Common Criticisms Part 5

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

This is a discussion of ten proposed reasons for why critics of Imagining the Tenth Dimension are saying people shouldn't watch my videos. See part 1 here. See part 2 here. See part 3 here. See part 4 here.


Reason #5: Because "there is no 'fourth' dimension".

That, of course, is the title of a minutephysics video, which I'm providing a link to here. My response to that video (in which he states that it's wrong to talk about THE fourth dimension as if it's a separate entity from any of the other dimensions) is that it's amusing for a few reasons. One, of course, is that most schools of thought do indeed treat "time" as the fourth dimension, and they certainly do say that its "temporal" quality makes it unique and different from the other dimensions. Two, minutephysics' point becomes clearer in the video when he says "as a matter of fact there is no third dimension either". But the funny part is in either case he'd be agreeing with me, in that I also ask people not to get hung up on what label you put on each additional spatial dimension, as long as you are visualizing a way in which the new dimension encompasses the previous ones and is orthogonal to the previous ones, as that is a basic concept behind spatial dimensions. "Spatial" is the important word here, because theorists do indeed say that the extra dimensions are spatial, or at very least "space-like".
And finally, even if you're going to argue that it's incorrect to add labels of any kind to each specific dimension, it's very odd to say "we just can't tell these dimensions apart" (again quoting Henry). If you are comparing the 2D world of the creatures from the book both Henry and I recommend, Edwin Abbott's Flatland, with a 3D world, there is definitely some new quality that gets added with each new spatial dimension, something that was inaccessible from the realm of the previous one. So whether you call the additional degree of freedom added by the fourth dimension ana/kata, duration, time/anti-time, or some other words you want to make up you are still acknowledging that there was something you couldn't get to until you added this new spatial dimension.

Common Criticisms Part 4

A direct link to the above video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7_2dApY6_I

This is a discussion of ten proposed reasons for why Henry of the popular YouTube channel minutephysics and his supporters are saying people shouldn't watch my videos. See part 1 here. See part 2 here. See part 3 here.


Reason #4: Because this is all pseudoscience.
"Pseudoscience" is an easy label to paste on anything with which one disagrees. There are physicists who have become celebrities and published popular books based upon their rejection of string theory and its extra dimensions. Lee Smolin says that theorists not interested in this field can find themselves unable to receive funding for their research into alternative theories. And Peter Woit says that this is not even science because it makes no falsifiable predictions. So even though I've made it clear that what I'm showing is only a creative visualization of ten spatial dimensions and not a scientific theory, what I'm trying to help you visualize is a concept that some physicists will tell you is nonsense even before they work through my ideas. Likewise, my willingness to explore the existence of free will automatically make me wrong in the eyes of those who have been taught to believe we're all helpless automatons acting out predetermined chains of events set in motion from the beginning of the universe. And have I ever tried to hide the fact that I believe there is evidence for consciousness as a process that can have connections "outside" of our narrow space-time window? Of course not, and anyone who has read my book or watched any number of the over 400 videos I've posted so far to YouTube will know that. And while these all may not be mainstream ideas, there are certainly scientists out there doing research into these same questions. Do all scientists agree on all ideas? Of course not. But exploring new ideas is what science is all about.

The above video, which is just under two minutes long, mentions the following articles:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/09/19/free-will-and-quantum-clones-how-your-choices-today-affect-the-universe-at-its-origin/
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2012/10/22/evidence-of-premonitions-hinted-at-in-new-study/ http://www.frontiersin.org/Perception_Science/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00390/abstract
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=psychedelic-healing

Common Criticisms part 3

A direct link to the above video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggHqZwHbmc8

This is a discussion of ten proposed reasons for why Henry of the popular YouTube channel minutephysics and his supporters are saying people shouldn't watch my videos. See part 1 here. See part 2 here.


Reason #3: Because Rob Bryanton is only making videos to get rich and sell his book.

Imagining the Tenth Dimension has always been about the discussion of a set of ideas that I first became fascinated with over 30 years ago. But these videos are at best my hobby. Is it a bad thing that I make any money at all from something I'm passionate about? Some of minutephysic's supporters say yes, that's a bad thing.
To make it perfectly clear that I'm not doing this to get rich, in July 2009 I posted a non-copy-protected pdf of my book to bit torrent, and that book continues to be shared on numerous torrent sites in distribution numbers that I find hard to fathom. But since my goal has always been just to get people talking about these ideas, I'm thrilled to see people all over the world downloading and reading my book.

Meanwhile... since minutephysics, as he now rapidly approaches 100 million views on his year-and-a-half-old channel is obviously making substantial money from his click-through ads, his sponsors, his t-shirt sales, and whatever other merchandising plans he has in the works, I'm sure he's a very happy camper. So do I think it's a bad thing that Henry is making stacks of cash from his videos? Of course not, I'm a fan and I've told him so. And what's wrong with people making some money from a project that they care about?

Common Criticisms part 2

A direct link to the above video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nlSZ8NOnEg

See part 1 here. This is a discussion of ten proposed reasons for why Henry of the popular YouTube channel minutephysics and his supporters are saying people shouldn't watch my videos.

Reason #2: Because it's dangerous.
In his video Common Physics Misconceptions Henry asks this question about simplified ideas that are often taught as a way of introducing more complex concepts to students: "is that an excuse to mislead our children about the true nature of things? No." And yet teachers the world over have always used this technique. Why? Because this is how knowledge is conveyed. You start with something simple and basic, then once those concepts are understood you build idea upon idea until you arrive at university-level classes and beyond. In many cases, teaching university-level concepts to young children is simply not a viable option.
Since my original video was published online in June 2006, and first appeared on YouTube in January 2007, there are people who first watched my original video a number of years ago who are now entering university. Almost every day I get messages from people saying things like this: "Thank you Rob Bryanton for opening my eyes to the wonders of the universe. You are the reason I am now pursuing a degree in one of the sciences."
Did I somehow destroy these people's minds, make them unable to learn? Or did I wake them up and get them interested in the concepts that minutephysics talks about regularly in his videos (most of which I find to be excellent).
"But Rob", one might ask. "Surely these students would have eventually stumbled across some other video, or book, or teacher who awakened their sense of wonder?"
Of course! That's life. But that's not an argument for removing something that has already inspired millions of fans from around the world to want to learn more.

Here are the some of the ideas that are NOT wrong which my visualization can help you remember:

- a "wormhole" is a hypothetical construct which can be visualized as a "folding" of spacetime
- some theorists say the fifth dimension and above are compatified, or "curled up at the planck length"
- Kaluza showed how general relativity and Maxwell's equations could be resolved at the 5th dimension
- A phase space is defined as "a space in which all possible states of a system are represented, with each possible state of the system corresponding to one unique point in the phase space."
- M-theory says that our reality comes from ten spatial dimensions plus time. This visualization arrives at a "timeless" tenth dimension, and does this by saying that time is not a dimension, it's a direction, or a way of describing change from state to state within the phase space of any of these spatial dimensions
- Michio Kaku says that antimatter can be described as "matter which is moving backwards in time", and while there are other ways of describing antimatter this approach is accepted as being equivalent
- this visualization shows how our observed reality is created from timeless "frames" of 3D space, and we're "locked in" at the seventh dimension. Some string theorists have said our universe is embedded in a D3 and a D7 "brane", or membrane.