Under My Skin

 A couple of weeks ago I heard from an Imagining the Tenth Dimension fan named Brian Cox. He wrote:

Hey Rob, I really wanted to thank you for the videos you posted. I watched "Imagining the Tenth Dimension" about three years ago, and it touched me in a very profound way. It very genuinely changed the way I look at, well, just about everything. Ever since, 10D theory is something I've obsessed over. Well, in concept anyway, I'm not much of a mathematician. Anyway, I got this tattoo recently, and I thought you would enjoy seeing it.

Here's the picture he attached:

Wow, that's definitely a first for me! I'm very flattered that Brian thought enough of this project's "point-line-branch-fold" concept to want to make it a permanent part of himself. Brian is a welder from Chatsworth, CA (not to be confused with Professor Brian Cox of Wonders of the Universe fame).

I do agree with Brian that this way of thinking about how our reality is created can get under your skin, so to speak, and filter its way into a more general understanding of the world around us. Thank you Brian for showing me in a whole different way how my new way of thinking about time and space really can get "under your skin".

In the comments on my most-viewed YouTube movie, Imagining the Tenth Dimension Part 1 of 2 (now at over 2 million views!), over the last couple of days I've been discussing the relationship between my project's line-branch-fold imagery, and the point-line-plane postulate. Here's a few of my comments:

The "point-line-plane postulate" is the accepted methodology for visualizing any number of spatial dimensions, and is related to my approach. No matter what dimension you start at, if you can define its phase space or set of all possible states and think of that as a point, you can call that dimension "x". Find a point not included within that first phase space, and you can draw a line in "x+1". Find a point not on that line: a plane in "x+2". Think of that plane as a point, and repeat.

A YouTube user who in previous comments had called my video "inflated BS" replied that while he didn't think I was completely wrong, he felt this approach is only valid for imagining any three dimensions, and is a very limited way of describing any dimensions beyond the first three. I responded:

I'm glad to hear you're not saying I'm wrong.

The point-line place postulate is point (dim x) line (dim x+1) plane (dim x+2), repeat. The visualization I use here is point (dim x-1 perceived in its entirety as a single entity, or "point") line (dim x) plane (dim x+1) fold (dim x+2), repeat (so 3 is a fold which becomes a point, and 4 is a line in this video).

The same user then commented that "my" point-line-plane postulate is misleading because the fourth dimension's not really a line, it only appears that way if you think of the entire third dimension in a particular state as a point. Fair enough! I replied:

I want to make sure you're clear that the point-line-plane postulate is not my invention, you can google it and find lots of references to it. The important thing about this postulate is that it can be repeated to visualize ANY number of spatial dimensions because once you've visualized a "plane" in a particular dimension then you can call that a phase space of all possible states for that dimension, which then becomes a "point" in the next dimension and you can repeat the process indefinitely.

The idea that line-branch-fold can start at any dimension is not something that's made clear in my first video, and for good reason: people introduced to this visualization for the first time already have a lot to digest. It would only confuse them to suggest that it's equally valid (for instance) to think of the entire fifth dimension as a point, the sixth dimension as a line, the seventh dimension as a branch, and the eighth dimension as a fold which becomes a point in the ninth dimension! Again, thank you to Brian Cox for sending me the above picture, and thank you to all the Imagining the Tenth Dimension fans who continue to make this project so popular around the world.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Dimension Folders, the Movie