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"
Poll 86: "Physicist David Deutsch says that calling Everett's Many Worlds an interpretation 'is like talking about dinosaurs as an 'interpretation' of the fossil record'. Do you agree with him?" Poll ended November 5 2011. 60.8% agreed, while 39.2% did not.
Like "interpretation", words like "theory" can mistakenly fall into similar territory: in the general public, after all, theory has a fairly loose definition. I could say "I have a theory about what happened to my missing sock" but there's nothing rigorous implied by that statement. A scientific theory, on the other hand, is not just a guess for what might explain the phenomena being studied. As it says in wikipedia:
A scientific theory is a set of principles that explain and predict phenomena.Scientists create scientific theories with the scientific method, when they are originally proposed as hypotheses and tested for accuracy through observations and experiments. Once a hypothesis is verified, it becomes a theory.
Why do we refer to Everett's work as an interpretation, then? In fact, Everett himself called his work the "Theory of the Universal Wavefunction", so he wanted us to understand that what he had produced was much more than supposition. It was, after all, backed up by the equations of the Schrödinger wave function, which underlies the most successful scientific theory of all time: quantum mechanics. As I've said before in this blog, any self-respecting theory of everything has to have quantum mechanics incorporated within it if it's to be taken seriously.
So what we're left with here is Dr. Deutsch's sly swipe at the Creationist argument that the world was created less than 10,000 years ago, and the fossils must therefore have been placed in the earth at that time. Is that an "interpretation" of the fossil record? Sure it is, whether you agree with it or not. Particularly in the US, this viewpoint does have many supporters as we see in the wikipedia article on level of support for creationism:
According to a 2007Gallup poll, about 43% of Americans believe that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so."
In that same article we see that while creationism has strong support in the US, there is a sliding scale of other countries around the world where this is not as prevalent a belief (for instance, about 20% believe this in Italy, sliding down through Norway, Spain, the U.K., Denmark, Sweden, France, and Japan, to Iceland, where less than 10% hold this belief). We also see that amongst persons in the US with education in the relevant earth and life sciences, the level of support for creationism is much much lower: according to a 1987 Newsweek poll of 480,000 scientists, creationism was given support by only 700 respondents, which represents about 0.146%.
So. If one approaches the fossil record from the pre-conceived notion that the earth is only thousands of years old, then a particular interpretation becomes more likely to occur. Why am I going on about all this?
From the outset of this project, I've said that I want to show people ways in which science and spirituality, physics and philosophy, can find common ground. But all of the above appears to point out one of the places where this is not really achievable: either you believe dinosaurs walked the earth millions of years ago or you think the earth was created a much shorter length of time ago than that. Isn't it clear that there's no easy meeting place where those two viewpoints can be reconciled?
Personally, I believe the universe really can be traced back to 13.7 billion years ago. But I've also said that the big bang is an illusion, and the extraordinary initial events of inflationary cosmology are better described as being a part of the process that selects a universe such as ours, though symmetry breaking, from a timeless whole that we might call the omniverse, or which Tegmark calls the Ultimate Ensemble. Still, you may be surprised that there actually is a way to find a meeting between these two viewpoints. Here's what I said in my book back in 2006:
What we’re saying, then, is where you actually began to observe becomes irrelevant. If it tickled your fancy, you could place that first observer at, for example, 6000 years ago. To do so would mean that prior to that time all potential physical realities remained possible within the wave function, and that at that point the observer turned their attention upon our universe and collapsed the quantum wave function into the reality we see around us, complete with the impression that time had actually extended out for billions of years prior to that. But why stop there? It could also be possible then that the universe didn’t actually exist until one second ago, which is when the observer turned their attention upon our universe and collapsed the probability wave function into what we now perceive as our reality, complete with a history which each of us believes we remember. Whether the observer came into existence 13.7 billion years ago or one second ago, the result will be the same: out of all the possible timelines which could have existed prior to this moment, through the act of observation we are now experiencing one of them as our own present, and our own history.
But if quantum particles can't discriminate between things that affect them forward and backward in time, that means specifying a final condition can determine what happens before it. "Mathematically, there's no reason why final conditions can't be 'givens' as well and everything has to follow logically from them," Steinberg says.
This all ties together with the multiverse of possible universes, commonly known as Everett's Many Worlds. Since Everett's "Interpretation" fully agrees with the underlying quantum nature of our reality, I would say that Everett's critics are left with finding other ways to explain what physicist Raphael Bousso called the "mother of all physics problems":
"This may seem laughable, but without the multiverse our finest theories predict that empty space should contain about 10 to the power of 123 times more energy than it actually does."
Is there more than one parallel universe resulting from the quantum wavefunction? Is there a multiverse of other universes, perhaps ten to the power of five hundred other universes as some string theorists have predicted? This is the interpretation that makes the most sense to me, and this is what Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation also tells us.
Where does that leave us? If you don't believe in the multiverse, then my project is not likely to find much that resonates for you, and you and I are going to have to simply agree to disagree. There is a multiverse of other universes, and there are multiple pasts and futures which connect to any particular "now" you or I are observing. While I'm all for finding common meeting grounds between different belief systems, this is where I have to draw the line.
"Why isn't there nothingness? Nothingness would have been decidedly elegant. In the Ultimate Multiverse, a universe consisting of nothing does exist. As far as we can tell, nothingness is a perfectly logical possibility and so must be included in a multiverse that embraces all universes."
- Brian Greene, discussing a concept which with this project we have called the Omniverse, in his book The Hidden Reality
At the end of the Introductory chapter of my book, I said this:
"...the point of this exercise will be that by imagining all ten dimensions, we will have imagined a fabric that can account for all aspects of reality. A tall order! Let’s begin."
How do we get to the tenth dimension from the ninth? As with every other dimension, we envision a point that encompasses the entire ninth dimension, and call that a "point" in the next dimension up. Persons familiar with my animation know what I say next:
"...if we’re going to imagine the tenth dimension as continuing the cycle, and being a line, then we’re going to have to imagine a different point that we can draw that line to. But there’s no place left to go! By the time we have imagined all possible timelines for all possible universes as being a single point in the tenth dimension, it appears that our journey is done."
