Poll 61-64 - Gravity and Free Will

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mX-iOZXrZ7U


Poll 61: "Gravitons will never be observed because they don't exist." Poll ended April 2 2010. This one was a dead heat, split perfectly between agreeing and disagreeing. This question relates back to Our Universe within the Omniverse, Holograms and Quanta, and More Slices of Reality; three of the blog entries where we looked at a new theory by Dr. Erik Verlinde of the University of Amsterdam which suggests that just as there are no "liquidons" imparting the quality of liquidity to water, gravity is something that arises naturally from our position within the information that becomes reality: there are no gravitons, according to Dr. Verlinde, and that idea appeals to me as well.

Poll 62 - "Within the multiverse landscape, it will eventually be proved that there are only two basic organizing patterns which need to be locked in to create a universe such as ours: the strength of gravity, and the speed of light." Poll ended April 17th 2010. 38.2% agreed, while the remaining 61.8% disagreed.

This idea of mine, which we looked at in more detail in Strength of Gravity, Speed of Light, is not something you will currently be taught in a university physics class so it's not surprising to see more people disagreeing than agreeing. In light of Dr. Verlinde's theory, though, I am drawn more and more to this being the simple underlying truth: if gravity is defined not by particles but by our position within the multiverse landscape, and is the naturally arising quality which says how much things are drawn together, then the speed of light is what keeps them from collapsing back into the symmetry that exists "before" and "after" our universe. Hence, our next poll question:

Poll 63 - "The speed of light is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once." Poll ended May 3 2010. 63.6% agreed, and 36.4% disagreed.

What do you think, should I be selling t-shirts with this as my new quotable quote? This was a phrase I came up with in Strength of Gravity, Speed of Light. It's fascinating to see how many people accepted this intuitive leap while the corresponding "gravitons don't exist" idea didn't fare so well in these polls. The idea that our reality is not continuous, but instead is divided into planck-length-sized "frames" is central not just to this project but to Holographic Universe theories we've looked at before: our spacetime universe is created by constructive interference at the fifth dimension, and the planck length's intimate connection to the speed of light is part of what makes one universe within the multiverse unique from another. Tying this back to the previous poll, then, gravity is what draws things together, while the speed of light is what keeps these frames pushed apart for the duration of our universe.

Poll 64 - "If you don't believe there's such a thing as free will, then there's no need for you to believe in extra dimensions beyond spacetime". Poll ended May 18 2010. 43.5% said "I agree", 19.1% said "I disagree", and the remaining 37.4% said "the two concepts are unrelated".

As we discussed in recent entries like The 5th-Dimensional Camera Project, Entangled Neurons, and Changing Reality, my concept of our spacetime reality coming from a fifth-dimensional probability space was recently presented to scientists at Oxford by Jon Ardern and Anab Jain. Wonderful news! The acceptance for this project keeps moving forward, and I'm grateful to people like Jon and Anab who are helping to make that happen.

But we're still mid-journey at this point, as this poll question shows. 37% of the visitors to this forum were not willing to accept the premise that the dimensions beyond our 4D spacetime are where we can much more easily make sense of quantum superposition, Everett's Many Worlds, and the spacetime tree of possible outcomes each of us are choosing from moment to moment with our free will. As I've said before, if you believe in the hard determinist viewpoint that everything is an inevitable set of outcomes that were set in motion like a giant clockwork mechanism at the big bang, and that any individual feelings of "choice" are an illusion as inevitable chemical reactions take place in our brains, then I can understand why you believe that the four dimensions of spacetime are all that there is.

Which takes us to the picture which started this blog entry. Are you and I robots, computers running a program that makes us think we have free will but that free will is an illusion? Or are we more like androids, processing the incoming data, formulating responses, consciously and actively engaged in the spacetime tree of our reality at the fifth dimension and beyond? I know what my answer to that question is, for sure.

But if gravity is a force that exists across all dimensions, how does that affect the choices we make and the outcomes we observe? We'll continue this discussion next time, with Gravity and Entrainment.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Our Universe Within the Omniverse

This has been an interesting month for new theories being advanced about how our universe fits in with the omniverse. Regular readers of this blog will recall that "omniverse" is the term I've come to prefer for referring to the set of all of the underlying information, all of the multiverses, all universes, and all parallel universe versions of those universes, as a single concept. The terms "multiverse" or "multiverse landscape" also can refer to this same idea, but not as decisively: there are actually many different "flavors" of multiverse being proposed from various camps. As noted in the wikipedia article on "multiverse", physicist Max Tegmark prefers to use the term "ultimate ensemble": omniverse is another way of thinking about this same over-arching idea.

