a new way of thinking about time and space ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ by Rob Bryanton
--author and research scientist David Jay Brown says: "one of the most brilliantly-conceived and mind-stretching books that I've ever encountered".
--science fiction author Greg Bear says: "a fascinating excursion into the multiverse - clear, elegant, personal and provocative"
Showing posts with label Anton Zeilinger. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anton Zeilinger. Show all posts
"The division between the quantum and classical worlds appears not to be fundamental. It is just a question of experimental ingenuity, and few physicists now think that classical physics will ever really make a comeback at any scale. If anything, the general belief is that if a deeper theory ever supersedes quantum physics, it will show the world to be even more counterintuitive than anything we have seen so far."
- from an article in the June 2011 issue of Scientific American, "Living in a Quantum World" by Vlatko Vedral
Poll 82 - "Information Equals Reality". Poll ended June 16, 2011.
68.5% agreed, while the remaining 31.5% did not.
One of the claims I've made from the outset of this project echoes Vlatko Vedral's statement quoted above. How great it is to see this idea has now officially moved into the mainstream! Five years ago when my book was published, this was one of the ideas that critics said proved I was a crackpot. As I said in Chapter Two, The Quantum Observer:
...the difficulties in determining where the dividing line between the quantum world and the macro world lies stem from the fact that it really is all part of the same continuum. Therefore the observer is functioning at both the quantum level, and as part of the physical world we see around us. This means that each of us is an observer, and each of us is creating our own unique reality, while we continue to participate in a shared consensus reality where the basic physical laws of our universe remain unchanged.
Which takes us to these words: "information equals reality". This is a highly useful phrase which I had not come across when I finished writing my book in 2006, but since then I've used it extensively in this blog. In 2009 when I created the pdf version of my book (available for download at www.tenthdimension.com/digital) I did add some addenda items to the end of each chapter to outline the progress that had been made in my ideas becoming less "out there" than they seemed at first. Here's a paragraph I added near the end of Chapter Two which helps to explain this concept:
Quantum mechanics is often portrayed as being completely unimaginable and supremely mysterious. I would propose that the way of imagining reality we are exploring here–which takes the indeterminate nature of subatomic particles and equates that idea with the simultaneously branching possibilities that we select from the probability space of the fifth dimension to create our fourth-dimensional reality–helps us to understand how both can be part of the same idea. When quantum physicist Seth Lloyd, in his book “Programming the Universe”, talks about information and reality being interchangeable, I feel a strong resonance between that statement and what we’re exploring in these pages: we are all navigating a sea of information, which from some perspectives may seem random and inexplicable. But within that sea of information we can find patterns and shapes, fractals and chaos, parts that start and parts that stop, all encoded within the underlying fabric of our observed reality.
There are numerous popular films that explore the idea that our reality equals information. We talked about some of those not long ago in my entry Poll 77 - What if the World's a Simulation?. A recent film about this idea, and it's one that I really loved, is Source Code. If you'd like to read an analysis of this film from a quantum physicist's perspective, here's a link from the Discover Magazine "Cosmic Variance" blog. Just a warning though, in order to discuss the underlying theories behind this movie the link I'm giving you has to reveal the surprise ending. Now that's okay, I suppose, if you've never seen the film and have no intention of doing so, but if you are thinking of watching it I'd really recommend you do so before reading this analysis.
Finally, here's a link to an exciting article published June 1st 2011 in New Scientist, which gives the seal of approval to a new paper published by Raphael Bousso and Leonard Susskind. This paper provides a formal proof for how the string theory multiverse and Everett's Many Worlds are directly equivalent. As I've admitted elsewhere, I've talked so much about this idea for the last five years that it seems a bit strange to have mainstream scientists only starting to accept it now, but once again I'm thrilled to see ways in which the "crazy" ideas I've been promoting with Imagining the Tenth Dimension are continuing to move closer and closer to the accepted mainstream. How cool is that?
Last time, as we looked at the results from Poll 48, we discussed the possibilities that some supernatural or physic phenomena might be giving us evidence of some of the ways that our reality is connected together "outside" of spacetime. But we also had to acknowledge that for someone who has never seen direct evidence of such possibilities themselves, it's extremely easy to dismiss such ideas as bunk.
Here's the video for an entry published in June this year, called "Do Animals Have Souls?":
We've also started a new poll question over to the right that asks for people's opinions on this question. "Do animals have souls?" The three answers offered are (1): "yes", (2): "no, only humans have souls", or (3): "there's no such thing as a soul". Admittedly, there are many other more finely-nuanced answers people might like to give to this poll question.
Which leads us back to that age-old question, what exactly is a soul? In entries like Where Are You?, Creativity and the Quantum Universe, and You are Me and We are All Together, we've talked about how each of us is a unique quantum observer, right at the center of our own observer-region. And in entries like Alien Mathematics, An Expanding 4D Sphere, and The Statistical Universe, we've talked about how this observer-region extends in all directions to create what's known as our cosmological horizon. This horizon includes the CMB (the cosmic microwave background or "surface of last scattering" as it's sometimes called); and in The Holographic Universe we looked at how being the middle of the ocean gives us a way to visualize how no matter where we go in the universe we're always at the center: but the tricky part of this concept is we have to remember that the CMB and the cosmological horizon is not a space horizon but a spacetime horizon.
The idea that each of us is a unique quantum observer can lead us to some mind-boggling questions. What's real? What is invented within our minds as part of this observer process? In Local Realism Bites the Dust, we looked at the work of physicist Anton Zeilinger and his team in Vienna, who have convincing scientific evidence that our reality is much stranger than most of us can possibly imagine: essentially, their experiments have proved not only that distant events can instantaneously affect each other, but also that the world around us is nothing more than a probabilistic cloud until we observe it. Einstein asked, "Do you really believe that the moon only exists when you are looking at it?" He was reported to be equally uneasy with what he called the "spooky action at a distance" ideas of quantum entanglement, but the Zeilinger team's work is proving Einstein wrong in both cases.