But is our journey really done? Far from it. The ramifications of this way of visualizing the dimensions are many indeed, and that's why I continue to find things to discuss about this project in my blog, and that's why I've published about four hundred videos at my youtube channel over the past five years since this project was launched. Some of the ideas that we haven't even touched on yet since we started this latest series two months ago include the following:
1. Some people suggest it's arbitrary to stop at ten dimensions. Did we run out of fingers so we decided there couldn't be any more? Indeed, if you're not assigning any meaning to the individual dimensions, then the point-line-plane postulate allows you to keep adding as many dimensions as you want. People also ask Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions? In my book and my blog I've insisted that ten is really all you need to consider all aspects of reality, and that supporters of M-Theory acknowledge that there are ways in which the 11 dimensions they are talking about are functionally equivalent to the ten dimensions string theory is talking about. The graphic at right comes from New Scientist magazine, in a recent special feature called "Instant Expert: Theory of Everything", please do follow the link to read the whole article.
Another way of showing this equivalence is to say that M-Theory proposes ten spatial dimensions plus time. With my project, I say that time isn't a dimension, it's a way of describing change from state to state within any dimension: so the tenth dimension with no time is the Ultimate Ensemble that Max Tegmark spoke of, or the timelessness that Gevin Giorbran spoke of in Everything Forever, or the Ultimate Multiverse that Brian Greene refers to in the quote with which we started this entry. As I said in my original animation, if there were no superstrings vibrating in the tenth dimension, there would be no reality precipitated in the dimensions below: no time means no vibrations, no change. And because every one of the spatial dimensions we're looking at here are mutually perpendicular to the others, change in the tenth dimension automatically affects the entire system in various ways.
2. A number of people who have watched my animation notice that by the time you get to ten in its unobserved state, in a way you're back to where you started - with a point of indeterminate size. As I've said before, this was the intent of the helix logo created for this project - the 0 (or nothingness) and the 10 (or the Omniverse) really are connected concepts, and that's why I represent them as being on a line inside the other dimensions as you can see in the animation below. Would this connection allow for a repeating cycle effectively creating infinite dimensions? Though some people have suggested that idea, it doesn't feel quite right to me. The idea that there are really no dimensions, that there are just infinite vectors within one underlying fabric which is dimensionless, actually resonates more strongly for me, because that's a way of describing the tenth dimension using a different mindset. But personally, I still believe there are good reasons to believe in the existence of extra dimensions beyond space-time, and that there are good opportunities within these paths to the infinitely large and the infinitesimally small for us to consider the continuously repeating recursion that relates conceptually to Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop, or John Wheeler's description of the universe as a self-excited circuit. In Imagining the Ninth Dimension, we looked at Stuart Kauffman's idea that there is a force for ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, and we'll return to ideas related to all this further on in this entry.
3. This takes us to a very big question. If we're trying to build an image which reflects "all aspects of reality", how do life and consciousness fit into this picture? Erwin Schrödinger's definition of life is that it's "a unique process which creates pockets of negative entropy". Physicists talk about the beginning of the universe being the most highly ordered/lowest entropy version of our universe, and how the "arrow of time" represents an overall climb in the amount of entropy, despite the efforts of life within these little pockets where (as Dylan Thomas put it so beautifully) it 'rages against the dying of the light'. This theme of life and consciousness being like a fire, a spark, that somehow engages with space-time and our fifth-dimensional probability space to keep itself moving forward is the theme of a number of the 26 songs I created for this project. I talked about those songs and this way of thinking about life and creativity in a blog entry called Novelty.
4. The phrase "self-excited circuit" comes from a paper published in 1979 by physicist John Wheeler, you can read about it in the wikipedia article on Digital Physics. As part of his "Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU)", Christopher Langan (who some readers will know as "the smartest man in America") has published an animated version of the simple drawing Wheeler created for his paper on the self-excited circuit, showing a "U" (standing for universe), incorporating an eyeball representing the quantum observer, looking at its "tail" that represents the "information" side of the "information equals reality" concept that we talk about regularly with this project. Wheeler also coined the phrase "'it' from 'bit'"which ties nicely to these discussions. That animation is pictured below.
So is the universe itself a self-excited circuit, that was most excited at the big bang and is slowly winding down from there? Or was the universe in a superposition of possible states until life first emerged somewhere, and began observing more organized versions of the universal wave function from that point on in the world line? The Biocentric Universe theory supports the latter idea. Perhaps Stuart Kauffman's God 2.0 supports the former? I think there's interesting evidence for both ideas, but ultimately I lean more towards the idea that there are organizing patterns in the extra dimensions which exist outside of time and space which have selected this (or any other) universe, and which keep the universe from dissolving into chaos. Gravity and Love is a blog entry from this past December which takes this idea out to a more metaphysical level if you're interested. I have used similar logic to argue for dark matter and dark energy as evidence of extra dimensions.
In my follow-up book to Imagining the Tenth Dimension, which is a collaboration with visual artist Marilyn E. Robertson called O is for Omniverse, we devoted the letter "J" to John Wheeler:
j is for John Wheeler, a famous physicist
who drew a strange eyeball looking at its tail
as a way to imagine that some branches of our line
might be changed in the past as we look back from today
so the branching tree that extends from "now"
is even more surprising: it branches either way
Here's a video showing the letters "I" and "J" from that book, you can see a lot more if you go to omniverse.tv.
