Timelike Entanglement

Here's the opening paragraph from an article written by Lisa Zyga and published last week at physorg.com. The article is called Physicists Describe Method to Observe Timelike Entanglement:

In "ordinary" quantum entanglement, two particles possess properties that are inherently linked with each other, even though the particles may be spatially separated by a large distance. Now, physicists S. Jay Olson and Timothy C. Ralph from the University of Queensland have shown that it's possible to create entanglement between regions of spacetime that are separated in time but not in space, and then to convert the timelike entanglement into normal spacelike entanglement. They also discuss the possibility of using this timelike entanglement from the quantum vacuum for a process they call "teleportation in time."

Personally, I find the above idea much easier to assimilate when I look at my new diagram I've been showing you this month, here it is again:


The underlying idea of Timelike Entanglement speaks to many of the more mysterious connections we've explored with this project, in such blog entries as Evidence for Seeing the Future, Magnets and Morality, Time and Schizophrenia, Beer and Miracles, Entangled Neurons, and Entangled Awareness and OBEs.

Ultimately, if time is an illusion and our Probability Space is really Just Geometry, then the possibility of there being patterns of connectedness across time makes perfect sense. Richard Dawkins understood this very well, and his invented word "memes" has now become a much-used way of talking about these timeless patterns that can connect across millennia without losing any of their impact: as a geneticist, he was interested in the fact that this makes "memes" much more powerful than "genes". Here's what I said in my book about this:

The connection that a group of like-minded people share (whether it be families, special interest groups, corporate culture, religion, sports fans, that song or band whose lyrics seem to express our innermost thoughts… this could be a very long list) can be viewed as a set of memes which connect people, not only in the third and fourth dimension but across higher dimensions as well. In this way, memes can be shown to be even more influential than genes because of their ability to extend so powerfully across time. For example, the words of a Chinese philosopher from 3500 years ago can still have the power to establish “viruses of the mind” which infect new readers and spread from person to person. Influential thinkers such as Confucius or Socrates set into motion memes which can continue to have their full effect even to this day. Conversely, the unique set of genes belonging to Confucius or Socrates (if they are even in the world’s gene pool today), by now are so completely diluted as to be inconsequential.

The very next paragraph in my book talks about how "memes" are tied to The Quantum Observer that is within each of us, and that's the title of our next entry.

Till then, enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Top Ten Tenth DImension Blogs, January 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 . December 10 . Top 100 Entries of 2010 .

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

1. Infinite Division
2. Bees and the LHC
3. Extra Dimensions and OBEs
4. Gravity and Love
5. Time Travel Paradoxes
6. Neurons and Extra Dimensions
7. Evidence for Seeing the Future?
8. Threes
9. Living in a Simulation
10. Top 100 Entries of 2010

And as of January 26th, 2011, 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. Vibrations and Fractals (11)
11. Light Has No Speed (10)
12. Dancing on the Timeline (13)
13. Poll 44 - The Biocentric Universe Theory (12)
14. Our Universe Within the Omniverse (14)
15. Monkeys Love Metallica (15)
16. Magnets and Morality (16)
17. 10-10-10 Look Before You Leap (20)
18. Consciousness in Frames per Second (17)
19. Simultaneous Inspiration (23)
20. Poll 43 - Is the Multiverse Real? (18)
21. Alien Mathematics (19)
22. Polls Archive 54 - Is Time Moving Faster? (21)
23. Seeing Time, Feeling Colors, Tasting Light (22)
24. When's a Knot Not a Knot? (24)
25. Flow (25)
26. The Quantum Solution to Time's Arrow (26)


Which means that no submissions are leaving our top 26 of all time list this month.

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: Timelike Entanglement

Cymatics

Here's my new video I've just put up to accompany a blog entry from last fall called Cymatics, Gravity and Light. As I mention at the start of this video, "Cymatics" is the study of sound and vibrations made visible.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eTrsIOGIZo

So let's talk a little more about Cymatics this time. Here's an image of what's known as a Chladni Plate, first discussed in a book published by Ernst Chladni in 1787. Chladni refined a technique which involved drawing a violin bow over a piece of metal whose surface is lightly covered with sand. The plate is bowed until a musical tone is produced and the sand forms a pattern like the one in this picture, or many others possible patterns depending upon the note produced. In other words, this is a form of cymatics, in which we can actually visualize the sound being produced by this vibrating metal platform.