So, what does it mean if the world around us is being created by our observation? I want you to look at a fascinating article from Scientific American called "Tasting the Light". Here's the opening paragraph of this article, which was written by Mandy Kendrick: Neuroscientist Paul Bach-y-Rita hypothesized in the 1960s that "we see with our brains not our eyes." Now, a new device trades on that thinking and aims to partially restore the experience of vision for the blind and visually impaired by relying on the nerves on the tongue's surface to send light signals to the brain.
"We see with our brains not our eyes": that's a powerful statement. You can substitute "mind" or "consciousness" or even "soul" into that sentence and still end up with a similar but profound idea which relates to the huge cloud of ideas we're playing with in this project.
Do you see, though, how someone learning to see with their tongue may not be that far away from someone with synaesthesia, an idea we explored in "Crossed Wires in the Brain"? Now check out this article from BBC science, which talks about a form of synaesthesia I had never heard of before, but which ties so wonderfully to the idea of the fourth dimension being spatial rather than temporal: the article, written by Victoria Gill, is called "Can You See Time?". Here's a few paragraphs from the article, which is about the work of Dr. Julia Simner, a psychologist from the University of Edinburgh:
In the case of time-space synaesthesia, a very visual experience can be triggered by thinking about time.
"I thought everyone thought like I did, says Holly Branigan, also a scientist at Edinburgh University, and someone with time-space synaesthesia.
"I found out when I attended a talk in the department that Julia was giving. She said that some synaesthetes can see time. And I thought, 'Oh my god, that means I've got synaesthesia'."
"For me it's a bit like a running track," she says.
"The track is organised around the academic year. The short ends are the summer and Christmas holidays - the summer holiday is slightly longer.
"It's as if I'm in the centre and I'm turning around slowly as the year goes by. If I think ahead to the future, my perspective will shift."
There are at least 54 different variants of synaesthesia and Dr Simner thinks this might be one of the most common ones.
"If you ask all the people at your work, or in your family, you're likely to find at least one person who has it," Dr Simner says.
I'm intrigued by this proposal that time-space synaesthesia might be one of the most common of all the variants of this fascinating condition. I would love to hear from people who feel they are able to "see" time, which might remind us of the conversations we've had about Kurt Vonnegut's fictional race of Trafalmadorians: for more about all that you might want to read Beer and Miracles, Connecting It All Together, and Dr. Mel's 4D Glasses. Of course, since I've spent so much time talking to people about my own unique way of visualizing space-time, perhaps I myself might have a form of space-time synaesthesia? Perhaps what I have really been trying to describe with my original Imagining the Tenth Dimension animation is my own visual perception of time and quantum probability? Since each of us is our own unique quantum observer, it's always hard to imagine how someone else's perception of the world around them might be fundamentally different from our own.
Here's a link to an article published by Pravda about a Russian man who says he can discern colors by touch. More evidence that our world is assembled together by our observation in ways that can boggle the mind? You be the judge.
Finally, here's a nice 10 minute clip from a documentary explaining how our reality is constructed within our minds:
Next time, we'll go back to Einstein's misgivings about the implications of quantum mechanics, and how my way of visualizing the dimensions might have helped: the entry is called "The Fifth Dimension is Spooky".
I suppose you could say this is a continuation of the "Beatles" theme we started with last week's entries "I Know You, You Know Me", and "You are Me and We Are All Together"... since Paul McCartney tells us when he first came up with the melody for his classic hit "Yesterday", the phrase he would sing to himself is "scrambled eggs".
Isn't it funny how we each have our own perspective, and find it so very hard to imagine some other perspective different from our own?
With my project, I've been trying to get people to understand that "time" is just a direction, not a full dimension, and like any other direction there is an opposite direction to "time" that makes just as much sense (north has its south, up has its down, and time has its "anti-time"). This idea is central to the way of visualizing reality that my book and this project is based upon: look up "time reversal symmetry" if you'd like to know more about how this concept of time having two possible directions is an accepted idea from mainstream science. In my blog entry "Time in Either Direction", I talked about physicist Sean M. Carroll's proposition put forth in a recent article in Scientific American, that there could be other universes that operate in the opposite "direction" of time to ours, which means in those universes it would be like eggs could unscramble and go back into their unbroken shell.
For most of us, that thought is unfathomable. What would it be like to live in a universe where every choice, every random occurrence results not in a bush-like branching structure of more possible outcomes, but less?
Even the idea that there are more copies of our universe created through chance and choice takes some getting used to: but the Deutsch team's 2007 proof confirms Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, which tells us there is a wave function of possible futures at both the quantum and macro level. Quantum mechanics is one of the most proven theories of reality known today, so a proof that shows there is a direct continuum from the quantum to the macro world is an important breakthrough: this is why New Scientist Magazine called the Deutsch team's proof one of the most significant science stories of 2007. But the upshot of the Many Worlds theory is that right now, if I break an egg, there are other versions of our universe where I didn't break the egg, and still others where I broke more than one egg, and others where I did lots of other things involving much more than just eggs. Each of those other universes exist, but at any particular instant I can only observe one of them.
Clearly, in our universe, eggs can be broken, eggs can become scrambled, and once that has happened they can't be unscrambled. There are an increasing number of possible paths forward, just as there are many ways to break an egg, but none of those possible paths will reduce the options back to a universe where a broken egg can once again become unbroken.
Now, let's look at this idea from the opposite perspective.
Believe it or not, we live in a universe right now where each choice taken, and every random outcome at both the quantum and macro level, results in less and less choices. As we flip our minds into this opposite viewpoint, it's quite easy to see: by observing one possible outcome, there are a huge number of other logical outcomes that are no longer available. If I get out of bed at seven this morning, I am no longer going to be able to get to the versions of our universe where I got out of bed at six. If I go out my front door this morning and turn right, I am no longer going to be able to get to the versions of our universe where I went out my front door this morning and turned left. With each branching universe observed, a huge number of other universes became inaccessible, because they are no longer part of the fifth-dimensional probability set for our universe in it current state.
In one of the more poetic paragraphs from my book, I talked about the "angels of possibility that swirl around a toddler's head"). Isn't it clear that this is why so many cultures regard their children as a sacred trust? A child has a huge set of possible paths branching out into the future before them: but with each choice taken and every random action, some of those potential futures are pared away. From this other perspective, then, it's like we're living right now in a world where eggs unscramble themselves and go back into their shells!