5. If the universe had the least amount of entropy at its beginning, does that mean that in a sense Schrödinger thought it was the most "alive" back then? Gevin Giorbran's remarkable insight, in his book Everything Forever, was that we're not moving from low entropy to high entropy with our arrow of time: instead we're moving from a high grouping order to a high symmetry order. I like this because it allows for a way to imagine a universal creative force which expresses itself throughout the world line of the universe, and which makes sense when we view our universe as a single data set from a timeless perspective. From our own vantage point, then, both time and anti-time represent the same thing: a naturally occurring return to balance. Ultimately our universe or any other arises from a breaking of symmetry, and "outside" of this system is a return to the underlying fabric of reality: the unobserved tenth dimension, the Ultimate Ensemble, the Teilhardian Omega Point, the Godelian "outside the system", the computational underpinnings behind digital physics or Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, ultimate enlightenment, or the Omniverse. And that's what we're visualizing with every single dimension in this project - how can we perceive any dimension from "outside" of itself, from the truest perspective, which is timelessness?
6. One of the surprises for me with this project was how many people from the psychedelics community have embraced this way of visualizing the dimensions: for instance, author and research scientist David Jay Brown, a world-renowned expert on psychedelics, said this about my book: "Imagining the Tenth Dimension is one of the most brilliantly-conceived and mind-stretching books that I've ever encountered." With no psychedelics experience myself, I find this particularly fascinating: in this blog, I've talked about Graham Hancock's amazing book Supernatural, which advances the idea that persons around the world and throughout human history have had experiences and visions when they are in altered states of consciousness (whether those are self-induced trance states, or through the use of psychoactive substances) that show remarkable similarities. Do such experiences "lift the veil" so to speak, and allow people to see actual aspects of the extra dimensions? It's a possibility I find very attractive. In my book and this blog I've explored many other more "out there" concepts that can tie to this: are prescience, deja vu, out of body experiences, lucid dreaming, perhaps even ghosts and spirit voices all examples of how there are patterns of awareness which exist outside of our limited space-time window into reality?
7. Another of the surprises for me with this project was the people who looked at my helix logo and presumed this was all about Kabbalah, because of the similarities to The Tree of Life (pictured at left). Yes, I see the connections, but I don't recall ever seeing the Tree of Life until after my book was published and comments started to come my way about this coincidence. What I find particularly interesting is that there are schools of thought within the Kabbalah which teach that we can divide our reality into three triads, which can be summed up as the material, the moral, and the intellectual. In the last chapter of my book, I reached a similar conclusion that there are three systems interacting through constructive interference, all of which in their unobserved state can be assembled into the tenth dimension as a "point" of indeterminate size. Those three systems are 1) the physical world, 2) the quantum observer who through constructive interference is actively engaged in observing specific aspects of the other two systems, and 3) the "information equals reality" world of memes, patterns of grouping, or waveforms. Likewise, it's interesting to relate this to Popperian cosmology: philosopher Karl Popper proposed that there are three worlds: the physical, the mind which observes, and mental patterns of information (I talked about all this in greater detail in my blog entry Three Becomes One). Is this recurring idea that there is a physical world, a world created by observation/participation, and an underlying realm of information another example of how Imagining the Tenth Dimension plugs into some deeper truths about our reality? I believe it is. And constructive interference is an important phrase to keep in mind through all this, as it applies to quantum mechanics, the universe as a hologram, Wheeler's self-excited circuit, and the role of life and consciousness in creating this universe or any other.
8. Let's look at this idea more carefully: "a world created by observation/participation". In Imagining the Eighth Dimension, we mentioned a concept from a paper published by Lee Smolin and others at arxiv.org, which proposes that we can have a deeper understanding of general relativity if we accept that "different observers construct different spacetimes, which are observer-dependent slices of phase space". And with this project, we keep returning to Everett's idea that there is an unchanging "set of all possible states" or "phase space" which exists outside of spacetime, and that quantum mechanics makes the most sense when we understand that this is not a process of collapse we are talking about here, it is only a process of observation. Does that mean then that we, as quantum observers, are each creating our own reality? And if so, how much control do we have?
There's no question that each of us is at the center of the observed universe, and even though that might sound like a return to ancient thinking that the sun revolves around the earth, the cosmological horizon is real, and this fact would be just as true for an observer on the other side of our currently observed universe - they too would find themselves to be at the center of a space-time sphere, with their very own unique version of the cosmological horizon.
So here I am in a unique universe created through my participation as a quantum observer, which is part of a 5D probability space (as we discussed in Imagining the Fifth Dimension). Does that mean I'm a part of Wheeler's self-excited circuit, the universe observing itself? Does that make me part of a universal creative force, or as Einstein referred to it, "the Old One"? In fact, am I an aspect of God, observing some unique aspect of My creation? Or am I part of an underlying life force which creates pockets of negative entropy, pushing against the natural decline of the universe? These are all different ways of thinking about the same idea, use whichever one you're the most comfortable with if you feel so inclined. For me, the most important part of this discussion is not what label you place upon this process, but the fact that this way of visualizing our reality presents a strong argument for free will. Yes, there is ultimately only one underlying form, one underlying geometry, but you and I (and all living things) are within something much more interesting. We are each moving points within a fifth dimensional probability space, observing a shared consensus reality which connects us all together, but also each observing our own unique version of that space.
For persons trapped in negative loops of abuse or addiction, this is particularly important to understand. If free will is an illusion, then how can we hope to break out of these patterns? The fifth dimension shows the way. As I say in my song Addictive Personality:
Every day is a new day
Every day you’re back to one
And today can be the new day
When you say you’re finally done
Not all habits are bad, of course, and it's in our nature to be attracted to things that make us feel good. The addictions we're talking about here are the ones that are the opposite of the universal creative force, the ones that conspire to extinguish that "spark" of life which Schrödinger described. Each of us, with our free will, have to be the one to decide whether we're on the path we want to be on, and to recognize that we have the power to change that path if we choose to do so. Does that mean we're magical creatures, capable of changing anything about our reality? Does it mean a starving child in Africa can become rich and famous simply by thinking better thoughts? No. But it also means that we are not the powerless automatons that the hard determinists would have us believe ourselves to be, and that there is a constantly evolving "best possible version" of ourselves that already exists within our fifth dimensional probability space which we each have the potential to get to with the choices we're able to make.