On April 8th, Paul Howard Frampton submitted a paper to arxiv.org which, in his words, presents "a simple, and hopefully convincing, discussion of a solution to the dark energy problem, which arises because the visible universe is well approximated by a black hole." Here is a link to his announcement, and here is a link to the pdf of his paper. Interestingly, his paper contends that there is no need for gravitons to exist, an idea we've explored several times lately in this blog. For instance, the poll question we were running here at the tenth dimension blog last month ended up split absolutely evenly: 50% agreed that gravitons will never be observed because they don't exist, and 50% disagreed.

Last month, in Holograms and Quanta, and Strength of Gravity, Speed of Light, we looked at a new theory from Dr. Erik Verlinde of the University of Amsterdam, which suggested the same idea: just as there are no "liquidons" imparting the quality of liquidity to a collection of H2O molecules, Dr. Verlinde suggests that gravity is also something that arises naturally from our position with the omniverse.

On April 12, the journal Physics Letters B published a new paper by Indiana University physicist Nikodem Poplawski. The Science Daily article about this new theory included the graphic at left, which is a depiction of an Einstein-Rosen bridge, a theoretical construct which could be used to connect one universe to another. Dr. Poplawski's theory appears to be related to this concept. In the National Geographic article about his new theory, author Ker Than described it like this:

Like part of a cosmic Russian doll, our universe may be nested inside a black hole that is itself part of a larger universe.

In turn, all the black holes found so far in our universe—from the microscopic to the supermassive—may be doorways into alternate realities.

According to a mind-bending new theory, a black hole is actually a tunnel between universes—a type of wormhole. The matter the black hole attracts doesn’t collapse into a single point, as has been predicted, but rather gushes out a “white hole” at the other end of the black one, the theory goes.

Isn't it funny to see a concept that science fiction fans have been reading and watching stories about for decades being discussed as if it's a new idea? In comments at my blog and discussions at the tenth dimension forum, I've mentioned a great science fiction novel by John Cramer called "Einstein's Bridge", which is about what happens when a particle accelerator opens up a connection to another universe.

The difference here, of course, is that Dr. Poplawski is proposing new equations that help to explain how this process could actually occur.

Which takes us back to the beginning of this entry: if science is starting to understand how all of these different universes could be connected together, all equally real, all existing simultaneously, and if the distinction between past present and future is meaningless (as Einstein liked to say), then that web of all connections is a way of thinking about the Omniverse. We'll continue looking at this idea of how all these universes fit together next time with an entry called Our Universe as a Dodecahedron.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Strength of Gravity, Speed of Light

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iC0XUTsKQwU

I've talked many times about Gevin Giorbran, who asked me to take over the promotion of his masterful book Everything Forever: Learning to See Timelessness after his death. In a blog entry about time-reversal symmetry called Scrambled Eggs, I showed this graphic from Gevin's book:
This is the beautiful yet simple idea which Gevin proposed - that ultimately the reality we see around us is the result of two kinds of order pushing against one another. From within our entropy-driven arrow of time, we perceive the greatest grouping order to be the highly ordered "big bang" (or whatever phrase you prefer to use to describe the beginning of our universe), and we perceive our universe to be moving away from that beginning towards a highest possible entropy "ending" for our universe. What Gevin made clear is that this "ending" is really just another kind of natural balance, the greatest possible symmetry order state for our universe.

Timelessness
Understanding reality from the perspective of timelessness ties so beautifully into the digital physics "information equals reality" concept I keep returning to. It requires us to jump outside our limited "arrow of time" viewpoint and recognize that those two kinds or order, and all of the states that transition from the one kind of order to another, exist simultaneously.

Like water naturally finding its level, these two kinds of order are a part of nature. Like a scale with one 10 kilogram weight on one side and ten 1 kilogram weights on the other, these two kinds of order are really just two ways of describing the same thing, which is why "before" and "after" the existence of our universe is also really identical when you view this all from the perspective of timelessness.