Ultimately, what we're talking about here is timelessness. Some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century - Einstein, Wheeler, Feynman, Hawking, etc. - have tried to get us to visualize that the distinction between past, present, and future is really immaterial. Quantum physicists like Seth Lloyd and Anton Zeilinger often use a phrase that this project also embraces: in the biggest picture of all, information equals reality. So, whether we're talking about Everett's Many Worlds, or just our own universe moving through time, we should really be thinking about how the other possible states already exist, and have always existed, within timelessness.
(diagram from "Everything Forever". Gevin Giorbrans's caption for this graphic reads: "The order of one type is the disorder of the other.")
When we're thinking about timelessness, all branches exist simultaneously. As we move down our line of time, each new instant takes away a set of possible branches that are no longer accessible, and adds another set of branches that are now part of the spacetime tree for our universe. This double-edged sword that we're thinking about here is the magic of the two kinds of order, grouping order and symmetry order pushing against each other to create the "now" that we are currently observing: and Gevin Giorbran's wonderful and uplifting book Everything Forever - Learning to See Timelessness gives us a powerful and intuitive way to imagine that process. Click here if you would like to watch the last interview I did with Gevin before his untimely death.
Here, to close, is one of my personal favorites from the 26 songs I've attached to this project: it's about picturing our universe as just one of many possible universes that exist within timelessness. This video was created by Ryan Hill, and the song is called "The Anthropic Viewpoint".
This separation between past, present and future is only an illusion… - Albert Einstein
Physicists and philosophers often say it: "time is an illusion". But things change, things move, and it takes “time” for those processes to occur. What are we supposed to be imagining if the distinction between past, present and future is really only a persistent illusion? What we’re talking about here is that our experience of “time” from instant to instant is really just a very narrow view of a much larger picture.
Back in a blog entry called "What Would a Flatlander Really See?", we talked about how a 2D Flatlander's vision would be even more limited than most of us can imagine. One of my sons recently sent me a link to a fun little flash game that asks you to deduce the shapes of objects and letters as they pass through a plane: click here to play that game. This challenging puzzle game is actually giving you a taste of what you would be able to see if you were an imaginary Flatlander living within a 2D plane.
Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation says that we as quantum observers don't "collapse" the wave function of our quantum reality, we merely "observe" it in a particular state at each particular instant. This time around, we're going to talk about the illusions that we fall into as we observe those waves of possibility that are represented within the "now" that is our universe at this very instant, and how this can cause us to miss the potential that those waves really represent. So... here's a question that is often asked: is it possible for a person to predict the future? If so, doesn't that mean the future already exists and our free will is an illusion?
The "hard determinist" viewpoint, which says everything from the big bang to the end of the universe was inevitable and our free will is an illusion, would seem to be supported by the idea that there has been only one path from the big bang to now, so why should there be more than one path from this moment forward?
Likewise, if I pass a 3D object like a rock through a 2D plane, it does indeed appear that what is going to pass through has already been predetermined. Imagining that rock is really 4D since it exists not just within space but within time doesn't seem to make much difference, because a rock is still most likely going to be the same rock with the same shape five minutes, five months, or even five years from now.
We need the 4th dimension for change in the 3rd dimension to occur But what about passing through a 4D human, capable of moving, dancing around, bending over and touching their toes, and doing all the other things their free will allows them to do? As that 4D person passes through the 2D plane, their shape will be unpredictable, and every time they pass through the plane there will be different 2D cross-sections visible within the second dimension.
Again, if a 2D flatlander were to somehow record the shape changes that had happened for one particular pass through by that free will human, then the flatlander would have a recording that in their minds was a "history" which, once it happened, would not change again, so a 2D flatlander could convince themselves that what had happened was inevitable if that was their chosen mindset. The flash game we started this entry off with, then, is only able to be played because there is no free will movement in the shapes being presented, and the same 2D pattern is presented over and over until you guess correctly.
Many Worlds, Many Branches, Many Histories
The quantum physics answer, promoted by respected experts like John Wheeler and Richard Feynman, is that the past has a certain amount of flexibility just as the future does, and that there are many ways we could have gotten to our current "now". Feynman called it the "sum over paths" or "sum over histories" concept, and Wheeler called it the "self-excited circuit" of quantum observation. This was an idea I talked about in my blog "Boredom and Consciousness Part One", in which I discussed the serious proposition from quantum physicists Lawrence Krauss and James Dent that our 1998 observation of the accelerating expansion of the universe has hastened its end!
This doesn't mean, by the way, that I'm claiming that simply through the act of observing we can make impossible things happen: this was the subject we explored in my blog entry "The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic". But it does mean that if there are certain things about our history that were not completely locked in, that had elements that were indeterminate, then those things are part of a cloud of possible paths that we could have traveled upon to get to our current "now". Physicists Krauss and Dent are talking about extremely large ideas from cosmology, but this idea also works at a personal level: for each of us, there are many ways that the past could have affected us, and until we irreversibly lock in one path or another, that past can effectively be changed (this idea relates strongly to the surprising scientific proof we've talked about before that we are capable of Changing Our Genes). As I've said before, for persons trapped in repeating patterns of negative behavior this idea can offer a way out: because quantum mechanics tells us there are many paths we could have traveled to get to our current "now", this means the past has a certain amount of flexibility which we can take advantage of.
The "Now" is Real, Everything Else is Probabilistic
In my blog entry "Local Realism Bites the Dust" we talked about the Anton Zeilinger team's experiments in Vienna that demonstrate these ideas as well. Is the past really an illusion? Not completely, and Feynman's sum over histories concept demonstrates the same idea: there are many paths we could have traveled to get to the absolutely real "now" that we are observing from instant to instant. I believe that it's time's arrow and the fourth dimension that convinces us that the past is less than it really is. And with my project, I believe the answer to all of this is in the fifth dimension rather than the fourth: that gives us an easily imagined explanation that allows for the straight and unwavering 4D line of time that supports the hard determinists' view, and lets us imagine within the fifth dimension the more probabilistic future (and past!) that quantum mechanics asks us to visualize for the underlying structures of our reality.