9. One of the 26 songs I attached to this project is called "Automatic". In it, I talk about the powerful idea put forth by Julian Jaynes in his groundbreaking book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". Jaynes proposed that until about 3,000 years ago, humans lived their lives with their conscious and subconscious minds fully integrated. When the subconscious developed a plan or had an intuition, humans heard this as a "voice" inside their heads, which they often interpreted to be the voices of gods or ancestors. Then something happened: the "narrator" voice of the conscious mind assumed dominance, and the subconscious mind's processes became more submerged. Still, there are a great many activities which we perform better when we can quiet our "narrator voice": driving a car, hitting a golf ball, playing a musical instrument or typing on a keyboard all go better when we can get our narrator voice to stop conducting traffic, saying "do this, now do that", and just let things flow. And yet, despite the advantages of this mode of operation, most of us have been taught to be suspicious of those moments when we stop narrating: we're told to stop daydreaming, get our minds back in the game, and so on.
Most of us are comfortable with the idea that there is some kind of duality to our consciousness. The difference between left brain/right brain approaches to processing the data coming in from our senses is well documented. And with this project, we have often talked about the "me" that is attached to the physical body, and the other parts of our awareness that are more connected outside of space and time. Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's book My Stroke of Insight is amazing to me because it blends these two ideas so beautifully - is the right brain more connected to those larger patterns that are outside of our physical reality? Dr. Taylor provides a compelling personal narrative that tells us this is so.
Here again is where we get into those more metaphysical ideas - that what I call "me" is much more than the collection of memories attached to my physical body, and instinct, intuition, inspiration, creativity, and the underlying processes of life itself are part of the gigantic patterns that exist outside of our physical reality. This is a dynamic system we're talking about, with each of us assuming new patterns of awareness, discarding old ones, becoming entrained and entraining others with the wave-like interactions of constructive and destructive interference that are occurring within the extra dimensions to create our observed reality. Is it possible for these patterns to exist completely separate from a physical body? Proponents of out-of-body experiences and lucid dreaming would say yes, and anyone with a sufficiently convincing supernatural story to tell will also be much more likely to accept this possibility.
Anthony Peake's work puts a tighter focus on these ideas - in his 2008 book The Daemon, he offers evidence that each of us have a left brain/physical consciousness called the Eidolon; and we each have a right brain/metaphysical awareness called the Daemon, which has the foreknowledge of what is to come and sometimes "steers" the physical body into better outcomes. In terms of Everett's Many Worlds and my approach to visualizing the dimensions, could this Daemon be an awareness operating from the sixth dimensional phase space of all possible outcomes for our universe, traveling from conception to death with each version of a unique individual as they physically navigate the possible world lines of their fifth dimensional probability space?
10. This project keeps coming back to quantum mechanics: the fact that our reality is divided into quantum "frames" and not continuous, the branching probabilistic outcomes of Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, and the idea that everything is potentially connected within the underlying quantum world is central to this "new way of thinking about time and space". Ultimately, does everything fit together through instantaneous quantum superposition across space, across time, and across all of the different versions of our universe or any other? Is it startling to think that the point of indeterminate size that we start from is also where we end up with this project, and to consider that the nested hyperspheres of each additional dimension can also be encompassed by this point of indeterminate size? No matter where we end up, we need to acknowledge that quantum mechanics is the most successful theory of reality devised so far, so whatever Theory of Everything we're trying to get to, we should keep in mind the truth about the underlying quantum nature of the universe we're in.
So as we think about there being a duality to our awareness (a left brain/physical, and a right brain/metaphysical), it's interesting to think of our physical existence as it's defined by branching paths within the fifth dimensional probability space and the quantum wave function. In a blog entry called Entangled Neurons, we looked at a new scientific study indicating that quantum entanglement is intrinsic to the process of memory creation, and in Entangled Awareness and OBEs, I said this:
...right at this instant, I am part of a cloud of probabilistic "me"s that are all continuing on the same general path, the same branch. That's true at the quantum level, and it's true at the macro level: all of the tiny random occurrences and inconsequential decisions (shall I put my hand here or here when I push that door open?) tend to cancel each other out, to keep us moving in the same trajectory. It's only when our choice, or chance, or the actions of others create an event that really does split us onto a new fifth-dimensional path that a long-term memory is created.
For years, scientists have been fond of saying that quantum physics has nothing to do with the warm and wet world of living things, but that opinion is now changing. A paper published last year at arxiv.org suggests that DNA is held together using quantum entanglement. In other blog entries like The Quantum Observer and Creativity and the Quantum Universe, we've looked at new evidence that photosynthesis and bird navigation are also utilizing quantum processes. Ideas such as these are the first inklings of a new science called quantum biology, and this all ties very nicely to the idea that life itself is a unique process which is engaged with our space-time in ways that transcend the limits of the "here" and the "now", in the same way that quantum entanglement and superposition seem supremely mysterious until we accept that there is more to the universe than the limited space-time reality we see around us.
Likewise, the new buzz around the evidence that neutrinos have been detected that arrived 60 billionths of a second earlier than the speed of light is very interesting, but I would caution people who says this disproves Einstein's Theory of Relativity: in my opinion, this would only be the case if you don't believe in the existence of extra dimensions. But if these neutrinos somehow took a tiny shortcut outside of spacetime, and essentially "burrowed" through the fifth dimension to arrive a little earlier, that would not violate relativity, and if this effect were proved and confirmed by other experimenters this could well be the first direct evidence of the existence of extra dimensions. How cool would that be??
As I say in song number 1 of the 26 songs I created for this project: Everything Fits Together. I hope that this project has helped to awaken your senses to the possibilities of just how true that phrase really is.
"...much as the many different forms for DNA provide for the abundant variety of life on earth, so the many different forms for the extra dimensions may provide for the abundant variety of universes populating a string-based multiverse".
A point represents a position within a system, and as we add dimensions, the system becomes more complex. In the Imagining the Tenth Dimension animation, we're asked to think of our universe with its locked in fine structure constant as a "point" at a position within the system of the seventh dimension, which means some other seven-dimensional "point" would be a way to get to some other universe with different basic physical laws than our own. Just how crazy is this idea?
