New Video - Connecting Zero to Ten

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKTOWhgq7Ys

Next: Free Energy Within the Next Ten Years?

Top Ten Tenth DImension Blogs, March 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 .
. January 11 . February 11 . March 11 . April 11 . May 11 .
. June 11 . July 11 . August 11 . September 11 . October 11 .
. November 11 . December 11 . Top 100 Entries of 2011 . 
. January 12 . February 12 .

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

1. Thrive Movement
2. Quantum Weirdness and Water
3. Gravity and Light from the Vacuum
4. We are All Quanta
5. New video - Imagining the Fifth Dimension
6. Psychedelics and Surprises
7. New video - Imagining the Fourth Dimension
8. Observers and Addictions
9. New video - Imagining the Second Dimension
10. Why Only Ten?



And as of March 26th, 2012, 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. The Pencil Visualization (3)
3. What's Around the Corner? (2)
4. Mandelbulbs (4)
5. Is Reality an Illusion? (5)
6. The 5th-Dimensional Camera Project (6)  
7. Gravity and Love (9)
8. Bees and the LHC (10)  
9. An Expanding 4D Sphere (7)
10. Just Six Things: The I Ching (8)
11. 10-10-10 Look Before You Leap (13)
12. Vibrations and Fractals (12) 
13. Light Has No Speed (11) 
14. Time Travel Paradoxes (14)
15. Changing Your Brain (15) 
16. Roger Ebert on Quantum Reincarnation (16)
17. Our Universe Within the Omniverse (17)
18. Magnets and Morality (18)
19. How to Time Travel (19)
20. Simultaneous Inspiration (22)
21. Creativity and the Quantum Universe (20)
22. Dancing on the Timeline (21)
23. Complexity from Simplicity (23)  
24. What is Reality? (24)  
25. Photons and Free Will (25)
26. Language and the Mind (new)

Which means that this worthy entry is leaving our top 26 of all time list this month.

 Monkeys Love Metallica (26)

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. Also, a lot of people are enjoying discussing these ideas with me on my facebook page: facebook.com/rob.bryanton .

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: New Video - Connecting Zero to Ten

Imagining the First Dimension

A direct link to the above video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV47Mcmo25I

The first dimension is a line passing through two points. Is there anything simpler? But within this discussion of the dimensions that make up our reality, the power of the line is important to keep in mind.

This line has length only – no width or depth. Right at this instant, we could define a point at the tip of my nose, and another at the tip of your nose, and visualize a line that passes through those two points. Even though that line most likely passes through the earth's crust to get from my position on the planet to yours, that means little to the one-dimensional line we have just drawn.

And as you and I go about our day, that line will move around, continuing to pass through those two points we've defined. Billions of light years away, if we were to follow that line, it would be passing through one galaxy after another as you and I change our positions relative to each other back here on Earth (and the Earth itself turns on its axis and orbits around the sun and the galaxies move through space), but ultimately at any one instant we are still just talking about a simple one-dimensional line.

So, no matter what dimensions we're thinking about, there will always be a point that we can define that represents a dimension in a certain state, and a second point representing a dimension in a different state, and there can be a one-dimensional line that passes through those two points. But what that line passes through to get from one point to the other, and what that line extends to as it passes beyond each of those points, can be a mind-boggling realm of information and different forms of reality.

That's the simple power of the line. Traveling from one point to another is a way of thinking about "time" for any dimension, since time is a way of describing change from state to state. While we, as creatures made out of 3D atoms and molecules, perceive the line that gets us from one state to another as being in the fourth dimension, that concept works equally well for any dimension, which is why with this project we say that "time" for an imaginary two-dimensional creature would be one of the two possible directions in the third dimension, and so on.

