101. When Richard Dawkins described the genes connecting us back through time to the beginning of life as a "river out of Eden", he was showing us the same timeless perspective that Einstein embraced. Superimposing the Kabbalistic Tree of Life on the human body shows how our energy starts for our physical presence at the base of the spine. Back in 1986 I wrote a song about feeling that energy, this is the opening verse: "I could feel it starting at the base of my spine, Made me sit up straight made me feel real fine, Sure opened those squinty little eyes of mine, For the very first time".
102. One of my more popular YouTube videos about Everett's Many Worlds is called "
We're Already Dead (But That's Okay)". I've quoted my friend Garth on this idea before as well, his words on the subject are "I am always in the version of me that is taking the longest to die."
103. Here's my contribution towards looking for some fun when times and glum: I and four good friends ever since high school are singing a song I wrote in 1974 called "Moose Jaw Woman".
https://youtu.be/Uvk5LKNzC4w
It's a love song for a fictitious woman from the not fictitious city of Moose Jaw, just a 45 minute drive up the highway. I hope you enjoy our social distancing recording, sent out with love to you all.
104. Terence McKenna described periods of increasing novelty before abrupt change. Ain't that the truth! The change is upon us.
105. My new video "Tesseract" is up on YouTube now. Thanks to @fhazalmusic for the fantastic music you'll hear in this video: the song is called "Tesseract (feat. 10thdim)" because it starts off by mutating a sample of my voice from my video "
Imagining the Fourth Dimension".
Tesseract 1 -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjhW7GzcN3c
Tesseract 2 - more explanatory text:
https://youtu.be/-EdBNPCWHIk
Instagram (vertical mode) version:
https://www.instagram.com/tv/CBgCVhZl57q/
106. The seed of life and the helix show us Maxwell's infinitely scalable field equations expressed across our reality. The helix is just as big as it needs to be because of that geometry, and is often engaged with the Fibonacci spirals of nature and life.
107. When people say reality is a "hologram projected from the edge of spacetime" they are talking about the fifth dimension. Similarly, for our imaginary 2D Flatlanders, no matter where they go within their 2D plane, the third dimension would always be at the "edge" of their reality.
108. My new video on YouTube is a remix of the first song in the 26-song collection attached to my first book. I'm calling the remix "Everything Fits Together 2020".
Here it is on YouTube in horizontal mode:
https://youtu.be/htGhyQqmrGg
And here it is on Instagram in vertical mode:
https://www.instagram.com/tv/CB9HBE5pa6Z/
When you watch this video: you'll see that it's a visual meditation on spheres within hyperspheres within hyperspheres. Because it is equal parts circles coming towards you and circles moving away, see if you get a feeling of balance when you watch these visuals.
109. My new book is now available in Paperback and as a Kindle download from Amazon.com.
https://www.amazon.com/Start-Point-but-whats-point/dp/B08C8R9QBT/
This is the link for the American store, if you're in a different country you'll probably have to go to the nearest version of Amazon for your location - here in Canada, for instance, you can order the paperback version from Amazon.ca.
110. Everything Fits Together 2020 is my latest video on YouTube. It is primarily constructed from concentric circles, roughly half of which are always expanding, while half are condensing to a point. So rather than being something that give you weird visual after effects, I find it makes me more peaceful and focused. Try it out!
https://youtu.be/htGhyQqmrGg
Haha, maybe if you stopped reading my words through clenched teeth you would see I'm not being snide at all. Here's the Wikipedia version of the Kaluza story, Greene and Kaku have told it similarly. "The five-dimensional theory developed in three steps. The original hypothesis came from Theodor Kaluza, who sent his results to Einstein in 1919,[2] and published them in 1921.[3] Kaluza presented a purely classical extension of general relativity to 5D, with a metric tensor of 15 components. 10 components are identified with the 4D spacetime metric, four components with the electromagnetic vector potential, and one component with an unidentified scalar field sometimes called the "radion" or the "dilaton". Correspondingly, the 5D Einstein equations yield the 4D Einstein field equations, the Maxwell equations for the electromagnetic field, and an equation for the scalar field." Has something changed about these equations to make you say Einstein is wrong?