My blog entry "What Would a Linelander Really See" offers further explanations of this way of thinking about time and free will. And all of this is part of thinking about the biggest picture of timelessness where, as Gevin Giorbran so eloquently described it, "Everything is Forever".
To close, here's a video created by Ron Scott for one of the 26 songs from my project, and this is about some of those events in the past that can create irreversible changes in the "now" that each of us is currently witnessing. The song is called "Senseless Violence". A direct link to this video can be found at http://revver.com/video/384964/senseless-violence/
Last blog we looked at the annotated version of the Imagining the Tenth Dimension video, which provides a running commentary introducing ideas from the website and the book to people who are already familiar with the original animation. This time, let's continue with a discussion of some of the basic ideas that stem from this way of visualizing reality.
The "spacetime tree" is a phrase that was first introduced to me by visitors to the Imagining the Tenth Dimension forum. I like this phrase because it immediately evokes a useful image of what the Many Worlds Interpretation tells us about our reality - that from this particular "now" there is not just one line of time. Rather, there is a bush-like branching structure of possible outcomes, and this has been confirmed by Anton Zeilinger and his team in Vienna as being more than just thought experiment: amazingly, this means that Schrödinger's cat really is simultaneously alive and dead until one state or the other is observed. The fact that the David Deutsch team at Oxford published a proof equating this at both the quantum and macro levels does indeed seem to put Everett's idea of a wave function that exists outside of time and space, and which we are merely "observing" rather than "collapsing" on a very solid footing.
In a blog entry called Time in Either Direction, I talked about Sean Carroll's ideas of an equilibrium state that exists outside of time and space, and how the entropy-derived line of branching choices that create what we experience as "time" is only one of the possible directions for a universe to be viewed. Thinking of the trunk, limbs, branches, and twigs of a spacetime tree gives us another way to visualize this - and also shows us how the move from the highly ordered "base" of the tree trunk to the many branches is equivalent to the universe we live in, where eggs do not unscramble themselves and broken mirrors do not reassemble: once you have moved out to a branch, you are no longer on the trunk, and so on. Here is a freaky-looking video blog of "Time in Either Direction":
The spacetime tree is also a useful phrase because it immediately puts one in the mindset of thinking in a more timeless mode, where all possibilities exist simultaneously. In a blog entry called Anime, Gaming, and Cusps I used the metaphor of the branching scenarios of video games as a starting point for imagining the many branches of our spacetime tree, which we would be able to see if we could somehow move our observation out to this timeless perspective. Here is a video blog entry of that discussion:
Finally, one of the assumptions that I make in this project is that the fourth dimension has (as Sean Carroll also says) two directions, one of which is time as we know it, and the other which would be the time-reversal version of that fourth dimension. If our spacetime tree was one single trunk from beginning to end that would be the end of the story, but since we now have scientific evidence that the branches do exist, the fifth dimension is where I place the spacetime tree for our particular universe as it exists in our current "now", and the sixth dimension is where I place the other spacetime trees which are logically/probabilistically incompatible with our current "now". In both cases I am using the moral/probabilistic branches created by chance and choice as ways to describe the extra dimensions, and some will insist that because of this I'm not talking about spatial dimensions, I'm talking about temporal dimensions. In Hypercubes and Plato's Cave, I made what I believe to be a convincing argument for why our experience of the extra spatial dimensions can be incorporated into a temporal model, because ultimately we are 3D creatures moving on a 4D line, and because of that our ability to perceive any of the extra dimensions requires us to acknowledge the spatial nature of time: without time, we 3D creatures are stuck in one single frame of our universe with no way to witness or experience the fourth dimension and above. Here is a video blog of that discussion:
The spacetime tree for our particular universe, then, at this particular moment, is in the fifth dimension. The spacetime tree for some other version of our universe, then, like the one where it's 2008 and gas is free, is inaccessible to our spacetime tree unless we move through the sixth dimension to get there. The logic of such reasoning is consistent with the general idea of dimensions - each dimension that we add gives us a way to get to states that were unavailable from the dimension we were in, and that is consistent with the most basic definition of the word "dimensions" that is commonly used.
One of the questions that sometimes comes up about the original Imagining the Tenth Dimension animation is that it doesn't really show what a Flatlander's world would look like to a Flatlander. The concept of 2D creatures living in a flat, two-dimensional world was first introduced to us by Edwin A. Abbott in his 1884 novel "Flatland: a Romance of Many Dimensions".
In the original animation, we started out by imagining our flatlander as being the "one-eyed Jack on an impossibly flat playing card":
This is the original image Jason Orban of OH!Media drew for me as a representation of what I'm describing here. But why did we say "impossibly flat" in the narration? Because no matter what kind of paper we can imagine this Flatlander to be drawn upon, that paper has length and width and some small amount of depth, represented by the thickness of that paper. For us to really imagine a flatlander we need to be thinking about him in a plane that has length and width only, and no depth whatsoever. This is not an easy thing for we 3D observers to imagine, and some people will insist that there must be at least some depth for this flatlander to exist. It's important to realize what we're talking about here: in the same way that a one dimensional line must have length only, no width or depth, for it to truly be one-dimensional, a 2D flatlander must have length and width only, and no depth, or he is not really two-dimensional.
Each additional dimension adds an additional degree of freedom. If you lived as a point on a one-dimensional line, the only thing you would be able to see would be the two points that are nearest you on your line. Everything else would be hidden from view, and because you existed within a single dimension, there would be no way for you to see or travel "around" those points to become aware of what lies beyond. In fact, the concept of going "around" would be completely unimaginable to you, and you would just take it for granted that your point of view was the only point of view possible.
Adding a second dimension gives our flatlander a little more room to move and see "around" other objects, but the possibilities for this creature, living within a flat 2D plane, are still very limited when you compare them to our world: as we watch the flatlander from above, we are able to see things with much more freedom that what his perspective would really allow. Let's look a little closer at that one-eyed-Jack as he was shown in the animation:
Here's a question we can ask ourselves then: are we seeing the flatlander's left eye or right eye in this picture? From our 3D perspective, we look down upon the flatlander as pictured here and presume that his eye is to the right of his nose. But really, because he is completely flat, this flatlander's eye is "behind" his nose, which means the only thing this poor fellow would be able to see is the inside of his own head! We would need to move his eye to the outside edge of his face if we really wanted to let him see the world around him, like so: Again, from our imaginary flatlander's perspective, having to have your eyes on the "outside edge" would seem completely normal, and the idea of an eye "within" a head would be completely foreign. But what would his 2D eye really be able to see? We still haven't properly imagined his perspective. As we try to do that, let's think about what we really see as 3D creatures.