In Imagining the Zeroth Dimension, we talked about how our universe or any other arises from a breaking of symmetry, and how the original animation that started this project visualizes the dimensions by starting with a point of indeterminate size and moving through the first, second and so on with repeating logical steps. This process also works from the other end: we can start with the tenth dimension as a point of indeterminate size, then imagine the descending steps from the ninth, eighth, and seventh dimension to represent an increasingly finely detailed "paring away" of the possibilities represented in the tenth dimension as a timeless Set Of All Possible States, or an ultimate ensemble of all possible information patterns conceived as a single unchanging entity. Thinking, then, of the "point" that represents our universe locked in at the seventh dimension, and thinking of a point in any other dimension, allows us to think about all the one-dimensional lines that could exist within or be connected to our universe, and how all those lines still represent only a tiny subset of the potential contained within the tenth dimension.

Finally, in Imagining the Second Dimension, we talk about how this one-dimensional line we're portraying has caused some people to say "that's impossible, something with no width or depth can't exist". If you're one of those people, this will be a good next entry for you to read.

Till then, enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: New video - Connecting Zero to Ten

Imagining the "Zeroth" Dimension

Zero is powerful because it is infinity's twin. They are equal and opposite, yin and yang. They are equally paradoxical and troubling. The biggest questions in science and religion are about nothingness and eternity, the void and the infinite, zero and infinity.

- Science Writer Charles Seife, in his book Zero: the Biography of a Dangerous Idea

Last August I started a more in-depth series about the nature of each dimension, but I started with Imagining the Second Dimension. Some people have asked why didn't I go right back to the beginning, so let's try that now. Here's how I would start this discussion:

With Imagining the Tenth Dimension, we start from a zero, which some would call a "zeroth" (or "zero-th", if you prefer) dimension, and we move to the first, second, and beyond using a repeating logical structure to eventually end up at a timeless ultimate ensemble.  When you get right down to it, that's what every respectable TOE (Theory of Everything) needs to describe: some underlying "thing" that all else is derived from. Otherwise, you're back to the "turtles all the way down" joke that often comes up in these discussions. Reconciling this timeless everything (which with my project I'm calling the tenth dimension in its unobserved state) with the zero that we start from (a point of indeterminate size) is the mind-blowing concept we arrive at with my project once we have imagined all ten dimensions.

I have often insisted that zero is not a dimension, because after all we need two new directions to travel within to define a spatial dimension. I have also suggested that the zero and ten represented on my helix logo for this project are shown to be on a line within the other dimensions because they represent the two directions which take us towards the infinitely large one way, and the infinitesimally small the other. Connecting Zero to Ten is the most recent entry where we've talked about that idea. But consider this: even if we ignore everything but this zero, this point of indeterminate size, we should remember what that means: even though we tend to think of this point as having no size, the definition of "indeterminate" is really "all possible values are true". Incredibly, that means even this lowly point that we start from does have a way that we can think of it as being infinitely large, encompassing absolutely everything within the information that becomes reality! So with that in mind, and for the sake of discussion here, let's continue to pursue the idea this there could be a "zeroth" dimension.

We began this entry with a quote from Charles Seife's Zero: the Biography of a Dangerous Idea, a book which discusses the relatively recent origin of this most powerful of numbers. Why does Seife call zero a dangerous idea? As an example, his preamble chapter includes an anecdote about a billion dollar warship that was suddenly dead in the water when a software bug resulted in a "divide by zero" error which completely crashed the computers running the ship. Then, chapter one begins with these thoughts:

...as natural as zero seems to us today, for ancient people zero was a foreign -- and frightening -- idea. An Eastern concept, born in the Fertile Crescent a few centuries before the birth of Christ, zero not only evoked images of a primal void, it also had dangerous mathematical properties. With zero there is the power to shatter the framework of logic.

The beginnings of mathematical thought were found in the desire to count sheep and in the need to keep track of property, and of the passage of time. None of these tasks requires zero; civilizations functioned perfectly well for millennia before its discovery. Indeed, zero was so abhorrent to some cultures that they chose to live without it.