Come now. You have shown me not one ounce of respect during this conversation, you started out saying this video is “literally a load of bullshit” and every time I have shown you supporting evidence from the experts you’ve dismissed it. Why is it so hard for you to understand that physically our window into the branching probabilistic outcomes of the fifth dimension is one Planck frame at a time, like a 3D flip-book animation? We don’t get to have the expansive view endorsed by Kip Thorne in Interstellar of what it means to say the fifth dimension is orthogonal to spacetime because we as observers are in a universe made not of Schrodinger’s waves, but of 3D atoms and point-like particles, that never changes. When Kaku and Greene (for instance) say that Einstein accepted that the math for general relativity reveals Maxwell’s equations when calculated in five dimensions, I believe them. Please help me to understand why you believe Einstein was wrong to endorse Kaluza’s discovery that the math for general relativity (gravity) and electromagnetism (light) is resolved in five dimensions.
I see that you disagree with Klein's addition from a few years later to Kaluza's original proposal. Why do you feel that means Kaluza's original idea, which Einstein agreed to and endorsed, is wrong? Why do say "your idea of the fifth dimension is about as far from what Maxwell's equations use as a star is from a planet" when Einstein agreed to this notion that Maxwell's equations appear out of general relativity when calculated in the fifth dimension? You accuse me of putting words in your mouth, but I am directly quoting your words. Einstein agreed to this, you say it's wrong, but I am jumping to conclusions when I ask you to explain why you disagree with Einstein? Nonsense.
Kip Thorne says our observed universe comes from Everett's Universal Wavefunction in the fifth dimension.
https://youtu.be/KKr91v7yLcM This animation shows the same idea: our quantum wavefunction is calculated using two orthogonal axes, which Hawking called time and imaginary time, and which Thorne calls the fourth and fifth dimension. Your desire for there to be a fourth spatial dimension that is purely abstract, that does not arise from or include the third dimensional space we are observing, has been well established, and you can go ahead and imagine that if you so desire. But Kip Thorne's 4D "world tubes" show exactly the same 4D "long undulating snake" concept I showed in my original 2006 animation and have talked about ever since. The fact that I have confirmation in 2014 from a Nobel prize laureate is certainly icing on the cake, but it doesn't change what I've been saying all along.
I am sorry to hear my little passion project has pissed you off so royally. Obviously it bugs you that somebody could arrive at an intuitive understanding of the dimensions which happens to align with modern scientific viewpoints being advanced by recognized experts like Sean Carroll and Kip Thorne. Do I understand the math the way these experts do? No, as I've already said here and as I have often said over the last 14 years I am not a physicist and I'm not pretending to be one. But after a decade and a half of showing these ideas I do hear regularly from people who are now scientists and teachers, who say my videos were their introduction to thinking about how there is more than just the 3D reality we see around us, and thanking me for awakening their intellectual curiosity. It is those kinds of messages that give me the drive to continue making new videos as I explore the many connections arising from this approach to cosmology, ancient mysticism, altered states of consciousness, sacred geometry, free will/determinism, and much much more.
Yes, I believe we have firmly established that as a non-scientist with a curious mind I am interested in topics well beyond your narrow definition of reality, and if that makes me a crackpot I am proud to wear that label, as I said in my 2006 book Imagining the Tenth Dimension.
I look forward to your takedown of Thorne’s The Science of Interstellar, where you convince him he is wrong about 4D world tubes and the 5th dimension of Everett’s Many Worlds.
Haha, you are hilarious. Okay, we will ignore what the Nobel laureate says about 4D world tubes in tesseract shapes seen from the fifth dimension from here on in, as you wish.
The reason I think teaching people about orthogonal thinking beyond the first three dimensions is a positive thing to do, is because thinking in terms of "and what's at right angles to that?" is a great way to organize thinking processes. As a film composer I was always thinking in terms of parallel and orthogonal motion, and structures that repeat across time and space, which can also describe entrainment, entanglement, and even causality. Indeed, one physicist I've watched proposes that it's valid to think of molecules or chemical reactions as being like little songs, repeating structures in time and space, the same thing over and over just like Bing Crosby's White Christmas. Richard Dawkins talks about genes connected within a "river out of Eden": once again we have a scientist encouraging a timeless perspective, which I believe is easily superimposed on Simulation Theory, or on fluid dynamics, the precursor to quantum theory. That's why genes as turbulence within a timeless four-dimensional river, from the beginning to the end of life on the planet, is such a great image.
Brian Greene describes our universe and its locked-in constants as existing at a position within the landscape multiverse. That is not saying a universe is a dimension. That is saying our universe exists at a position within the information that becomes our reality. We are someplace within what Thorne calls The Bulk. What dimension is Greene's Landscape Multiverse? In this video I suggested the Landscape Multiverse would be the ninth dimension, as the highest dimension where change can take place within my approach, but conceptually I think whether you call it the Landscape Multiverse or The Bulk doesn't change what we are talking about. Some place within Tegmark's Ultimate Ensemble our universe exists, and that is what we are observing, nothing strange about that.
