them longer to decide that a picture of a kitten is pleasant than if "beautiful" had been flashed. Running the experiment back-to-front, Bem found that the priming effect seemed to work backwards in time as well as forwards.

I invite you to read the whole article. This study is not without its detractors, but Dr. Bem insists that proper scientific protocols were followed, and the fact that the paper has been accepted for publication indicates that at least some other experts agree.

Now, here's another New Scientist article that was published five days later, written by Justin Mullins, and titled "Quantum Time Travel: Black Hole Not Required". It discusses new papers published by quantum computing expert Seth Lloyd, who we've talked about a number of times in this blog.

According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, there is no objective reality until a measurement is made. But we are beginning to learn that even that reality may be a moveable feast: the past state of a quantum particle has no more reality than its future state. Which is why post-selection has an effect. In other words, everything is up for grabs. In theory, the post-selection process could even change the entire history of the universe.

Lloyd and Aephraim Steinberg, of the University of Toronto, Canada, say this peculiar property of the quantum world might be the key to a working time machine. Our daily experiences tell us that the conditions given at the beginning of an experiment will determine its outcome. But if quantum particles can't discriminate between things that affect them forward and backward in time, that means specifying a final condition can determine what happens before it. "Mathematically, there's no reason why final conditions can't be 'givens' as well and everything has to follow logically from them," Steinberg says.

It is exactly this sort of thinking that led physicists Charles Bennett at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, New York, and Ben Schumacher at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, to suggest that quantum mechanics could be used to build a time machine by making use of quantum teleportation, a phenomenon that has been demonstrated experimentally countless times. The process exploits a curious quantum property called entanglement, by which two particles, such as photons, become so closely linked that they share the same existence. Entangled particles are special because a measurement on one immediately influences the other, no matter how far away it is.

Now imagine that you want to teleport a third space-travelling particle from A to B. The trick is to make a pair of entangled particles and place one of them at A and one at B, then carry out a set of measurements at both locations. If you do this just right, you can use this "spooky action at distance", as Einstein called it, to ensure that the second particle ends up in a state that is exactly the same as the "space traveller".

In fairness, the traveller hasn't physically moved, but the quantum information that completely describes the traveller has made the trip instead and this allows the second particle at B to take on the traveller's identity.


I'm hoping that the possible connections I'm seeing between the above two articles are clear. We've talked about the past being just as open-ended as the future many times before in my book and in this blog, here are a few other entries on that topic:

Local Realism Bites the Dust
The Past is an Illusion
The Biocentric Universe
The Biocentric Universe Part 2
The Long Undulating Snake
The Flexi-Laws of Physics

Next time, we'll continue this discussion as we look at the fascinating theory that bees appear to be able to perceive the sixth dimension, and the predictions that the LHC may finally confirm the existence of extra dimensions in 2011.

My prediction is that my next entry will be called Bees and the LHC. :)

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Sunday, December 12, 2010

Infinite Division


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV5H1u5eq5E

(This picture was created by my Facebook friend Annamaria Paizs, a Hungarian born Dutch artist living and working in Breda the Netherlands. It's called "Whitehole". Click here for other examples of her work. Thanks Annamaria!)


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mX-iOZXrZ7U

This video accompanies a blog entry published earlier this year called Gravity and Free Will, which was tied together with a look at the results from four recent poll questions here at this blog.

Last entry, in Threes, we worked our way through the Three Becomes One concept we explored earlier this year, and we arrived at thinking about spin. "Spin" ties together with Triality, Twistor Theory, Garrett Lisi's E8 rotation, Dan Winter's fractal compression/decompression, Nassim Haramein's point-based physics, and Marko Rodin's Rodin Coil. Could all of these different approaches be related? Let's watch a couple of movies.

This YouTube movie is titled Infinite Division. It uses visuals from a number of other videos and presents the ideas of Nassim Haramein using clips from a live presentation of Nassim's from a few years ago.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cd37rafOJ1U

Here's a second video: this one features Randy Powell, who has studied with Marko Rodin, and has been working on ways to visualize the spin-based vortex mathematics of Rodin's work. As you'll see, in this ten minute video Randy makes some astonishing claims about the importance of this work and his group's intention to turn this knowledge into an open source project with far-reaching implications for humanity! Does this make him sound like a crackpot? Of course it does. But if these claims are supportable by hard math, then we may be looking here at a way of harnessing the Information Equals Reality paradigm I've been promoting throughout the life of this project. What do you think about this ten minute presentation?


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1hLzQPio_8

How does the concept of infinite division relate to my approach to visualizing the dimensions? The answer is encoded into the logo I created for my project: at the core of this is the point we start with (the zero) and the point we end with (the ten), and those are connected. All of the other dimensions represent ways of dividing up the information that becomes reality, and so are shown in this graphic to be revolving around or "outside" the conceptual line which connects those starting and ending points. Those points, by virtue of being of indeterminate size, are really equivalent, but it's helpful to think of the zero as representing the drive towards division down to the infinitesimally small, and the ten as representing the drive towards encompassing the infinitely large "point" of the Omniverse.

Ultimately all of that information exists as potential within the beautifully balanced symmetry state that exists both before and after our universe or any other information set. So, if all possible states already exist and we are each merely observing infinitely dividable "slices" from instant to instant, is it possible for us to sense the future? Next time we'll look at a new science experiment on that question, with an entry called "Evidence for Seeing the Future?".


Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Threes


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amcTK7Mnu70

This recently published video accompanies a blog entry from earlier this year called Three Becomes One. Our discussion this time also ties to a comment I made in Entangled Awareness and OBEs, where I suggested that we could think of my approach to visualizing the dimensions as a filing system that encompasses all possible expressions of information and reality.