Most of us have two eyes. Let's start by covering one eye, so that we're more like the flatlander we're looking at here. If you sit motionless with one eye covered and look in front of you, how many dimensions are you seeing? Most of us would automatically say three (or even four if we consider the direction of time), but really we are only seeing two: we are seeing a flat 2D representation of the world in front of us, projected onto the retina at the back of our eye. If we keep our other eye covered and move our heads around a bit, we'll see changing relationships within that 2D image that give us clues as to what is nearer and what is further away from us, but that is information that our brains are deducing from watching a series of 2D images our eye is delivering to the brain, one after the other. Johnny Lee has a lovely YouTube video showing a "heads up" display he created using Nintendo Wii technology that allows a flat image on a screen to appear as if it has a very realistic 3D depth, and his invention relies upon exactly what we're talking about here: our brains are able to look at a flat 2D image and infer the 3D nature of that image by what happens as we move our heads around.
A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw
The great thing about the Johnny Lee demo is it clearly shows how our brains can deduce 3D even with only one eye, as long as we can move our heads around. If you add a second eye to our 2d flatlander, or to us as 3D creatures, you give the brain even more information to work with - now there are differences between what one eye and the other sees, and the differences get greater the closer any objects are to us, which allows the brain to infer even more about the 3D nature of the world it's witnessing... but our brains do so, still, by taking in two slightly different 2D images projected on the back of our eyeballs. This convinces us that we are able to see in 3D, but the truth is still that our perception of 3D is happening within our brains, and the information that is coming into each eye is still really only a series of changing 2D images.
So: our 3D eyes are seeing 2D images, and we take it for granted that we can't see what's on the other side of a wall without getting up and moving there. An imaginary one-dimensional creature would only be able to see the Zero-D "points" that are nearest them on their 1D line, and to them the idea of seeing or moving "around" things would be inconceivable, because of the extremely limited freedom of movement their dimension gives them.
In each case, what each creature sees from its current dimension is the dimension below. Now we're ready to go back to our original question: what would a flatlander really see?
Try to imagine yourself now as a 2D flatlander. In our representation of him, we're seeing his world from above - we're able to see "around" things that the flatlander would not. In fact, until we repositioned his eyeball he would not even have been able to see "around" the outline of his own face. What we need to do now is imagine ourselves rotating down out of our nice round 3D world, and becoming part of the flat 2D plane the flatlander exists within. To do that, we need to rotate down into his perspective. This series of pictures shows us going most of the way: This sequence shows what happens as you get closer and closer to the perspective of the flat 2D plane our flatlander is living within. You would get a similar effect by picking up a piece of paper, bringing it up to eye level and rotating it so that you're only seeing one edge. The closer you get to seeing just that edge, the closer you are to seeing what the flatlander would see - but it's still important to keep in mind that the edge of a piece of a piece of paper in our 3D world is still a whole dimension thicker than the forest of lines, some nearer, some further away, some hidden behind other lines that would be the perceived 2D world of the flatlander.
The original eleven-minute animation for Imagining the Tenth Dimension introduces viewers to the ideas from chapter one of the book of the same name. In the book I say this:
To a Flatlander, we 3D beings would be able to pop in and out of their two-dimensional world as if by magic, and our texture and form would be quite inexplicable. In the same way, we humans would find the 2D information that a Flatlander sees to be a useless and confusing jumble of lines all in the same plane.
If you go back and watch the original animation now, keep in mind that what we're seeing in the section about flatlanders is all from our perspective, looking down on the flatlander's world from "above", which is a direction the flatlander wouldn't even be able to conceive of. Most books introducing people to the idea of flatlanders choose to use this vantage point, and for good reason: because what a flatlander would really see is even stranger than what we showed in our brief introduction to thinking about the dimensions.
Finally, please kind in mind that what we're talking about here with Imagining the Tenth Dimension is a visualization tool, not a scientific proof. But as a visualization, it does gives us ways to imagine lots of things that physicists say about our reality, for instance:
how our experience of the fifth dimension is curled up at the planck length (because time is a direction in the fourth spatial dimension and the fifth dimension's probabilistic outcomes are being observed one planck length after another)
the string theory idea that our 3D universe is "locked in" at the seventh dimension by a 3D and 7D brane
the idea that by the time you get to the tenth dimension you are visualizing the equilibrium state that exists "outside the system" as Godel liked to describe it. Physicist Sean Carroll talks about this "equilibrium state" that exists before and after our observed universe in the June 2008 issue of Scientific American. Other people refer to this state as the "omniverse".
Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, which says there are branching parallel universes being created through choice and chance (this idea was confirmed by a proof offered in September 2007 by a team of scientists at Oxford under the direction of physicist David Deutsch), and
the idea that the future exists only as part of probabilistic waves, as proven by experiments conducted by a team of scientists in Vienna under the direction of physicist Anton Zeilinger.
What's unique about this new way of thinking about time and space is that it makes no distinction between the first four dimensions that we know from spacetime, and the extra dimensions that physicists are talking about: this project proposes that since all of the ten dimensions are spatial dimensions, each new dimension adds an additional degree of freedom, and we can use what we know about the dimensions below to help us visualize the dimensions beyond the four that we live in.
There are lots of other discussions from physics and philosophy that can stem from this way of visualizing how our reality is constructed and what that means to us, I do hope you enjoy the journey as we explore those ideas.
Last entry we talked about the "daily parrying" that would cause some people to look at a blog titled "God 2.0" and automatically assume that what is going to be talked about will be non-scientific meandering about the world of the spiritual and the metaphysical. If you're familiar with my blog or my book, you will already know that I am more interested in the middle ground - a place where philosophy and physics, spirituality and science can find ways to agree that they are really thinking about the same things.