Isn’t it strange how you keep bringing up Klein’s later addition to Kaluza’s original proposal? When did Einstein withdraw his public endorsement of Kaluza’s original idea, and why do you keep talking about your hatred of Kaluza Klein theory and string theory rather than what Einstein agreed to? Yes of course a world line and a world tube are the same idea. Both are about thinking about the fourth dimension spatially, where the distinction between past present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. In this video I call them worldlines, since it came out well before Kip Thorne introduced the world tube phrasing to me in The Science of Interstellar. I’ve also called them spimes, Bruce Sterling’s term used to describe the data set representing an object in the fourth dimension. And we still have Kip Thorne saying our reality comes from the fifth dimension of Everett’s Many Worlds, please stop pretending I am alone in my obsession with this idea. Imaginary time, at right angles to spacetime, is used in the calculation of our Universal Wavefunction. We have a Nobel laureate calling that the fifth dimension, and we have some guy on the internet saying that’s wrong.
You ridicule Kaluza Klein theory, string theory, and M-Theory, I apologize for suggesting that means you dislike them, maybe you love them, who knows. You want me to stop bringing up Kip Thorne’s description of the fifth dimension containing Everett’s Many Worlds? Show me where Thorne, one of the world’s most respected physicists, has recanted his position on this idea.
Quantum mechanics is often described as our most-confirmed theory of reality, will you agree? When Everett put forth his Theory of the Universal Wavefunction (now commonly referred to as the Many Worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics) back in 1957 he did not talk about the fifth dimension. Instead he talked about the branching world lines of his “many worlds” occurring within a “subspace which is orthogonal to spacetime”. Extra dimensions were not in vogue at that time, but if we are talking about something orthogonal to spacetime that sure sounds like the fifth dimension to me, the same fifth dimension Thorne is endorsing now. In 2007 a team of scientists at Oxford under the direction of David Deutsch published a paper mathematically equating the probabilistic outcomes of quantum mechanics with the branching worldlines of Everett’s Many Worlds, and New Scientist magazine called the paper the most important science news story of the year. I have well-respected physicist Sean Carroll saying “Many Worlds has the simplest, smallest, most compact fundamental picture of reality. It’s just a wave function obeying an equation” and “There aren’t separate wave functions for each particle. There is only one wave function: the wave function of the universe.” I have KipThorne saying the simultaneous branching causal chains of Everett’s theory can be viewed from the fifth dimension. And I have a random guy on the internet telling me I am wrong to be spreading these ideas. Is there any chance at all I could get you to acknowledge that yours may not be the only viewpoint in the world?
As I'm sure you know, Everett insisted that all of the potential outcomes are equally real for the observers in each version of the universe, to the point where each observer would be convinced that theirs was the only possible reality and free will is an illusion. This would be one of those cases where serious scientists have a different viewpoint from yours, while others support your position, fair enough. Why are you asking the crackpot for the math when I'm only reporting what the experts say? Do you disagree with the math of quantum mechanics? Do you disagree with the Deutsch team's proof equating quantum mechanics with Everett's Many Worlds? I believe we've already established that you disagree with Kip Thorne's depiction of the different probabilistic fourth-dimensional world tubes that can be viewed simultaneously from the fifth dimension, the same idea I show in this video, but perhaps I am putting words in your mouth again?
Yes, as I said at the end of my very first video, “this ‘way of imagining’ is not the explanation for string theory“. The premise of my thought experiment is “all dimensions are spatial”. You say my depiction of the fourth and fifth dimension is different from Kip Thorne’s, having read The Science of Interstellar, I disagree. You say my approach of thinking about what it means to say each new dimension is orthogonal to the previous ones is bullshit past the third dimension, and yet I depict the fourth dimension as a world line, and the fifth dimension as where you can see there are the multiple worldlines of Everett’s Many Worlds connected to any event, same as Thorne. There’s nothing ambiguous about this, you either buy into Thorne’s fifth-dimensional depiction of Everett’s interpretation or you do not. I do.
I would be happy to discuss how that spatial logic might be continued past the fifth dimension if I thought it would do any more than trigger more name calling and expletive-laden tirades. No chance of that, obviously. But thanks for the conversation, you taught me some things.
May I have your permission to post this conversation on my blog?
(Of course this last question was offered only to be polite, I don't need permission to post something that's already public, I just thought we might have heard one final response, but after two weeks of silence it looks like this conversation is done.)