Some string theorists have said there are ten to the power of five hundred other universes out there, in something we can call the "string theory landscape". Other cosmologists have suggested that the number of other possible universes out there approaches infinity, and because of that we are just in a tiny sliver of something called the multiverse. Either way, what we're trying to visualize here is a position within that landscape, and within that position we would find a way to get to Everett's universal wave function representing all possible outcomes for our particular universe.
According to string theory, our observable universe is a small part of a larger space having more dimensions than the three we directly see. The other dimensions may be microscopic in size (or otherwise difficult to penetrate) and crumpled up in a funky shape known as a Calabi-Yau space. The observable universe may be on a membrane, or simply a "brane," sitting at the tip of a spike (what physicists call a "throat") or composing part of a membrane wrapped around teacuplike handles.
When I published my book in 2006 did I know that string theory proposes that our universe is constrained at the third dimension and the seventh dimension by "branes" in those dimensions? I did not. Still, there seems to be another very interesting parallel here between my proposal that our universe is "locked in" at the seventh dimension, and the string theory idea that our universe is constrained by a seven-dimensional brane. My goal, since the day I launched this project back in 2006, has been to continue to document interesting connections between leading edge science and my approach to visualizing the dimensions, and I believe we're looking at a particularly useful one here.
The word "multiverse" has a number of different meanings for different people, so there are some possibilities for confusion. As you'll see in the wikipedia article on this topic, physicist Max Tegmark has proposed that there are four different levels of Multiverse (some of the following is paraphrased and some is quoted from the wikipedia article):
Level I: Beyond our cosmological horizon
Remember the cosmological horizon? It gives us a way of seeing that each of us is at the center of our own version of the observable universe, and that if we were on a planet billions of light years from here, we would still see ourselves to be at the very center of a different but essentially similar cosmological horizon. Those two would overlap much like a space-time Venn Diagram. But what if an observer were so far away that their cosmological horizon didn't overlap with ours at all? In a Level I multiverse, space-time is perfectly flat. On that flat "sheet" of space-time there are an infinite number of self-contained universes, all with the same physical laws and constants. Almost all will differ from our own universe. However, because there are infinitely many, there will eventually be similar, and even identical, configurations.
Even though this version of this multiverse has many supporters, particularly since it doesn't require the existence of any extra dimensions, this one feels extremely unlikely to me.
Max Tegmark estimates that within a Level I multiverse, an identical volume to ours should be about 1010115 meters away from us (a number larger than a googolplex).
If that's the case, then how far away is the one where I got up five minutes earlier this morning? And how far away from that one is the one where I got up four minutes and fifty-nine seconds earlier? It's easy to see why some people who are taught this version of the multiverse dismiss it as being ridiculously extravagant.
With my project, I've proposed that the cosmological horizon is the space-time equivalent of the 3D horizon we see around us when we're in the middle of the ocean - it's the same in every direction because of an underlying curvature. Topologically speaking, if we think of our 4D space-time as a flat plane, or the surface of the ocean as a flat plane, where is the curvature? In either case, I would say it's in the next dimension up. So our observable 4D universe is really on the surface of a 5D hypersphere! Which means that if Tegmark's calculation is correct we have a measurement of the circumference of that hypersphere. Just as we could travel east on the surface of the earth and eventually end up back where we started, this would indicate that if we traveled 1010115 meters, we would traverse the 5D hypersphere and end up at the same place we are right now. It also means that if I had adjusted my angle ever so slightly, I could have ended up in the universe that is really very nearby ours in the fifth dimension, where I got up five minutes earlier this morning.
Level II: Universes with different physical constants
In this version, the multiverse as a whole is stretching and will continue doing so forever, but some regions of space stop stretching and form distinct bubbles, like gas pockets in a loaf of rising bread. Such bubbles are embryonic level I multiverses.
With my project, I have referred to this as the multiverse landscape, and placed it in the seventh dimension and above (depending on the context of the discussion), but within Tegmark's classification system his Level II universe does not require the existence of extra dimensions, and is on an infinitely flat expanse of spacetime.
Level III: Many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics
Hugh Everett III's Theory of the Universal Wave Function, commonly known as the Many Worlds Interpretation, tell us that observation causes one universe out of many to be selected, but the others continue on, just as real as the one we're in. Tegmark argues that a level III multiverse does not contain more possibilities than a level I or II multiverse.
In effect, all the different "worlds" created by "splits" in a level III multiverse with the same physical constants can be found in some Hubble volume in a level I multiverse. Tegmark writes that "The only difference between Level I and Level III is where your doppelgängers reside. In Level I they live elsewhere in good old three-dimensional space. In Level III they live on another quantum branch in infinite-dimensional Hilbert space." Similarly, all level II bubble universes with different physical constants can in effect be found as "worlds" created by "splits" at the moment of spontaneous symmetry breaking in a level III multiverse. Related to the many-worlds idea are Richard Feynman's multiple histories interpretation and H. Dieter Zeh's many-minds interpretation.
At last we get to extra dimensions, even if they're infinite within Tegmark's classification system. With my project, I have suggested that these "other" universes resulting from different physical constants are at different positions within the multiverse landscape of the seventh and eighth dimension, and that having arrived at any particular location within that landscape there is a potential for there to be a wave function of possible states (in other words, a set of parallel universes for the resulting universe) within the first through sixth dimension.
Level IV: Ultimate Ensemble
The Ultimate Ensemble hypothesis of Tegmark himself. This level considers equally real all universes that can be described by different mathematical structures. This does not include different low-energy physical laws not of our observable universe. Tegmark writes that "abstract mathematics is so general that any Theory Of Everything (TOE) that is definable in purely formal terms (independent of vague human terminology) is also a mathematical structure. For instance, a TOE involving a set of different types of entities (denoted by words, say) and relations between them (denoted by additional words) is nothing but what mathematicians call a set-theoretical model, and one can generally find a formal system that it is a model of." He argues this "implies that any conceivable parallel universe theory can be described at Level IV" and "subsumes all other ensembles, therefore brings closure to the hierarchy of multiverses, and there cannot be say a Level V."
