Tenth Dimension on TopTenz

Here's a new video featuring Simon Whistler of the popular YouTube channel TopTenz describing my approach to visualizing ten dimensions. Thanks for your support, Simon!

With over 850,000 subscribers to TopTenz, I suspect there are a number of people reading this blog entry who are not previously familiar with my Imagining the Tenth Dimension project. The videos I'm posting below are useful as a step by step introduction to how I am using the logic of the point-line-plane postulate (the accepted methodology for visualizing any number of spatial dimensions) to creatively explore what these dimensions could mean all the way up to ten. As I've noted from the beginning, I'm not a physicist and I'm not pretending to be one, but the interesting connections between this approach and string theory, cosmology, spirituality, ancient mysticism and much more are what have continued to make this project the subject of much discussion since I first launched it in 2006. Online sites for Discovery and Scientific American have, over the years, written articles praising this project, and author and research scientist David Jay Brown, who has written extensively about modern psychedelics research, called the book this project is based upon "one of the most brilliantly-conceived and mind-stretching books I have ever encountered".

As a boy back in 1963, I was first introduced to the idea of spacetime as a structure that could be bent and folded through Madeleine L'Engle's marvelous novel A Wrinkle in Time, which I'm excited to see is soon to be a major film release from Disney. Within the last decade we've seen a number of films and TV shows that explore the ideas behind extra dimensions: I've particularly enjoyed seeing the rise of Rick and Morty, created by Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland, which plays with many of the same concepts I've explored, most importantly Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, a key to my approach.

Interstellar, the amazing Christopher Nolan movie, has a unique pedigree in the world of science fiction: Kip Thorne, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics, acted as an executive producer and scientific advisor on that film. I've written in this blog about the connections between that film and my portrayal of the fifth dimension as being our Probability Space: it's great to see one of the world's most respected physicists advancing ideas I've been pushing for over a decade!

http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2014/11/interstellar-fifth-dimension.html
http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-science-of-interstellar.html
http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2015/01/interstellar-and-pendulum-clocks.html
http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2015/01/interstellar-and-ignoring-dimensions.html
http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2015/01/interstellar-whats-beyond-fifth.html

There was also in 2017 the news that the brain itself may be using extra dimensional topological mapping to encode memories and process information. To quote Aberdeen University's Ran Levi, one of the mathematicians who contributed to these findings:

It is as if the brain reacts to a stimulus by building then razing a tower of multi-dimensional blocks, starting with rods (1D), then planks (2D), then cubes (3D), and then more complex geometries with 4D, 5D, etc. The progression of activity through the brain resembles a multi-dimensional sandcastle that materializes out of the sand and then disintegrates.

Is our observed reality constructed from extra dimensional patterns? And is Elon Musk correct when he says there's a billion to one chance that we are all not in a computer simulation right now? I don't pretend to have all the answers, but I've been having a wonderful time exploring ideas such as these, and am particularly grateful for the continuing support of my youtube channel (currently approaching 18 million views!), where I have daily conversations with people in the comments sections to the over 400 videos I've posted there. If you are new to this project I hope you appreciate the passion and sense of wonder I feel for my little hobby project dedicated to the ten spatial dimensions from which the amazing universe we find ourselves within is derived. Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton
January 2018