In my video above I showed images from another YouTube video called Hidden World: Cymatics. Here's that video, which shows how in modern times it has become more common to place a loudspeaker driven by an electronic signal generator over or under the plate to achieve a more accurate adjustable frequency, and with the added benefit that we can see the patterns changing from one to another in a repeatable fashion as different frequencies are played.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxV0FrFMxUY

Here are two images from the video: the one on the left is an oval-shaped Chladni Plate being driven by a certain frequency, and the one on the right is (of course) a tortoise. See any similarities?

Hidden World: Cymatics looks at the work of German photographer Alexander Lauterwasser, who has made it his mission to catalogue the different patterns that can be found in a Chladni Plate, and to point out the connections between these patterns to those found in the natural world we see around us. Here we are looking at some of the "Chladni Sound figures" (as they refer to them here) seen in this video.

These pictures show how the cymatics patterns change with the increasingly high frequency being generated to excite the Chladni Plate. I find it fascinating to think that a tortoise, whose awareness seems to more slow and deliberate, would have markings on the shell that correspond to a relatively low tone. Are these creatures plugged into a longer groove, a deeper music than we are?

Here's a quote from near the end of their promo video which does a nice job of explaining my fascination with Chladni Plates and Cymatics:

"The sand is pushed from areas where the vibration is strongest, and collects where it is the weakest, forming patterns that correspond to the particular tone that is applied to the plate. The higher the frequency applied, the more complex and detailed is the pattern that results."

As you can see in the last screens from this video, Hidden World: Cymatics video is actually a promo for one of a set of DVDs, which I haven't seen but I'm interested in viewing some day.

The central idea to Imagining the Tenth Dimension is that our unique universe is being generated at the fifth dimension, and this month I've been focusing on how the interaction of gravity and light is at the root of this process. This takes us back to my original contention proposed at the end of my popular animation that we might find this useful as a way to imagine how exquisitely tiny superstrings vibrating in the tenth dimension could be what produce our reality. As I say at the end of Cymatics, Gravity and Light:

Our beautiful, chaotic, fractal world is like a much more highly detailed version of the Cymatics patterns we're looking at above: our universe is the shadow of an extra-dimensional hologram, created (as all holograms are) through constructive interference to reveal the reality each of us are observing right here, and right now.

Clearly, the vibrations that produce the subatomic particles of our observed reality must be much higher than the vibrations that produce the patterns on the shell of a tortoise, but I'm proposing that they are both part of the same continuum. Is that not an exciting idea? I hope that you're enjoying the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Timelike Entanglement

Photons and Free Will

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABh5j2yA_mE

(or should I call this one "Photons and Phree Will"? Hey, I'm just a sucker for alliteration!)

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

This new video accompanies one of my favorite blog entries of 2010, Light Has No Speed. This one has already generated a lot of interest and discussion over at my YouTube channel.

We talked about one of the central ideas in the above entry last week in At Right Angles to Spacetime, where I showed you two intersecting arrows. Here's that diagram again, this time with a little more explanatory text added:

(you can click on the above picture for a higher resolution version)

Understanding that our reality is actually a continually evolving series of "points" in the fifth dimension, representing the intersection between the above two lines, is key to understanding my approach to visualizing the extra dimensions. Think about these ideas:

• From a photon's point of view, there is no space, no time. The "time" it takes for light from a distant star to reach our eye does not exist for a photon - from its perspective it took no time to reach us. In that sense, thinking of this photon's path is like thinking of the "long undulating snake" we think of in my project, or the "spime" concept that Bruce Sterling likes to talk about - it's a data-set that connects the past to the future, viewed from outside of spacetime.
• If that photon had not reached our eyes, it could have continued on into the future, traveling from that distant star many light years away with the light that from our perspective is already from many years ago: but even from the perspective of a photon coming from the very beginning of our universe traveling to the very end of our universe, this would still all happen simultaneously: for such a photon, the entire life of our universe would be one single event.
• This reveals the contradiction in believing in free will and believing that there is nothing beyond our 4D spacetime: from this photon's perspective, then, there is only one single past, one single future, and everything is inevitable: including the dogged insistence that the free will we believe we're experiencing is real, when in fact it's only an illusion.