"Ultimate Ensemble" certainly works as a description of the tenth dimension within my approach to visualizing the dimensions, and I've been saying that to avoid confusion it's better not to call this over-arching concept a multiverse, but rather The Omniverse. This helps to keep it separate in our minds from the parallel universe versions of our own universe (Tegmark's Level I, which I have also referred to as our universe's "phase space"), and the multiverse landscape of possible universes (Tegmark's Level II and/or III). On top of that I have added the ninth dimension, which encompasses the dimensions below but moves beyond any physical expressions and into patterns of information only, and by then we are arriving at what Tegmark calls Level IV. The omniverse, then, becomes either the ninth dimension in its entirety, or the tenth dimension in its unobserved state: a single "point" representing the ultimate ensemble of all possible patterns and shapes, ready to be created through symmetry breaking to spill us back into the realities of the dimensions below.
So. What is unique about the seventh dimension? Our universe never wanders off into the other different initial conditions universes as we observe the quantum wave function of possible outcomes for our universe because it is constrained by its position (or a D7 brane as we saw in the string theory graphic above) within the seventh dimension. Moving to another "position" within the seventh dimension and above precipitates a completely different universe with different basic physical laws, and for that universe its expressions in the lower dimensions will be just as real as our own, and just as locked in by their position within the seventh dimension and above as our own universe is. In that sense, what we are talking about here is easily connected to what physicist Lisa Randall talks about in her book "Warped Passages": there are are other regions of the multiverse (and ultimately the "omniverse") where other universes with different basic physical laws from our own exist, and it's because they stem from a different "position" within the underlying structures of reality that we can't get to them, and they can't get to us.
As I have cautioned people from the outset of this project, my "new way of thinking about time and space" is not the explanation for string theory, it's just an innovative way to visualize ten spatial dimensions, something that most people would have said was impossible to do. I have always remarked, though, that I find it interesting to see how many different spiritual and metaphysical systems have also placed a heavy significance on the number seven: so much so that one of the 26 songs I've attached to this project is called "Seven Levels". Just for fun, we'll look at a video for that song at the end of this entry.
But before we do that, let me close with this thought: if Information Equals Reality, then absolutely everything about our reality can be thought of as patterns and shapes within the information that is the fabric of quantum indeterminacy, or Tegmark's Ultimate Ensemble. Subatomic particles, fractals, life, consciousness, and our observed universe are all structures that result from these underlying patterns that reside in that place where the distinction between past present, and future is meaningless. Our own observed reality is being created at the fifth dimension, so anything beyond that becomes part of a "you can't get there from here" list, unless we can some day navigate within those extra dimensions beyond the fifth. And as we get closer to ten, we are now starting to move away from the reality side of the equation and more towards the information side. We'll continue this exploration next time with Imagining the Eighth Dimension.
(This picture was created by my Facebook friend Annamaria Paizs, a Hungarian born Dutch artist living and working in Breda the Netherlands. It's called "Whitehole". Click here for other examples of her work. Thanks Annamaria!)
This video accompanies a blog entry published earlier this year called Gravity and Free Will, which was tied together with a look at the results from four recent poll questions here at this blog.
Last entry, in Threes, we worked our way through the Three Becomes One concept we explored earlier this year, and we arrived at thinking about spin. "Spin" ties together with Triality, Twistor Theory, Garrett Lisi's E8 rotation, Dan Winter's fractal compression/decompression, Nassim Haramein's point-based physics, and Marko Rodin's Rodin Coil. Could all of these different approaches be related? Let's watch a couple of movies.
This YouTube movie is titled Infinite Division. It uses visuals from a number of other videos and presents the ideas of Nassim Haramein using clips from a live presentation of Nassim's from a few years ago.
Here's a second video: this one features Randy Powell, who has studied with Marko Rodin, and has been working on ways to visualize the spin-based vortex mathematics of Rodin's work. As you'll see, in this ten minute video Randy makes some astonishing claims about the importance of this work and his group's intention to turn this knowledge into an open source project with far-reaching implications for humanity! Does this make him sound like a crackpot? Of course it does. But if these claims are supportable by hard math, then we may be looking here at a way of harnessing the Information Equals Reality paradigm I've been promoting throughout the life of this project. What do you think about this ten minute presentation?
How does the concept of infinite division relate to my approach to visualizing the dimensions? The answer is encoded into the logo I created for my project: at the core of this is the point we start with (the zero) and the point we end with (the ten), and those are connected. All of the other dimensions represent ways of dividing up the information that becomes reality, and so are shown in this graphic to be revolving around or "outside" the conceptual line which connects those starting and ending points. Those points, by virtue of being of indeterminate size, are really equivalent, but it's helpful to think of the zero as representing the drive towards division down to the infinitesimally small, and the ten as representing the drive towards encompassing the infinitely large "point" of the Omniverse.
Ultimately all of that information exists as potential within the beautifully balanced symmetry state that exists both before and after our universe or any other information set. So, if all possible states already exist and we are each merely observing infinitely dividable "slices" from instant to instant, is it possible for us to sense the future? Next time we'll look at a new science experiment on that question, with an entry called "Evidence for Seeing the Future?".
The above recently published YouTube video accompanies a blog post from earlier this year of the same name, Our Universe as a Point.
Some people watch my original animation, following the logical patterns as they repeat from one spatial dimension to the next, becoming more and more amazed at how much they're holding within their minds, but then think that I'm somehow copping out at the end when I say "there's no place left to go" at the tenth dimension. I've said this before but it bears repeating - there's no reason for you to stop at the tenth dimension if you're not assigning any logical meaning to these dimensions. The point-line-plane postulate's logic says that you can use this approach to construct any number of spatial dimensions, not just ten.