Here's a link to a really great article written by Brian Hayes and published in a 2001 issue of American Scientist magazine: it's called Third Base. Please read the whole article, which celebrates the advantages of using the ternary (as opposed to the binary) counting system, which is really another aspect of the three becomes one concept. I did want to quote from a section I thought was particularly innovative: Brian's sub-heading for this section is "Martha Stewart's File Cabinet".

Some weeks ago, rooting around in files of old clippings and correspondence, I made a discovery of astonishing obviousness and triviality. What I found had nothing to do with the content of the files; it was about their arrangement in the drawer.

Imagine a fastidious office worker—a Martha Stewart of filing—who insists that no file folder lurk in the shadow of another. The protruding tabs on the folders must be arranged so that adjacent folders always have tabs in different positions. Achieving this staggered arrangement is easy if you're setting up a new file, but it gets messy when folders are added or deleted at random.

A drawer filled with "half-cut" folders, which have just two tab positions, might initially alternate left-right-left-right. The pattern is spoiled, however, as soon as you insert a folder in the middle of the drawer. No matter which type of folder you choose and no matter where you put it (except at the very ends of the sequence), every such insertion generates a conflict. Removing a folder has the same effect. Translated into a binary numeral with left=0 and right=1, the pristine file is the alternating sequence ...0101010101.... An insertion or deletion creates either a 00 or a 11—a flaw much like a dislocation in a crystal. Although in principle the flaw could be repaired—either by introducing a second flaw of the opposite polarity or by flipping all the bits between the site of the flaw and the end of the sequence—even the most maniacally tidy record-keeper is unlikely to adopt such practices in a real file drawer.

In my own files I use third-cut rather than half-cut folders; the tabs appear in three positions, left, middle and right. Nevertheless, I had long thought—or rather I had assumed without bothering to think—that a similar analysis would apply, and that I couldn't be sure of avoiding conflicts between adjacent folders unless I was willing to shift files to new folders after every insertion. Then came my Epiphany of the File Cabinet a few weeks ago: Suddenly I understood that going from half-cut to third-cut folders makes all the difference.

It's easy to see why; just interpret the drawerful of third-cut folders as a sequence of ternary digits. At any position in any such sequence, you can always insert a new digit that differs from both of its neighbors. Base 3 is the smallest base that has this property. Moreover, if you build up a ternary sequence by consistently inserting digits that avoid conflicts, then the choice of which symbol to insert is always a forced one; you never have to make an arbitrary selection among two or more legal possibilities. Thus, as a file drawer fills up, it is not only possible to maintain perfect Martha Stewart order; it's actually quite easy...

The protocol for avoiding conflicts between third-cut file folders is so obvious that I assume it must be known to file clerks everywhere. But in half a dozen textbooks on filing—admittedly a small sample of a surprisingly extensive literature—I found no clear statement of the principle.

Now, here's an article from the physorg.com website about a theory proposed in 2007 by mathematician George Sparling of the University of Pittsburgh that there are two additional dimensions beyond space-time which can be described as "time-like". Sound familiar? This is one way of describing the first six dimensions of my "new way of thinking about time and space". First, read the article, which includes mention of twistors and twistor space. It also includes Elie Cartan's "triality" symbol pictured here, which ties into the idea that Sparling's three time-like dimensions can be rotated into a single point (three becomes one), which can be thought of as a "null" or "zero" created by the perfectly balanced symmetry inherent within triality.

Interestingly, triality also connects to Garrett Lisi's E8 rotation, which we've talked about a number of times in this blog. Coincidentally, E8 as A Geometric Theory of Everything is a featured article in the December 2010 issue of Scientific American.

At the end of Three Becomes One I showed you the following two graphics:

Pictured at left: diagram showing congruence of null lines from Twistor Theory.
Pictured at right: diagram of Marko Rodin's Rodin Coil.
According to the June 2010 issue of Scientific American, there's renewed excitement about
Twistor Theory and String Theory being united by the highly respected theoretical physicist Ed Witten. It appears to me that this will all tie into the work of Marko Rodin, whose Rodin Coil is pictured at right, but that remains to be confirmed.

We're going to continue this exploration next time with an entry about Infinite Division. Till then, enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Saturday, December 4, 2010

Is Reality an Illusion?

Is reality an illusion? This is not just a philosophical question. Here's a link to an article about a new scientific experiment, and the title says it all: "Fermilab is Building a Holometer to Determine Once and for All Whether Reality is Just an Illusion".


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCJLRrFTX3Q

The above video is for Changing Reality, recently put up on youtube but accompanying a blog entry from six months ago. The Big Question is, how much are we each creating the reality we see around us, and by extension how inevitable is it? Can we change our reality by changing our attitude? Epigenetics and the increasingly effective Placebo Effect are some of the signposts I've been using to say that leading edge science supports this idea, but a century of training to the contrary still makes a number of educated people reject such ideas immediately. "The only thing that matters is matter", they say, and "people can't change reality with their thoughts".

In Just Geometry we looked at an idea from The Grand Design: Model Dependent Realism. Some are lamenting that this represents Stephen Hawking giving up on the possibility of there ever being one TOE, one Theory of Everything, because each unique frame of reference changes the rules, so to speak. Model Dependent Realism proposes that the fabric of reality contains many possibilities, and no one theory or formula is going to be able to encompass them all.

So if reality is an illusion and different frames of reference allow the possibility of different rules, are you willing to accept the implications of the following video my facebook friend Frank Samaritano recently sent to me? Or are you going to say the man in this video is a charlatan? Is it really possible for a person to set paper on fire using only the energy from their body? A century of training to the contrary will lead some people to assume that this couldn't possibly be real, but see what you think.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3F3ovb2kZ9Q

Next time we'll return to the Three Becomes One concept, with an entry called Threes. Till then, enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Tenth Dimension Vlog playlist