The Skeptic Michael Shermer is the well-known publisher of Skeptic Magazine, and Michael's goal has been to poke holes in the questionable claims of fringe science, the paranormal, and a wide range of other areas that he has targeted with his razor-sharp debunking skills. This is why I found it quite marvelous when I picked up the July issue of Scientific American, and found that Mr. Shermer's regular column this issue is entitled "Sacred Science: can emergence break the spell of reductionism and put spirituality back into nature?".
Reinventing the Sacred Mr. Shermer's article is about a fellow who comes from my neighboring province of Alberta, Canada: Stuart Kauffman, founding director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary, who has written a book called "Reinventing the Sacred". To quote from Michael Shermer's article about the book:
Kauffman reverses the reductionist's causal arrow with a comprehensive theory of emergence and self-organization that he says 'breaks no laws of physics' and yet cannot be explained by them. God 'is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere and human cultures,' Kauffman declares.
I have spent time with Stu Kauffman... he is one of the most spiritual scientists I know, a man of inestimable warmth and ecumenical tolerance, and his God 2.0 is a deity worthy of worship. But I am skeptical that it will displace God 1.0, Yahweh, whose Bronze Age program has been running for 6,000 years on the software of our brains and culture.
Creativity and the "now" I've talked many times here about the role of creativity in our universe, and how ideas from quantum physicist John Wheeler and professor of cognitive science Douglas Hofstadter can be tied together to show us how a self-excited loop can create not just a universe but life and consciousness as well. In my book I used physicist Richard Feynman's sum over paths idea to show how the past is just as probabilistic as we know the future to be. Now that Anton Zeilinger is publishing the results of experiments he and his team in Vienna have conducted that prove that we are operating in a probabilistic cloud where the only thing that is truly real for us is the constantly moving "now" of our observed reality, the ideas I proposed are being confirmed: and as John Wheeler suggested, this means that there are some indeterminate elements of the past that can be changed by our current observation. As I've been saying here, this means we can all select new trajectories from our current "now" at any time that launch us off on a new path, and accepting the indeterminate nature of the past is key to understanding how much power we are talking about here. As I discussed in Changing Your Genes, the scientific study that shows we are able to switch off and on various genes simply through changes in lifestyle and changes in attitude gives us a glimpse of how the past is not as carved in stone as we've been led to believe: because quantum physics is proving that our currently observed reality is derived from a multiverse of possible choices that exist in both the future and the past for our universe at any particular "now".
Enfolded Symmetry Scientists like Sean Carroll, David Deutsch, and (of course) Richard Dawkins are atheists. I reference their work regularly with this project. I believe the Dawkins concept of genes as a "River Out of Eden" and memes as ideas that can be transmitted or shared without loss across time and space are both very useful and enlightened ways of imagining the underlying timelessness of our reality. My way of imagining how our reality is constructed agrees with Dr. Carroll's ideas about an equilibrium state which is "outside the system". My project also agrees with the Deutsch team's proof that the parallel worlds resulting from chance and choice are directly equivalent to the probabilistic results of quantum mechanics. Now, here's something new: the June 14 2008 issue of New Scientist Magazine has an article about the award-winning work of mathematicians John Thompson and Jacques Tits, who have offered some mind-expanding proofs about how our amazing universe is derived from symmetries in the higher dimensions. This idea is related to Garrett Lisi's eight-dimensional E8 symmetry group, which I've referred to a number of times in this blog, and which I believe ties back into my project as well: by the time you have imagined an Omniverse which expresses all possible patterns of mass and energy, there is an equilibrium state where all of those possible patterns enfold back into a balance, where everything fits together into a perfect symmetry, which is the natural underlying state. Our universe is defined by higher dimensional patterns which give it its unique laws of physics and its breathtaking intricacy, right from the quarks and neutrinos up to the universe as a whole and all of its possible "spacetime tree" of expressions. In that sense, our cosmos is just a temporary deviation which has been set in motion by the breaking of that symmetry, and our line of time is a return to that perfectly balanced zero which existed before our universe began and which we'll return to after our universe has run its course.
God 2.0 So, while some would object to calling Stuart Kauffman's patterns of emergence that feed back on themselves to create our beautiful and complex universe "God", perhaps "God 2.0" is a useful way to reset our thinking about all this: all we are really talking about here is how higher dimensional patterns could be responsible for the universe we find ourselves in to be selected from the multiverse of all other possible universes, which ultimately, are all part of the Omniverse, where information equals reality. And that is a beautiful thing, worthy of our praise and our wonder.
I've quoted Vienna physicist Anton Zeilinger before in this blog: he is one of the leading proponents of the concept of information and reality being equivalent, which is a central idea to what we're talking about here. Now, the June 2008 issue of Seed magazine has an article about the leading edge experiments he and his team at IQOQI have been doing which have been designed to answer one of the most basic questions about our reality. To quote from Joshua Roebke's article:
Quantum mechanics fundamentally concerns the way in which we observers connect to the universe we observe. The theory implies that when we measure particles and atoms, at least one of two long-held physical principles is untenable: - distant events do not affect one another - properties we wish to observe exist before our measurements. One of these, locality or realism, must be fundamentally incorrect.
... or both might be incorrect, the article goes on to remind us!
Regular readers of my blog or my book will see this as related to the basic ideas I've been exploring with this project. For me, the question becomes this: is the future fluid, undetermined until we observe it? Plus, I believe time-reversal symmetry requires us to ask the same question in the other direction: is the past just as fluid as the future? In other words, is there only one single path that we could have traveled to get to our current "now", or are there many? I have quoted Feynman's "sum over paths" concept many times as evidence that this multiple-pasts-and-futures concept is true at the quantum level, and I have pointed to the David Deutsch team's proof published in September 2007 that the quantum and macro worlds are equivalent: Feynman and Deutsch are telling us something important when we combine those two ideas. In other words, I believe that branching parallel universes exist both before and after the current "now" that each of us is observing. So, while we might doggedly insist that the reality we observe exists before and after our observation, we have to accept that it exists only as a part of a probabilistic "ray", and not as a single concrete (that is to say, deterministic) structure.