But thinking of our spacetime universe as having only one path from its beginning to its end leaves us with no easy way of understanding non-locality or quantum entanglement: these effects seem mysterious, unfathomably weird. This "photon's perspective" we're talking about here doesn't have room for such "spooky actions" (as Einstein referred to them) to occur, and yet quantum theories have been confirmed through experimentation to a higher degree of accuracy than any other theory about the underlying structures of our reality.

In Time's Illusions, we talked about the two kinds of "now" that are shown in my above diagram, and we started a poll question to see which kind of "now" people think of as applying to our space-time reality. Then, with At Right Angles to Spacetime I started another poll question, asking if people agree with that blog's title as a definition of light.

Here's the kicker - in both cases, there's a third "all of the above" answer I should have provided, but chose not to because it would have been so easy for people to select it without thinking about the other options. That answer, as I hope I've made clear with my blog entries this month, is that our spacetime "now" is in the fifth dimension, not the fourth, so both versions of "now" are correct depending upon your perspective. And because both light and gravity push against each other to create our reality, whether you think one or the other is at right angles to spacetime also depends upon your frame of reference. As I've said before, it's the same with the third dimension - calling the directions added by the third dimension up/down, or forward/backward, or left/right, or whatever doesn't change what you're adding, because these are just labels that are defined by the frame of reference already established.

Likewise, what we call the additional degree of freedom afforded by the fifth dimension can change depending upon your frame of reference, or which of the two "now" arrows pictured in the above diagram, you choose to assign to the fourth dimension.We'll talk about how our reality is defined at the fifth dimension through constructive interference more next time, with Cymatics.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Is Spacetime Flat or Curved?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7iFXPU_1YE

This new YouTube video accompanies my blog entry from a few months ago: Looking at We Start.

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

Here's an image generated by data from WMAP, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. According to WMAP's results, our universe is flat to within a 2% margin of possible error. Is our universe really flat? I believe that it isn't.

Remember this: our universe is not just space. If you are traveling in space you are really traveling in spacetime, unless you've discovered some way to instantly transport to a distant star using no time whatsoever.

Here's one way I saw the concept of a perfectly flat universe within the multiverse explained.

If spacetime is absolutely flat, then if you were to set off in a rocket ship and travel in a single direction, you would eventually get to the universe that's just like the one you're in now, but where you got up an hour later this morning, or where Michael Jackson is still alive. And if you continued on this journey, eventually you would start getting to the other universes with basic physical laws, the other universes of the multiverse.

So. There is evidence that spacetime is close to flat, but I still feel certain that it will be proved that there is a certain very small curvature to spacetime, which is why our universe is not really infinite, it's finite but unbounded. It's like the old video games where going off the top of the screen gets you to the bottom, or going off the left gets you to the right (or traveling on the equator eventually gets you back to where you started). To continue the analogy, our observed spacetime universe and its cosmic horizon would be a tiny dot in the middle of that video game screen: we've talked about this in entries like Finite But Unbounded and An Expanding 4D Sphere, how some cosmologists say that if this dot representing our observable universe were the size of a quarter, this "video game screen" we're thinking about here would be the size of planet Earth.

Now, in a finite but unbounded universe with a slight curvature, if you were to set off in a rocket ship and travel in one direction, you would traverse the finite but unbounded hypersphere of spacetime, and eventually end up back where you started. Or with a slight change in trajectory, you could end up in the universe where you got up an hour later this morning, or where Michael Jackson is still alive... or any of the other possible versions of our universe that are part of the wave function of outcomes which could have or will have occurred for our particular universe with its locked in fine structure constant.


The other "perfectly flat spacetime" explanation we looked at above has its supporters, I think, because it still allows the viewpoint that free will is an illusion and everything is inevitable. If you eventually get to that universe where Michael Jackson is still alive using flat spacetime, then where you get to is really completely unrelated and causally unconnected to our own version of spacetime! No wonder some people who are shown this theory reject the idea of parallel universe versions of our universe even existing. And where that model breaks down further for me is that we have to eventually encounter an "edge" to our spacetime universe where the basic physical laws become fuzzy, and we somehow transition into the spacetime "edge" of a different universe with a different fine structure constant.