But when we follow my presentation, moving up from our tangible world of three spatial dimensions, through the logical proposals that time is a direction within the fourth spatial dimension, and the fifth dimension holds the probabilistic quantum waves for our particular version of the universe, and up through the dimensions beyond any possible physical expressions to the place where everything is just patterns of information, the new degree of freedom afforded by each additional spatial dimension eventually reaches a point where we're thinking about the biggest picture of all.
For the people who follow the logic of my original presentation, this is often the moment where they feel like their minds have been blown wide open - because even if it seems contradictory at first, what we're really talking about here is that the tenth dimension, the ultimate ensemble, the omniverse, the omega (or whatever word you choose to use) is a point of indeterminate size: it's the ground state of perfect symmetry that simultaneously contains the potential for all other possible states, but only the potential. It's indeterminate. Which, people are startled to realize, means it's the same as the point that starts this whole presentation.
My twitter friend Jeff Hall (who describes himself as an "Alexander Technique teacher, existential philosopher, mathematician, spiritual person, oh... and IT professional" from the UK) recently pointed me towards a new BBC documentary called "What Happened Before the Big Bang". It features leading-edge speculations from a number of well-known cosmologists, but Jeff knew I would be particularly interested in this quote from Professor Sir Roger Penrose:
"When people asked me what happened before the big bang my normal answer would be to say 'well, you know, the word before, what does that mean? That's just some temporal concept. And if the big bang was a singularity in space-time, then that means the very notion of time loses its meaning at this so-called 'event' of the big bang... so it's meaningless to ask about before because there wasn't a before, that's the wrong kind of notion.'
And I would have gone along with this idea until I've had some different ideas more recently.
The present picture of the universe is that it starts with a big bang, and it ends with an indefinitely expanding, exponentially expanding universe... where in a remote future it cools off and there's not much left but photons.
Now, what I'm saying is that in this remote future, the photons have no way of keeping time, they don't have any mass. You need mass to make a clock. And you have to have a clock to measure the scale of the universe. So the universe loses track of how big it is, and this very expanded universe becomes equivalent to a big bang of another one.
So I'm saying that this, what we think of as our universe, is but one eon of a succession of eons, where this remotely expanding universe of each becomes the big bang of the next. So small and big become completely equivalent."
Wow! Isn't it amazing to see a leading-edge cosmologist saying he's come up with a new idea, and it turns out to be directly connected to what I've been promoting with my project? I'm going to end this blog entry with one of my 26 songs written for this project, this one was written in 2002 and it advances the same idea as Sir Roger has now advanced: that really the big bang is an illusion, and that "before" and "after" the existence of our universe is completely equivalent.
One might interpret Sir Roger's comment above to say that all universes happen one after another, sequentially in time. I think the more correct interpretation of this idea lies in the secret of "before" the universe and "after the universe being equivalent: so we are still, I believe, talking about universes which exist simultaneously, independent of each other, in the indeterminate place which is "outside the system" as Godel liked to say.
Still, how can (as Sir Roger says) small and big become completely equivalent?
When they both represent a point of indeterminate size.
Please remember this: as we discussed in One to the Power of Infinity, indeterminate is not the same as undefined. Indeterminate means all answers are equally true, while undefined means no meaning can be assigned. If the tenth dimension and the "zero" point we start from are both of indeterminate size, then they are equivalent.
Is it kind of a zen thought to say that thinking biggest and thinking smallest are the same thing? Sure it is! But this project is about much more than science or spirituality by themselves, and that's the power of this way of visualizing the dimensions. Thank you to tenth dimension fans around the world who have embraced this project, and enjoy the journey!
As promised here's that song, The Unseen Eye, to finish.
P.S.: For more about why there is no "time" when all that's left is photons, please refer back to one of my more popular blog entries from the last few months, Light Has No Speed. P.P.S: Terence McKenna suggested that there are historical evolutionary pressures that have caused us to be less able to perceive the extra dimensions. What do you think? We'll talk about this more next time in Psychedelics and Spacetime.
This music was created by Scope DJ, a music producer from the Netherlands working in the musical genre called "hardstyle". If you listen to the piece at about 0:59 and again at about 2:15 you may recognize the voice that appears: yep, it's me. I've been sampled by Scope DJ, immortalized in a slamming dance track that might give a few people something to think about while they party on the dance floor. Scope DJ's music is available in MP3 and WAV formats at www.hardstyle.com/scope-dj. Here's the original video that the sample came from: one of my more popular YouTube videos, called Imagining the Omniverse.
Scope DJ's real name is Dennis Koehoorn. I contacted Dennis and asked him how he came to use my voice and the "omniverse" concept for his piece, and here's what he said:
I've always been extremely interested in the phenomenon of multiple universes, dimensions et cetera. It makes so much sense to me that I can't figure out why they shouldn't exist. Your vlog gave me more insight on this topic. Since I was always interested in topics like these and also always wanted to make a track about it - even though the main audience may not learn anything about the topic from just listening to the track - I decided to use your vlog as a source.
I am glad you are taking this well, I can imagine someone NOT liking someone else using their voice without asking...
Best regards, Dennis
Hey Dennis, by all means, I put my vlogs up on YouTube because I want to get these important ideas out into the world. But I do own the copyright to these videos, so I trust that if you make any significant money from your mp3/wav sales or licensing of this track that you'll do the right thing and shoot me a small cut of your profits as a licensing fee, fair enough?
Last blog entry was called Thinking Bigger, and Scope DJ's "Omniverse" certainly fits into that vein. We're going to continue with related concepts in our upcoming blog entries: Extra-Dimensional Geometry, Just Geometry, Thinking Biggest, Psychedelics and Spacetime, and Tangential Thinking.
Finally, just a reminder that the long awaited followup to my first book is still available. "O is for Omniverse" is a collaboration between myself and visual artist Marilyn E. Robertson. Go to http://www.omniverse.tv for more info.