Distant effects do affect one another The evidence for nonlocality is already proven in science labs with demonstrations of entanglement at increasingly great distances, and not with just subatomic particles but with molecules. I would say it is proven in our daily lives with intuition and empathy, with the connections of selfish memes and selfish genes, and with the way music communicates emotions across time and space. All of the possible expressions of the universe before and after the "now" of our observation are part of a probabilistic cloud of potential states, which I've talked about in entries like "The Omniverse". Still, you might be surprised to learn that the Zeilinger team's experiments showed realism to be violated by "80 orders of magnitude", meaning that they have proved that we do actually create the classical world that we perceive just through the act of observation.
Last year, a piece in Nature magazine about these same experiments entitled "Physicists Bid Farewell to Reality" quoted Dr. Zeilinger as follows:
"We do this all the time in daily life... for example, imagining what would have happened if you had tried to cross the road when a truck was coming. If the world around us behaved in the same way as a quantum system, then it would be meaningless even to imagine that alternative situation, because there would be no way of defining what you mean by the road, the truck, or even you."
In my blog entry "Time in Either Direction" I talked about Dr. Sean Carroll's leading-edge theories on the asymmetry of time, and how nicely they tie into this way of imagining how our reality is constructed as well. As I discussed in "The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic", the key to all of this is finding a way to accept that the branching timelines of other realities exist as potential, even if they are not within the version of reality that we end up witnessing. My song "The Anthropic Viewpoint" sums it up like this:
All those other possibilities Are just as real but they don't have me
How does music (or any other artform) communicate universal ideas?
Here are quotes from two quantum physics experts who would probably be surprised to hear me insist that they are providing the answer to that question.
"...quantum physics requires us to abandon the distinction between information and reality." - Anton Zeilinger, professor of physics at the University of Vienna, from the book "What We Believe But Cannot Prove"
"The conventional history of the universe pays great attention to energy: How much is there? Where is it? What is it doing? By contrast, in the story of the universe told in this book, the primary actor in the physical history of the universe is information. Ultimately, information and energy play complimentary roles in the universe: Energy makes physical systems do things. Information tells them what to do." - MIT Professor and quantum computing expert Seth Lloyd, from his book "Programming the Universe".
I'm going to deal with my question about artforms and how this all ties in to my way of imagining the dimensions, but first I'd like to work through some steps... so please bear with me here.
One of the commonly-leveled objections against any theories requiring there to be additional dimensions past spacetime is that those dimensions are not observable, and so there is no way to verify any predictions made by such theories: this is one of the central themes of Lee Smolin's book "The Trouble With Physics".
Quantum mechanics, then, is the golden child of science from the past one hundred years - because it makes predictions and paints a picture of reality which, although often portrayed as unimaginably strange, has stood the test of time: quantum effects are observable and verifiable, and all without the need to theorize the existence of additional dimensions.
But this is where it starts for me: because I've been proposing that quantum mechanics shows us that we are not actually on a limited one-dimensional line of time. Instead, observable phenomena such as quantum interference patterns, and demonstrations of entanglement of widely separated particles shows us that we are actually in a fifth dimensional probability space, where our fourth-dimensional reality twists, turns, and folds without us being aware of it, just as the two-dimensional Flatlander on the mobius strip is unaware of his motions in the higher dimensions.
The question of whether our reality is created in the fifth dimension or the fourth has been the subject of this week's poll here at the tenth dimension blog. What do you think? Way back in 1919, Kaluza proposed this idea to Einstein - that the field equations for gravity and light could be united if they were calculated in the fifth dimension. Einstein ruminated on Kaluza's radical idea for two years, and then gave it his full endorsement. If Einstein believed our reality originates in the fifth dimension, why is this not common knowledge for the general public?
With "E=mc squared", Einstein firmly established in our minds the equivalence between energy and matter, and how our universe is just an interplay between those two states. Now, experts like Anton Zeilinger and Seth Lloyd are telling us we can take a step even further back: our reality is just an expression of the information encoded within the underlying fabric of quantum fields.
Okay, information equals reality, and we're in the fifth dimension rather than the fourth. If we can accept those ideas, then where does that lead us?
I'm proposing that this is the key to understanding how our currently observed reality is a pattern within the multiverse of all possible universes. If there is a data set out there that could represent every possible timeline for our universe and for all other possible universes, then each of us is navigating through that data set. And with the recently published proof from David Deutsch's team at Oxford, we have a way to see how that is just as true at the quantum level as it is for us at the physical level, as each of us navigates through the available paths of our fifth-dimensional data set though choice, chance, and the actions of others.
But I take all this even further: if our reality is information, then like any other data set there are many ways of analyzing that data. Richard Dawkins showed us how we can think of our genes as a "river out of Eden": a continuous pattern of information conveyed from generation to generation back to the primordial beginning of life. He also introduced us to the concept of memes: ideas that are transmitted across time and space. Imagining memes within the information vs. reality paradigm is an important part of the ideas I play with in my book: and the concept of memes is how we get to the question of how music and art communicate emotion.
Memes connect emotions and ideas across time and space: so the song you loved when you were 18 will still have an emotional connection for you when you're 40. But memes are not just learned, they are deeper than that, because they are part of our shared experience as human beings. This is how we communicate to each other through body language: a joyful physical presence or a depressed stance are part of the tools that any actor or dancer uses to express emotion, and these are memes that work across time and space. But we're not just talking about human beings here: this is how we can recognize emotions in the vocalizations of other living creatures - the rising question of a cat asking for food, the pained yelp of a dog who has been kicked, the sorrowful keening of a mother bear who has lost her child, are part of the same vocabulary of memes that allow us to recognize whether a piece of music is happy or sad, energetic or peaceful. The connection between blues phrasing, in terms of melodic shape and timing, to the speech of someone expressing the same emotions, is an easily recognized example of how both are part of the same meme-set. And the fact that the vocalizations of other non-mammal creatures are much harder for us to recognize the emotion within (is that frog's croak happy or sad? I'm not sure) shows us how near or far we are from other creatures not just with our shared genes, but with our shared memes as well.