The slightly curved spacetime model works better for me because it seems much more likely that the universe where you got up an hour later this morning is directly connected to the universe we're in, and that the spacetime tree of possible outcomes connected to "now" has its branches within the fifth dimension. It also explains why no matter how far out into spacetime we look, we're never going to see other universes with different physical laws - because getting to those other universes would require extra dimensional movement within the seventh dimension and above (or to use the string theory perspective, it would require us to break out of the D7 brane our universe is embedded within), and arriving at a new "point" within that multiverse landscape would reveal some other universe that is apparently infinite within its version of spacetime, but is really just as finite but unbounded as our own.

Next time, we'll be looking at the video for one of my favorite blog entries from 2010, "Light Has No Speed" in a new entry called Photons and Free Will. Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

At Right Angles to Spacetime

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

This new video accompanies my blog entry You are a Point at the Center of Spacetime, published last August. Now I'd like to tie the ideas in this video to a blog entry that came a month later, called Light Has No Speed.

Last time, in Time's Illusions, we looked at two definitions of the word "now":

1. "Now" is what I see at this instant. This includes what I see when I look up at the stars: even though I know it took years for their light to reach me, their light is reaching me right "now".
2. "Now" is what's entangled with this very instant, and that's how the quantum world's instantaneous "spooky action at a distance" effects occur. "Now" is not what I see when I look at a star that's ten light years away, because the time it takes light to travel means that I won't be seeing what that star looks like "now" until ten years in the future.

Which of these agrees more with your definition of the word? Consider this:

A point in 3D space can, by virtue of it being of indeterminate size, be infinitesimally small (like the point we're most familiar with from geometry), or infinitely large, encompassing all of 3D space. In my book, and blog entries like The Flipbook Universe and What's Around the Corner, I've been asking people to imagine that this infinitely large "point" would be a "frame" of space (with no time), and each 3D frame is one planck length away from the next to create 4D spacetime.

A point in 4D spacetime can also be infinitesimally small (like the tip of my nose at 3 p.m. tomorrow afternoon, a very specific location in space and in time), or it can be infinitely large. What does an infinitely large point in spacetime encompass? In other words, which of the two "now"s listed above should we be thinking about here?

If I were to say that the infinitely large version of that point is the entire universe at 3 p.m. tomorrow afternoon, I would only have enlarged the space aspect: but I also need to enlarge the duration, the 4D element.

In Light Has No Speed, we looked at a presentation by physicist Peter Russell which explains that for a photon, there is no space and no time. From a photon's point of view, it travels instantaneously from a star 100 light years away to an observer such as you or I. So is our 4D point of infinite size like a photon, potentially encompassing all of our universe's timeline from its beginning to its end in one single instant?

Here's an additional clue from Mr. Russell to throw into this: for a photon, there is no non-locality, and the photon is "outside" of spacetime. So from the sounds of it our photon is not in the fourth dimension. Where is it then?

We know that non-locality is part of our universe, as it and other "spooky" quantum processes have been proven to exist beyond a doubt (we've talked about this in such entries as Our Non-Local Universe and Local Realism Bites the Dust). So is our 4D point in its largest state encompassing the "now" of non-locality? We've talked many times about how it's so easy for us to forget that the star we see in the sky is really not part of our "now" because of the time it took for the light to arrive here - looking at a star is looking back in time. The "now" of non-locality and quantum superposition allows for instantaneous correlations to occur at great distances, because our "now" is not what we see when we look into the sky.

Is it better, then, to think of our infinitely large 4D point that way: as encompassing the quantum world of instantaneous entanglement and non-locality?

Here's how I prefer to think about it - both definitions of "now" apply, because you and I are actually a point in the fifth dimension rather than the fourth. And just as trying to relegate "up/down" or "forward/backward" to a specific dimension within a 3D space makes sense only from a particular reference frame, thinking about these two versions of "now" makes more sense when we realize that our current "observation point" is in a frame of the fifth dimension, not the fourth. This is what Einstein came to believe as well: that our reality is defined at the fifth dimension, where the field equations for gravity and light are resolved.