Gevin Giorbran, author of the brilliant Everything Forever, Learning to See Timelessness, liked to point out that some cosmologists say the accelerating expansion of the universe will eventually take us to an absolute zero of perfectly flat space, an empty and formless void which seems like the most grim future imaginable. Gevin's take on this idea was that this zero we're headed towards is not empty, but full of all the other possible states, and this can be supported by the commonly held viewpoint that our universe arises from the breaking of an underlying symmetry. This means that our universe is now headed back towards a natural return to the perfectly balanced whole that exists both "before" and "after" the existence of our universe. Here's a quote from chapter 20 of Gevin's book:

(1 + (-1)) + (2 + (-2)) + (3 + (-3)) +... = 0 + 0 + 0 + ... = 0

     The simplest most straightforward way of summing all numbers is to sum the equal but opposite numbers together as shown above. So for a moment we will imagine that the correct sum of all numbers does sum up to and equal zero. Except this means that we need to change the value of zero away from being "no" things. We need to treat zero as the largest value in the mathematical system which actually includes the two already vast infinities of positive and negative numbers. Suddenly zero has become an infinite whole that contains all other numbers. Every positive and every negative number on the real number plane is summing or combining together to form an ultimate number of absolute value. Obviously this is not math as we know it. This is a math without time, without process, a math of truly infinite values.

    So we have made a dramatic change and the next step is to see the effect that changing the value of zero has had on the value of other numbers. If we are going about this bravely, as if we are imaginatively exploring a series of ideas, and so the brain is actually working, we notice that the values of other numbers have also changed, transformed in the same shift that we have taken with zero. Ordinarily the nothing of zero is a foundational axiom. Our foundation has shifted dramatically. What now is the value of one or two?

    If zero is seen to contain all other numbers, then logically all other numbers must have a lesser value than that of zero. If zero is the largest value, the only way there can be lesser values is if we remove some measure of value from the whole of zero. For example, suppose that we take away a (-1) from zero. What remains in the absence of that (-1)? Zero is still very large but zero is no longer an absolute value containing all other numbers. Something has been removed from it. But what value does zero transform into to show that loss?

    The answer is simply that zero minus (-1) equals 1. The missing (-1) causes zero to transform into the value 1. If zero contains all numbers within it, and we take away a value, zero then contains all numbers except the removed value. If we remove a negative one from zero the value of zero records that loss by transforming into a positive one. It still contains all other numbers besides (-1). So it is still a very large number like zero. But it is no longer the complete whole of all numbers. It is one. A very large number one.

    So if we treat what just happened as the logical rule we can now discover the values of other numbers in this system. For example, one is the sum of all numbers, so it contains within it all numbers, except (-1) is removed. The number two is the sum of all numbers except (-2) is missing, so it is also near zero but its content is less than zero and less than one. The number three contains all other numbers except (-3) so it is very large but smaller than two, one, and zero. And so on, and so on. The transformation that has happened is not simply an inverse reversal of ordinary mathematics, rather in this mathematical system, the value of a number decreases as we count toward greater numbers, since more of the negative numbers are being removed and placed somewhere else.

    Now, I should point out, just for the sake of clarity, that switching to the negative, the number (-1) is a combination of all numbers except that a positive 1 is removed, which would otherwise create the balance of zero. And in removing a positive two the whole shows that loss by becoming the number (-2). Unlike ordinary math, where negative values are less than nothing at all, here the numbers (-1) and (-2) are very large. In fact the content of (-1) is equal but inverse to the content of (+1). In physics, matter and anti-matter particles are equally substantive yet inverse in form and structure.

Do you follow Gevin's logic here? Saying that zero minus negative one equals one really makes perfect sense in ordinary math, but framing this idea in terms of zero being "full" and any of the other numbers as being slightly less than that requires a powerful mental shift. This shift takes us to the understanding that the broken symmetry that creates our universe or any other is defined by what's "missing" from it. In the case of our own universe, we know there is much less anti-matter than would be expected if our universe is derived from an underlying symmetry state: so it is this absence of anti-matter which is one of the defining factors that resulted in our particular universe.