Dynamic Tension
One thing pushes against another thing, and from that a third thing arises. This is also another way of thinking about constructive interference patterns and the holographic nature of our universe. Such ideas appeal because they speak to the scientific need to find nature's structures and show how the incredible complexity of our observed universe arises from relatively simple underlying structures and patterns. This also speaks to quantum mechanics - the idea that in the underlying quantum structures of reality, there can be one state, an opposite state, and a third in which both states exist simultaneously. Like yin and yang pushing against each other to create a holistic "one", this approach to understanding reality is as ancient as it is leading edge.

Where Does Gravity Come From?
Last time, in Holograms and Quanta, we looked at a new cosmology framework recently proposed by Dr. Erik Verlinde of the University of Amsterdam, which suggests that gravity is a property that naturally arises from our reality, rather than being a force which is transmitted. He likens gravity to the liquidity of water: there is no "liquidon" particle that transmits this quality of liquidity from one water molecule to another. In the same way, this would mean there is no "graviton" particle transmitting gravity throughout our universe - this theoretical particle would never be observed because it doesn't exist (we're running a poll question about that idea here at this blog right now, what do you think?).

In the New Scientist article about Dr. Verlinde's approach, it states that gravity arises from entropy, which might give the impression then that since the highest level of entropy is at the "ending" of our universe, gravity must come from the future! I would say that such a conclusion ignores the underlying timelessness that is the truer picture of our reality. I would like to propose an approach that relates to both Gevin's ideas and Dr. Verlinde's.

Gravity is the natural organizing principle where things tend to be grouped together. Dr. Verlinde's approach says that in a probabilistic universe, there is a higher likelihood of two large objects like a planet and its sun to be attracted to each other rather than repulsed.

What is Time?
"Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once." This well-known phrase, attributed variously to Einstein, John Wheeler, and Woody Allen, makes us wonder a similar thing about space here - if gravity is a natural outcome of the probabilistic nature of our universe, then why isn't the most likely outcome that everything is gradually collapsing to a single point? There must be some other organizing pattern that is keeping everything apart. While dark energy is often used to explain what is causing the accelerated expansion of our universe, I'm sticking to my supposition that eventually both dark matter and dark energy will be shown to be caused by the extra-dimensional effects of gravity, coming from the other universes and the other organizing structures that are "outside" of our spacetime.

So what's the force that pushes against gravity? If gravity is drawing things together, what is pushing things apart, keeping them from collapsing into a single point? With this project, I'm proposing that it's the speed of light. In entries like How to Make a Universe and What's Around the Corner?, we've talked about how, in the multiverse landscape of all possible universes, we could move from one position to another and be moving through different values for these two constants. Selecting a different strength of gravity and a different speed of light would result in some other universe completely different from our own. Many of those would be unstable or short-lived or completely static, but in some the dynamic tension between those two forces would be balanced in a way to allow interesting patterns to emerge in the same way that our universe has.

In entries like You Are the Point and More Slices of Reality I've suggested the frame rate defined by the planck length for our universe could be thought of as being akin to a strobe light - when a strobe flashes at certain rates, it reveals interesting patterns in other repeating structures. Since the speed of light defines the size of the quanta --the granularity-- of our 4D spacetime, that would mean the planck length would be shorter if we were in a universe with a slower speed of light, and so on. Perhaps, then, it would be more accurate to say that "the speed of light is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once"? That's what I'm suggesting.

And, just as Dr. Verlinde suggests that gravity arises naturally, I am suggesting the same thing for the speed of light. Moving through the multiverse landscape would be moving through different values for these two fundamental organizing patterns, and everything else about our universe or any other, would arise from that selected position. How "sticky" and how "granular" are the resulting patterns going to be across all the dimensions as defined by a particular position within the multiverse landscape? Will they be balanced in a way that allows interesting things like a universe to emerge?

The Dynamics of Creation
So. One thing pushes against another thing, and out pops a third thing. When that third thing is consciousness, an observer such as you or I, we are back to the conclusion I reached in my book: that ultimately there are three organizing patterns interacting with each other, two of which are just "there" within timelessness, and a third which is actively engaged, through constructive interference, in the process of ongoing creation. This places each and every one of us within our own version of a cosmic dance that creates the beautiful universe that we are each observing right this very instant.

