Monday, April 19, 2021

Seth Abramson on Imagining the Tenth Dimension

https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/the-best-videos-on-the-internet-vol

Seth Abramson is a well-known professor, attorney, author, and political columnist. He is currently an assistant professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at the University of New Hampshire and an affiliate faculty member at the New Hampshire Institute of Art. His teaching areas include digital journalism, post-internet cultural theory, post-internet writing, and legal advocacy. His "Proof" substack offers lots of interesting essays, but the one I wanted to tell you about is a recently published article he called The Best Videos on the Internet Volume One. And what was his number one pick? I'm pleased to report it's my Imagining the Tenth Dimension video!


 

Here's what he says about the video: 

This video will change your life - if you let it, and if you can get through all the dimensions of reality detailed below with some semblance of your sanity intact. I've played this video for undergraduate students for many years, in part as a way of explaining post-internet cultural theory, and most poop out at the seventh dimension. If you can fight your way past that point, you'll be well rewarded.

Fantastic! Thanks for you support, Seth, it's very much appreciated. I did write back in the comments, here's what I wrote:

Hi Seth, Rob Bryanton here, thank you for including my Imagining the Tenth Dimension video in this list! I'm honoured. Why, some may ask, is my 2006 video in two parts? Because back in the early days of YouTube 11 minutes was the maximum duration for accounts like mine. By 2008 they raised that limit, so I posted another version which runs uninterrupted, here it is: https://youtu.be/XjsgoXvnStY

Yes, there are a number of copies of copies of my video out there that have removed my name, copyright info, and the explanatory text at the end... including a Korean channel, their copy is currently at 6 million views! But there are also critics who say everything about this video past the third dimension is wrong, so let me try to clear up some confusion.

First of all, as I write at the end of the video, this is not the explanation for string theory, although it has some connections, including the idea that our reality is constrained by "branes" at the third and seventh dimension. It has more direct connections to Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, and if you read Nobel laureate Kip Thorne's 2014 book The Science of Interstellar you'll see a very similar explanation of the first five dimensions. Thorne says a theoretical observer elevated to a five dimensional vantage point would see the many branching timelines of Everett's Many Worlds bending and stretching in the warped 4D geometries of the tesseract. Thorne goes on to say that it's fine to lump all of the dimensions beyond the fifth together and call them "The Bulk". The Bulk is the rest of the information that becomes reality that is not directly connected to our observed universe. Likewise, with my approach the first five dimensions show where our observed reality comes from, while with each dimension beyond the fifth with my approach we move further and further "outside" of the unique universe we are currently observing.

Finally, I've always tried to make it clear with my videos and blog that I'm not a physicist and I'm not pretending to be one. I'm a composer and sound designer (currently I'm mixing a film starring Scott Eastwood and Mel Gibson). The logic my video uses to imagine these dimensions relates nicely to the point-line-plane postulate, which is the accepted methodology for visualizing any number of spatial dimensions. That's the key - this video requires us to accept that all of the dimensions, including the fourth, are spatial, and it's our unique perspective as creatures embedded in the third dimension that makes it appear that the dimensions beyond the third are not as spatial (or "space-like" as some physicists prefer to say).

Ultimately, I try to frame this video as a "mind-expanding exercise". I hear all the time from people who feel this video has been a positive influence on their lives, and from people who see connections between this approach and ancient mysticism, sacred geometry, psychedelics, and much more. In his book The New Science of Psychedelics, author/scientist David Jay Brown wrote these amazing words: "Physicist Michio Kaku's book Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension and Rob Bryanton's Imagining the Tenth Dimension both seem to provide uncanny maps of the territory that one encounters after smoking salvia or DMT. Like the two-dimensional character in Edwin Abbott's book Flatland, we seem just as limited in our three-dimensional perspective."

 

Enjoy the journey,

Rob


 

 

Tenth Dimension Vlog playlist