There's no question in my mind, Gevin Giorbran was a genius and I'm sad that he's no longer with us. And p.s., I really should remind everyone that Gevin's book is available in hard cover, soft cover or as a downloadable pdf from www.tenthdimension.com/store.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Imagining the First Dimension

New video - Wrapping It Up Part One

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrulvxL1FzY

Next: Imagining the "Zeroth" Dimension

TIme Crystals

What is a crystal? The wikipedia definition begins with this sentence:

A crystal or crystalline solid is a solid material whose constituent atoms, molecules, or ions are arranged in an orderly, repeating pattern extending in all three spatial dimensions.

We've talked before in this blog about physicist Frank Wilczek, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics, who has some interesting ideas about the nature of time which can be tied to this project. Last month Dr. Wilczek, along with Alfred Shapere of the University of Kentucky published a paper at arxiv.org with the fascinating title of "Classical Time Crystals". That same day, Dr. Wilczek published a related paper, called "Quantum Time Crystals". Please follow the links if you'd like to get into the nitty gritty of what these scientists are proposing. Or check out this informative article written by Lisa Zyga and published February 20, 2012 at physorg.com: "Time crystals could behave almost like perpetual motion machines".

Wait, perpetual motion? That's impossible, right? We've talked a few times lately about the suspicions held by some that free energy technologies already exist and have been deliberately and maliciously suppressed by powers-that-be. Could time crystals be another path to this ideal? A time crystal would be a structure which exhibits a continuously repeating motion across time even in its lowest energy state. Lisa Zyga's article says Shapere and Wilczek suggest that even if time crystals don't exist in nature, it should be possible to construct them:

“It’s so tricky to implement mathematically,” Wilczek told PhysOrg.com. “It’s surprising that they can exist at all. But, whether or not they exist naturally, I’m very optimistic that it’s something one could engineer.”

But let's not jump to the wrong conclusion here: Wilczek is not promising a new free energy source or a violation of the laws of thermodynamics. As the article reports:

He added that, even though time crystals might move continuously, they couldn’t be used to generate useful energy since they can’t be disturbed, and they wouldn’t violate the second law of thermodynamics.

Back in Bees and Tangential Thinking, we discussed this quote from Stephen Hawking:

I still believe the universe has a beginning in real time, at the big bang. But there's another kind of time, imaginary time, at right angles to real time, in which the universe has no beginning or end.

And as I said in that previous blog entry: what is Hawking's "imaginary time"? It seems clear to me that if it's at right angles to our 4D spacetime, then it must be the fifth dimension. While I understand his use of "time" and "imaginary time" to convey these fourth- and fifth-dimensional ideas to the public, they do have the potential to create some confusion. Calling the fourth dimension "duration" rather than time, and the fifth dimension our "probability space" has been my suggestion for making these concepts more clear.

What I love about this new idea of "time crystals" is that it encourages us to think about time as just another spatial dimension, which could have repeating structures within it that occur naturally, or that can be constructed. Like Hawking, Wilczek also invokes "imaginary time", but he gives us a modern spin on this idea: he calls imaginary time "iTime".

In nature, fractals and fibonacci sequences and even DNA could be thought of the same way: as repeating structures which have a larger function that exists not just within space-time, but as waves and repeating patterns that exist outside of space-time. Extending these ideas of extra-dimensional patterns beyond the fourth dimension to explain much else about our reality has been one of the main goals of this project.

Is life itself like a time crystal? In entries like Beer and Miracles, we've looked at some astonishing implications of how yeast cells have been shown to be able to lie dormant for 45 million years and still spring back to life when the proper conditions are presented. What was within those cells during that huge time period that could be called "alive"? This is one of the great mysteries of the universe, and I believe Frank Wilczek is providing us with new and important implications about how that "tiny spark of life" that we've talked about so often with this project really could be something that forms naturally within the underlying extra-dimensional structures of our reality: like a crystal, the repeating pattern that engages with space-time to allow life to occur at any place within the universe could be a highly ordered extra-dimensional structure, a time crystal from the "iTime" of the fifth dimension. How cool is that?

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: New Video - Wrapping it Up Part One