Ten Years

It was ten years ago that the internet discovered the tenthdimension.com website. We had initially started showing the website to friends and associates at the end of June 2006.

As I reported on the fifth anniversary of this project:

Initial response was generally very favorable, and we congratulated ourselves on a site that looked like it was going to do all right for itself. But we really had no idea what was about to happen!

On July 2 2006, the site got 2346 hits from 160 unique visitors, not too shabby. Then, some time later in the day on July 3rd, people started sharing the site with each other in a much bigger way, and we were thrilled to see a twelve-fold jump - 30,116 hits from 2,196 unique visitors. Cool! But by the end of the day, we were starting to learn about something known as the digg effect. So many people were trying to access our website simultaneously that some visitors were getting error messages, while others were having to wait minutes for the pages to load. Even with those delays, July 4th 2006 was an amazing day - 451,954 hits from 25,075 unique visitors.

With the support of users on digg and also on stumbleupon, the site saw over five million hits that first month, and that was from almost 282,000 unique visitors. Unbelievable! 

Ten years for a project about ten dimensions certainly seems worthy of note. My YouTube channel, 10thdim is now approaching 16 million overall views for the 400 plus videos we've posted about the project. The original Imagining the Tenth Dimension video started out at the now defunct revver.com video sharing site, where it was at 2 million views when the site was discontinued. I've also seen a great many copies posted of that first video, many of them taken from an edited version created by tigger1972, on tigger's channel that version is approaching 500,000 views. At the time YouTube was limiting movies to just over 11 minutes, which is why the original movie was broken into two parts for my channel. As a fan of the project tigger wanted to get the movie on YouTube in one piece, so he removed my intro and extro screens and all pauses, managing to get the video from 11:51 down to 11:01.

Then other people posted copies of that version: master roshi's copy is over 900,000 views, Giovanni B's is over 600,000,  the Break.com copy is at almost 500,000 views,  Andrew Philip's is over 60,000. None of these people include my name or give me credit as the creator of the video, but at least they leave it ambiguous as to who created it... unlike izacboi who brazenly says in his description "this is a short vid i made to help people understand the tenth dimension".

With my name as the author removed and the text screens at the end removed (which includes "while this 'way of imagining' is not the accepted explanation for string theory, it does have thought-provoking connections to many people's impression of how our reality is constructed"), there has indeed been some controversy as to my intent with this project. So at the risk of repeating myself too many times, let me say once again: I am not a physicist and I'm not pretending to be one. In Chapter 3 of my book, I say this:

So. Is Imagining the Tenth Dimension a crackpot theory from a non-physicist with no formal background in the relevant sciences? Absolutely. I am making no claims at all about the viability of this theory’s mathematics, as I do not have the tools to even begin such an analysis. The suppositions we are exploring here are based purely upon intuition, combined with a layman’s understanding of the concepts of quantum mechanics and cosmology. The fault for any misrepresentations of string theory or the laws of physics that may occur within these pages rests squarely on my shoulders, and not with any of the other sources cited throughout this text.

As a creative person, originally a film/TV composer and now a virtual reality producer, I have enjoyed all of the wonderful positive feedback I have received from the many fans of this project. I've often mentioned Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time as having similarities - for my generation, that was the book that introduced young minds to mind-expanding new ways of visualizing space-time as a structure that can be bent and folded. Did Madeleine get all of the science right? No... and if someone were to be upset about that then they've misinterpreted the intentions of her book. But as a way to get people started thinking about how there is more to our reality than what we are observing before us, I believe both A Wrinkle in Time and Imagining the Tenth Dimension have served the same purpose, and I'm proud to think of the millions of people who have become more interested in these topics after learning about my "new way of thinking about time and space".

What's next? Hey, who wants to watch Imagining the Tenth Dimension in Virtual Reality? I sure do!

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Previous blog entry: http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2015/01/interstellar-whats-beyond-fifth.html