Believing that our "now" is only in the fourth dimension leaves us thinking that the two arrows we're looking at here are not compatible. My diagram shows us how Peter Russell can say that light is not part of 4D spacetime, and light is not part of non-locality - because light is at right angles to spacetime.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next - Is Spacetime Flat or Curved?

Time's Illusions

Here's two new videos for you to look at today, both of them are quite short:


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxsu8BPK-S0

The above new video accompanies Alexander's Time Illusion Game, a blog entry from last August. I also published "Flow and the Now" in August, here's the video version for that one which I've posted to YouTube just a few days ago.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ev6Je9yJNE

These two videos tie together into a larger discussion of just what we mean when we say now. Here's a mental puzzle for you to consider: I am suggesting that there are really two "now"s that are at right angles to each other, but most of us tend to blur these two opposing concepts together in our minds.

Our reality is not continuous, and the seamless reality we believe we are observing is really a discrete series of "now"s that are each one planck frame apart from the next. That is the "illusion of time". Which of these two versions of "now" would you say are more correct?

1. "Now" is what I see at this instant. This includes what I see when I look up at the stars: even though I know it took years for their light to reach me, their light is reaching me right "now".
2. "Now" is what's entangled with this very instant, and that's how the quantum world's instantaneous "spooky action at a distance" effects occur. "Now" is not what I see when I look at a star that's ten light years away, because the time it takes light to travel means that I won't be seeing what that star looks like "now" until ten years in the future.

Which version of the word applies more for you? I've started a poll question here that lets you provide your answer. We're going to talk more about this question in the next few entries, as we get to my soon-to-be-released video that accompanies my blog entry "Light Has No Speed".

Are you enjoying the journey right "now"?

Rob Bryanton

Next: At Right Angles to Spacetime

Living in a Simulation

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ezPlq2Z59E

Welcome to 2011! People of my generation walk around this time of year saying "can you believe it? This year sounded impossibly far away when I was young, it doesn't seem real!".

The above new video accompanies my blog entry from last August, on the subject of Simulism: the idea that we could be living within a gigantic virtual world, whether we are aware of it or not. Simulism.org is a wiki created by the Netherlands' Ivo Jansch, and it brings together a number of interesting bits of information about (to quote from the wiki) "the possibility that our existence rests on an unimaginably complex n-dimensional k-state computer grid with rules governing the transition from one state to another".

In my previous post on Simulism and the above video blog, I talk about several other shows which have showed Simulism-related concepts, including The Matrix, Inception, Star Trek: TNG's holodeck, and a television show I had not come across before called Play. The Movies page at the simulism wiki lists a number of other films, most of which are obviously science fiction. But I couldn't resist adding a few of my favorite films to the list because (in my opinion) they present related concepts:

A Christmas Carol - could this 1843 Charles Dickens novella be the grand-daddy of Simulism? The ghosts conjure virtual worlds of time travel and alternate timelines that to Ebenezer Scrooge are completely real.

It's a Wonderful Life - when George Bailey is shown an alternate version of the world as it would have been without him, can't this be thought of as a simulation?

Groundhog Day - being trapped at a certain instant of time (6 am on Groundhog Day), and then being given the freedom to explore all the possible timelines that extend from that instant: is Phil Conners trapped in a simulation? The movie offers no explanation so we are left to imagine what could have been the cause of his predicament.

Brazil - since so much of this film is surreal, placed "somewhere in the twentieth century" according to the opening subtitle, it's possible that the entire film is a virtual world, a simulation. Could Sam Lowry have woken up from the dream, Neo-style, at any moment in this movie? Since the world depicted in this film is unlike any version of the twentieth century you or I experienced, there are other "alternate history" discussions that could just as easily be related to this film, one of my all-time favorites.

The wikipedia article on alternate history presents some examples of stories exploring the "what would have the world been like if this rather than that had happened" as far back as two thousand years ago: ideas of parallel universe versions of our own observed universe are not as new as you might suspect! And if Information Equals Reality, then all of these examples of simulism, alternate histories, and parallel universes may not just be flights of imagination, but examples of the possibilities inherent in the underlying structures of our reality.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next - Time's Illusions