Ah yes, our old friend the omniverse. Connecting the idea of there being extra dimensions with the idea of there being an omniverse containing the many different forms of multiverse and parallel universes that various cosmological theories have advanced would certainly fall under the category of Thinking Bigger, wouldn't you agree? To be clear, not all multiverse theories posit the necessity of there being extra dimensions, but (as I've always said) when you add extra dimensions it becomes much easier to visualize how there could be other universes just as real as our own, existing within their own versions of spacetime, and yet completely inaccessible from "here". "Here" is our unique universe's position within the multiverse landscape.
In my most popular blog of all time, Jumping Jesus, I embedded Google Video windows showing the amazing Frank Theys documentary "TechnoCalyps" (yes, that's how he spells it). My facebook friend Sean Dickinson recently sent me a link to a ten minute YouTube clip from that same movie which I think does a nice job of expanding these Thinking Bigger conversations beyond physics and beyond technology, through the questions of Simulism and into the realms of the spiritual and the mystical.
Some theorists propose that there is only one dimension, and this is an idea we've played with before. In entries like "An Expanding 4D Sphere" and "Our Universe as a Point", we've tried to show how ultimately each dimension is enfolded by the next: the 2D circle contains the 1D line, the 3D sphere contains the 2D circle, the 4D hypersphere contains the 3D sphere, and so on. By the time we're talking about hyperspheres constructed from four or more spatial dimensions, we're rapidly moving beyond what our monkey brains are capable of visualizing! But if our reality is defined at the tenth dimension, that tenth dimension contains a 9D hypersphere as a subset, which contains an 8D hypersphere as its subset, and so on. Wheels within wheels, spheres within spheres, a logic that continues all the way to the tenth dimension: and if a theorist says there is only one dimension, then I would say they are somehow pointing towards the enfolded nature of all of these structures considered simultaneously.
We're going to continue this line of reasoning in these upcoming entries: Extra-dimensional Geometry, Thinking Biggest, Psychedelics and Spacetime, and Tangential Thinking.
A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzGBDBEx_pI Not long ago the amazingly energetic Dr. Mark Filippi of somaspace.org invited me to attend the 2010 Coherence Conference, which took place at the University of Bridgeport in October 2010. Unfortunately, my schedule didn't allow me to participate, but there were four basic questions Dr. Mark asked everyone to consider prior to the conference, and I'd like to share my responses with you now. This conference focused on the burgeoning field of "Health 2.0", and brought together a wide range of speakers from various disciplines to discuss the importance of coherence as it relates to people's well-being. Since I'm not a health professional, I'm sure there would have been a lot of eye-opening discussions for me, but I'm also sure that my own approach would have added some new ideas to the discussion.
I'm particularly interested in the idea that our reality is shifting as people become more and more connected to each other: definitely a coherence-related concept! Here's the questions that Dr. Mark, as chair of the event, asked all participants to respond to:
1. Define coherence in your terms Here's how I first learned about the concept of coherence: our reality is constructed through constructive interference from a fifth dimensional probability space, which contains a wave function which can be thought of as the constantly evolving map of possible pasts and futures that connect each of us to our current "now". Those past and future paths are "coherent" with our current now, while the pasts and futures of the universe that are logically/causally incompatible are "decoherent".
Coherence, then, connects us to the multiverse as per Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Speaking philosophically, coherence as a goal is finding ways for each of us to better connect to the preferred versions of the universe that already exist within the underlying patterns of timelessness which, to avoid confusion with the multiple definitions of the word "multiverse", I've come to prefer to refer to as the "omniverse".
My project, Imagining the Tenth Dimension, has been an ongoing exploration of how we fit into these underlying patterns. I recently posted a video to YouTube called "Strength of Gravity, Speed of Light" which shows one example of how my project is about trying to find the common meeting ground between physics and philosophy, between science and spirituality.
A recent blog entry which goes even further out on a limb with these ideas is called "Love and Gravity". In that one I look at what would more commonly be called "new age" phrases and relate them to my approach to visualizing the extra spatial dimensions our reality comes from. Those phrases are:
The universe loves you.
Your body's natural inclination is to want to heal, to want to thrive.
There are forces outside of our reality which are trying to move us towards a better future.
2. What are the key applications of your definition? Understanding how each of us is at the center of our own unique version of the universe gives us a way of understanding our connectedness to the reality we are observing, and our connectedness to others we are interacting with as that reality is being observed. We each have more power than twentieth century science has traditionally taught us to believe, and the new science of epigenetics is a prime example of that. Who would have believed twenty years ago that studies could prove that changes in diet, lifestyle, and attitude can change which genes are expressed, and even influence what genes we pass on to our offspring? A YouTube video I posted at the end of August called "Placebos Becoming More Effective?" relates to this discussion.
3. What do you see as the major impact of your application within your field? I am a generalist, interested in exploring the common meeting ground between ancient spirituality and modern science. I'm always careful to point out that I'm not a physicist and I'm not pretending to be one, but my visual approach to understanding the ten spatial dimensions (plus one of time, but since I agree with the many physicists who say that ultimately "time is an illusion" I prefer not to count it as a dimension) that our reality comes from has fired the imaginations of millions of people around the world.
4. What do you see as the major impact of your application outside your field? "Outside my field"? Since I'm a generalist, that term's a bit hard to define. For persons who insist that spirituality has no place in science, or religious fundamentalists who say that science is delusion, or hard determinists who say free will is an illusion, my project will not likely convince them to change the conclusions they've already reached. Other than that it's difficult to pin down exactly what the phrase "outside my field" would mean, since the main goal of my project is to find ways to be as inclusive as possible in discussing where our reality comes from, and the significance of our individual roles as participants in that process.
For more about how my idea of our reality coming from a fifth dimensional probability space is receiving more mainstream consideration this year, please watch my video for "The 5th Dimensional Camera Project".
I've titled this entry "Global Coherence". Here's a link to a description of "The Global Coherence Initiative", something that Jack Canfield (famed author of the enormously popular Chicken Soup for the Soul series) describes as "perhaps the greatest experiment in the history of the world". Is the world changing for the better as more and more people become connected to each other, embracing the possibilities of shared intention? Check out the link if you'd like to know more.
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