And if you're not enjoying the journey... why not?

Rob

Next: Poll 53 - One to the Power of Infinity

PS - These "three patterns interacting" we're talking about here tie in an interesting way to Karl Popper's Three Worlds. We're going to talk about Popperian Cosmology in a poll question we're looking at in about ten days about whether Imagining the Tenth Dimension can be compared to "lying to children".

Holograms and Quanta

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nhcUQ27X1E

Here we are on the way to the fourth anniversary of the July 2006 launch of this project, currently there've been about five and a half million unique visitors to my website. The original animation, posted at revver.com, is now at almost 1.4 million views and has climbed to within thirty of being that site's most-watched video of all time. That same animation at youtube is also well on its way to a million views, and googling the title of my book in quotes, "Imagining the Tenth Dimension" reveals around 2 million separate references to my project on the net. Wow!

So, with all the chatter that's been out there, we have some naysayers who have proclaimed my project to be a scam, to be completely wrong, even to be dangerous! Some of these attacks have been downright vicious. What prompts such outrage? Part of it is a knee-jerk reaction: "this is not what I learned so it must be wrong". I guess the phrase "a new way of thinking about time and space" doesn't mean anything to those people. Meanwhile, more and more people keep seeing ways that this approach to visualizing the dimensions can be aligned with their own understanding of reality, and that's why the audience for this project continues to grow.

This time around, let's talk about the "person observing the waveform" as seen in the above graphic from my animation, and look at some of the new theories and new discoveries that are gradually moving the mainstream towards my "new way of thinking"

Two important ideas are represented in the above graphic.

1. The idea that the quantum and the macro worlds are in some way completely separate, and that there is a dividing line where we are either in one realm or the other, is starting to fall by the wayside. Demonstrations of quantum entanglement and superposition with increasingly large molecules move us towards understanding that this is a continuum, and research indicating that algal photosynthesis and even migratory birds' navigational abilities are using quantum effects argue against the old idea that our "warm and wet" macro world is completely separate from the quantum one. Advances are also continuing in quantum computing - did you hear that Google is now demonstrating a quantum computing system that can recognize and sort individual images by their content? More and more, visualizing the underlying wave structure of our reality is essential to our understanding of what we are observing.

2. The idea that there is something holographic about our reality, with the fifth dimension holding the many different possible states for our universe, and interference patterns causing one version or another to be observed at any particular instant is also going through a resurgence. In the 1970s, both Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein explored holographic approaches to cosmology. Michael Talbot's popular 1991 book The Holographic Universe created much excitement about the work of physicists David Bohm and Karl Pribram, both of whom had also independently come up with holographic models, but that excitement seemed to be overshadowed as string theory and then M Theory became the dominant research models over the following years. Still, the idea didn't go away, with notable physicists like Juan Maldecena, Leonard Susskind and Gerard 't Hooft suggesting important holographic concepts during the 90s. In this blog we've talked about a number of holographic universe theories that have been advanced in the last few years, and some of these models do incorporate quantum mechanics and string theory. Last week, in More Slices of Reality, we mentioned an exciting new approach from string theorist Erik Verlinde of the University of Amsterdam which explains gravity using a blend of string theory, quantum mechanics, holograms, and the key idea that when you look at the underlying structures of our universe, information equals reality.

In the New Scientist article on Dr. Verlinde's new approach, they sum it up like this:

"Like the fluidity of water, gravity is not ingrained in matter itself. It is an extra physical effect."

To which I would add, if there are parts of the multiverse where gravity is stronger, than we could liken that part of the multiverse landscape to syrup rather than water, and perhaps we could liken low gravity regions to water vapor.

One of the side effects of Dr. Verlinde's approach would be to disprove the need for the theoretical graviton particle. I am currently running a poll question here about that idea: will the graviton ever be observed?

If you read the above article, you will see the suggestion that with this new approach gravity and thermodynamic entropy are related. Since there is more entropy in the future than the past, would that mean that gravity comes from the future? Again and again, I return to Einstein's proposal that the distinction between past, present, and future is ultimately meaningless. I think this article on Dr. Verlinde's approach could have used a good dose of that timelesness in its analysis: eventually, I believe, it will be shown that gravity comes from both the past and the future simultaneously. That will prove to be related to the fifth dimensional probability space that we are navigating within, where the past is as fluid as the future, but some events are more likely than others to occur or to have occurred. Understanding that information equals reality requires us to think about the space where everything that can occur does occur, simultaneously, outside the constraints of our 4D spacetime. This also requires us to understand that any events that are currently impossible for our own version of our universe must reside outside of our fifth dimensional probability space.

