Even though it comes from a different starting point, it's interesting to think about how this is a similar question to Poll 87, which asked this question:
"Physicist David Deutsch says that calling Everett's Many Worlds an interpretation "is like talking about dinosaurs as an 'interpretation' of the fossil record". Do you agree with him?" In that case 60.8% agreed with Dr. Deutsch, and in this case an even higher number agreed with Dr. Greene.
What I like about the Brian Greene statement is it gives us a nice reminder of the holy grail scientists continue to search for: what are the building blocks, the underlying steps, that reveal how a universe such as ours is created? That desire to find the elegantly simple process that explains how the beautiful and complex reality we see around us could arise is at the root of any TOE. or Theory of Everything. In past entries like Cymatics, Gravity and Light, Love and Gravity, and Strength of Gravity, Speed of Light, we've looked at some of my project's explorations of what this underlying simplicity might be. I've talked before about Dr. Erik Verlinde's proposal that just as there are no "liquidons" imparting the quality of liquidity to a fluid, there are no "gravitons" imparting gravity to matter. Since gravity is the only force, physicists tell us, that exerts itself across the extra dimensions, what we begin to imagine is that there are places within the underlying information that becomes reality where things tend to be grouped together more strongly - where gravity's strength is stronger - and places where the grouping order is less strong.
"Grouping order", of course, is how Gevin Giorbran liked to refer to the underlying organizing process that reveals itself within timelessness. If I throw a coin ten times and write down H or T for heads or tails, the highest possible grouping order would look like this: HHHHHTTTTT (or TTTTTHHHHH). The other possible extreme would be HTHTHTHTHT (or THTHTHTHTH), which Gevin referred to as being the highest possible "symmetry order". Both of those orders are, when viewed as a whole, identical: they represent a perfectly balanced symmetry, the "zero" that we start from and the "zero" that our universe returns to. The idea that our universe or any other springs from a breaking of symmetry is not unique to Gevin though. Cosmologists refer to symmetry breaking all the time as the answer to this simple question. "Why is there something rather than nothing?"
In the video for Imagining the Eight Dimension, I refer to the idea I've been promoting that ties so nicely to what Dr. Verlinde is proposing, and which Gevin Giorbran also showed us as a way of understanding: gravity is the underlying organizing principle that pulls things together, and the speed of light is the underlying organizing principle that divides things apart, through the planck frames that create our observed reality. As physicist Julian Barbour likes to describe it, each of those frames is unique and separate: and if we were in a part of the underlying information where gravity had nothing in opposition to it, we would be at the highest grouping order version of that information, the HHHHHTTTTT. On the other hand, if we were at the position where there was no gravity, and only the dividing apart that the speed of light reveals, we would be in the highest symmetry order, the HTHTHTHTHT.
Is there a simple process similar to Darwinian Natural Selection that causes our universe or any other to be selected from an underlying timeless whole, an Ultimate Ensemble, an Omniverse? And is Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation an important part of understanding what that simple process would be? 78.5% of the visitors to this blog were willing to agree with that idea.
For those of you who haven't watched the video for Imagining the Eighth Dimension yet, let's take a look at it now to finish today's entry.
A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDNO6vv1SjE
Next: New video - Imagining the Ninth Dimension
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