We can use that same vocabulary to move ourselves to different trajectories within our probability space. Try this one: imagine a warm ball of energy starting at the base of your spine, gradually working its way up your back, making you sit up straighter, creating a radiant glow out through your shoulders and the top of your head that opens your eyes wider and makes you feel more alert. Do you feel it? It really is that simple to change your energy, because it's all just information. Think about this: just standing up straighter, you might say, improves your body mass index (my son the med student will say "not really", but he's the one who said this to me as a joke, and I still think it's a useful idea)!
Metaphysical ideas of auras and vibrations, energy transference, entrainment (or "like attracts like") are all part of this picture as well. If information equals reality, all we are talking about is recognizing the patterns that are encoded within that information.
Here, now, is one of the more tongue in cheek songs from the collection of 26 songs attached to this project, whose lyrics are printed at the end of the book: try to imagine this one with Spinal Tap performing the verses and oh, I don't know, Jimmy Buffett performing the choruses. The song is called "What I Feel For You".
And here are the lyrics:
WHAT I FEEL FOR YOU words and music (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)
Much greater minds than mine Have tried to figure out The secrets of the universe And what it’s all about Masters of the abstract Seekers of the spell That fits it all together I know the quest so well
But it all keeps coming back No matter what I do The only thing that’s real for me Is what I feel for you
And what I feel for you Is what makes me carry on My world would be so pointless My reality so wrong The secret gears and levers That spin behind the scenes To make what’s here before us Must only do one thing
Cause it all keeps coming back…
Much greater minds than mine Have tried to figure out The secrets of the universe And what it’s all about Masters of the abstract Seekers of the spell That fits it all together I know the quest so well
But it all keeps coming back No matter what I do The only thing that’s real for me Is what I feel for you The only thing that’s real for me Is what I feel for you
Some of the previously discussed songs from this project that touch on similar ideas include Everything Fits Together, Connections, Big Bang to Entropy, and Change and Renewal (these song titles are hotlinked to previous blog entries featuring those songs). Or some of the videos created for those songs are below.
Last blog ended with the big question: what do you want to change?
One of the big ideas Imagining the Tenth Dimension has been pushing is memes. This term, introduced to us by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, refers to ideas and beliefs that propogate themselves across time and space in much the same way that our genes have done so since the beginning of life on this planet. I have been arguing that memes (rhymes with "teams") are more than just an intellectual concept. If, as Anton Zeilinger, professor of physics at the University of Vienna has been quoted to say, "quantum physics requires us to abandon the distinction between information and reality", then memes are just another way of looking at the information that creates the multiverse from which our universe is a slice.
As the social networking world of Web 2.0 starts to become more and more integrated and cross-connected, we are finding ways to instantaneously track the rising and falling of memes which shape our world. This is a paradigm shift which seems completely natural to the under twenty-fives of the western world, who have spent all of their lives with computers in their homes, and were part of BBS communities long before the internet rose to prominence. This generation are comfortable with a feeling of inter-connectedness through Web 2.0 which the baby boomers (of which I am one) can only begin to dream. How much longer will it take before this connection to people of similar interests around the world finally corrects the free-fall in under-30 voter turnout we have been seeing for the last thirty years? That change is already beginning.
All around the world, people who felt powerless are starting to realize that they have more control of their futures than the highly-concentrated power structures of the twentieth century had taught them to believe. As people wake up, the clamor for the latest football to the groin video on YouTube is gradually being joined by a connected world with serious concerns about the future of this planet. As these memes start to become more dominant, we can see how they are like any other waveform in the information that creates our reality - resonance and entrainment starts to kick in, and tipping points that change our consensual reality become more and more possible.
In the physical world, books like Steven Strogatz's "Sync : the Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order" have shown us how vibrational patterns can be transmitted across rooms, causing pendulum clocks to fall in synchronization with each other, or across fields and valleys, causing huge swarms of fireflies to blink off and on in unison. New developments such as WiTricity are showing how resonance can be used to induce an electric impulse without wires, giving us hope for electronic devices that will some day charge themselves.
In the world of ideas spreading across the internet, new initiatives are springing up daily. Sites like edge.org have done much to bring new intellectual explorations to the forefront, including books like "What We Believe but Cannot Prove". John Ondrasik (of Five for Fighting fame) has created a site called "What Kind of World Do You Want" which encourages people to post videos about their hopes and dreams, and promises to donate money to one of six charities as people watch these videos. Microsoft is promoting their "I'm Making a Difference" campaign, which donates money every time people registered with the program use Windows Messenger. The Fire the Grid project goes even further, inviting people around the world to meditate on peace and healing for the planet at a certain time on July 17th... could the initiative which moves our world into a new phase really be that close?
Let's ask ourselves this: what stands in the way of us as a planet reaching a tipping point, a chaos-theory-style bifurcation, where enough people can desire a specific change that our consensual reality is affected through resonance and entrainment? Projects like Julius Popp's Bit.Fall (which tracks common words from the internet and puts them into visually stunning computer controlled waterfalls), We Feel Fine (which track the emotional words that bloggers use associated with the word "feel" and creates fascinating real time animations of how, where and when these words are being used) are pointing the way to the future of cloud tagging. Newly popular YouTube videos from younger contributors, like "Stand Up For World Peace" are showing how simple ideas can be imaginatively presented (Norman McLaren style in this case) and create a huge amount of conversation and response in the Web 2.0 world. And the video "Prometeus - The Media Revolution" gives us a plausible scenario for how things could develop over the next few decades.
I believe that Imagining the Tenth Dimension has the potential to be part of that change. Almost two million people have visited the tenth dimension website and seen my new way of imagining reality, plus the hundreds of thousands more who have seen copies of the video at revver, youtube, and so on. I have been hearing from people all over the world who are excited about its implications. A few video bloggers (like this one and this one) have posted their thoughts on YouTube. A tenth dimension fan from Greece has translated the voiceover into Greek subtitles and posted the result at Google Video. The book has been sold in dozens of countries around the world, and discussions are now beginning for translation of the book into other languages. As we approach the first anniversary of the launch of the tenth dimension website, the tenth dimension meme shows no sign of slowing down, and for that I am very grateful.
Enjoying the journey,
Rob
PS - here, just for fun, are some more videos of some of the songs from the tenth dimension project.
Poll 82 - "Information Equals Reality". Poll ended June 16, 2011.
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