Dr. Verlinde's approach has attracted at a lot of initial attention, although he cautions people to understand that this is not a fully developed theory yet, but is offered as a framework that should now be explored. This is something I've always said about my approach to visualizing the dimensions as well: I have offered it to the world as a framework for discussion, and a great many other people around the world have enjoyed playing with these ideas.

Next: more about the underlying ideas to my approach: Strength of Gravity, Speed of Light.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

PS - You should follow me on twitter here.

More Slices of Reality

Two weeks ago, in Dancing on the Timeline, we looked at some fanciful ways of imagining what our spacetime reality might look like from "outside" the tiny planck-length window of our arrow of time. And a while back, in Imagining the Omniverse: Addendum we looked at some of the other visualizations that are out there to help us imagine how the interplay between the granular nature of spacetime and extra-dimensional waveforms might result in the reality we see around us. In one of my earliest blog entries, Death?, and again in Magnets and Souls, we looked at moire patterns and a fascinating physics demonstration people like to call the "corn starch monster": two examples of what happens when one pattern and another pattern interact, and the complex, fluid, and sometimes even life-like patterns that can result as a result of constructive interference. Here's a video I came across not long ago which shows a really creative use of constructive interference:


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5xtRdLOopU

There's a series of kids' books out that use the same technique pictured in the above movie, if you watch the following video for Imagining the Omniverse: Addendum from about the 1:15 mark you'll see a demonstration of one of those books.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MptYznkv14

More and more theories of reality are agreeing that our universe is defined by the non-continuous nature of our 4D spacetime. This is what I was talking about in Slices of Reality, here's the video for that entry again:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nheaNclVe2Y

Holograms are created by interference patterns, as we said in The Holographic Universe, and some theories very specifically tell us that our non-continuous 4D spacetime universe is the shadow of a fifth dimensional hologram. Again, it's important to keep in mind that holograms need an interference pattern to come into view, and the 5th dimensional hologram that defines the wave function of probabilistic outcomes for our universe comes into view for us as a result of the one-planck-length-after-another nature of our spacetime. In You are the Point, I recently suggested that this non-continuous nature of our spacetime is akin to a rapidly vibrating strobe light, creating interesting patterns in ways very similar to the interactions we see with the thin black lines in the above "optical illusion" video, or with the seemingly life-like motions created by the rapid oscillations applied to a corn starch solution - they reveal the nature of underlying extra-dimensional structures.

Ernst Chladni was a German physicist and musician, who published a book in 1787 demonstrating his discovery of the nodal patterns that can become visible when fine particles such as sand are sprinkled on a vibrating metal plate. In Chladni's time, he would use a violin bow to cause his "Chladni Plate" to vibrate. In modern times this is usually done with a signal generator hooked to a speaker mounted under the plate, and the interesting figures that emerge are sometimes called "Chladni Patterns":

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wmFAwqQB0g

In 1967, Hans Jenny published a book called Cymatics: the Study of Wave Phenomena which developed Chladni's ideas much further. Keeping in mind that quantum mechanics tells us that the underlying mode for matter is that it is a wave until it's observed, Cymatics has far-reaching applications. The following two videos relate to Cymatics, plus in both of these videos our old friend the corn starch monster makes an appearance once again.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaYvYysQvBU


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4shodbQMcmM

As I mentioned, it seems the holographic nature of our reality is being talked about more and more these days. New Scientist magazine recently published a story called "The Entropy Force: a New Direction for Gravity" which describes an exciting new approach from string theorist Erik Verlinde of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Dr. Verlinde bases his ideas upon the information equals reality paradigm that I'm always promoting, and invokes the underlying holographic nature of our spacetime as part of a new explanation for gravity.

We'll talk about interference patterns and gravity some more next week in an entry called Holograms and Quanta.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

PS - You should follow me on twitter here.

Next: 3 Books That Could Change Your Life