Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 16 to 20

Click here for the archive of polls 1 to 10.
Click here for the archive of polls 11 to 15.
Click here for the archive of polls 21 to 25.
Click here for the archive of polls 26 to 30.


Poll #16 - Zero plus zero equals zero. What does infinity plus infinity equal?
(poll ended June 16 08)

5% said "zero", 70% said "infinity", 15% said "two infinities", and 8% said "none of the above".

This poll is a continuation of similar questions asked in the preceding couple of polls, where you will find some useful discussion about the "many roads to infinity" concept that can make questions like the one in this current poll seem contradictory. The first answer, "zero", for instance, would make sense in the following context: if I start with a line, and place a point on the line, all of the values heading in one direction on that line would be heading towards infinity. Meanwhile, all of those values in the opposite direction would also be heading towards infinity. Is there such a thing as "positive infinity" and "negative infinity" when we look at things in this way? If there were, then adding those two values (or concepts) together should cancel each other out and leave us with zero as the answer. My preference with this project is to say that because infinity is not a number, the infinity that you head towards in either direction on any particular line in any particular direction is ultimately heading towards the same thing: infinity. But keeping in mind the idea of a perfectly balanced equilibrium state which in this project is the tenth dimension in its unobserved state, an idea which also ties to the work of Dr. Sean Carroll which we've been talking about in this blog, does give us a way to think of how a point of indeterminate size, a perfectly balanced equilibrium, and "zero" all are interconnected ideas.

Other blog entries discussing infinity, timelessness, and Dr. Sean Carroll:
Unlikely Events and Timelessness
The Spacetime Tree
The Annotated Tenth Dimension Video
What Would a Flatlander Really See?
Wormholes
God 2.0
Daily Parrying
Time in Either Direction

Poll #17 - Max Planck said: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
(Poll ended June 30 08)
70 % agreed while the rest disagreed.

Another more succinct version of this quote is "science progresses by funerals".

As a person with an unusual approach to thinking about how our reality is derived, which some people embrace and some people reject as bunk, I of course take some comfort from Max Planck's idea presented in this quote. Will my dimensional hierarchy's connections to mainstream science ever be embraced by the mainstream or will this remain nothing more than an intellectual curiosity? Only time will tell. History is full of naysayers and established experts who ridiculed new ideas: there are many famous quotes that have been gathered in various places around the net. Michio Kaku, in his new book Physics of the Impossible, starts each chapter with quotes from famous historical figures and their comments on new ideas. This one, from a respected physicist just over a century ago, is typical of the kind of thinking that Max Planck is referring to:

"Radio has no future. Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. X-rays will prove to be a hoax." - Physicist Lord Kelvin, 1899

Poll #18 - Max Planck said: “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”
Poll ended July 14 2008
70% agreed while the remainder disagreed.

This relates to so many ideas we have looked at with this project, but most notably Godel's incompleteness theorum, which says it is impossible for us to get "outside the system" we are part of and describe the system in its entirety. The equilibrium state of the underlying quantum fields in their unobserved state is equivalent to how I am describing the tenth dimension - and, as I have always said, attempting to observe any part of the tenth dimension immediately collapses you into some part of the other dimensions. Tying this concept to string theory ("if no strings are vibrating in the tenth dimension, no reality is created in the dimensions below") is one of the interesting connections I see between my way of visualizing how our reality is constructed and mainstream scientific theory.

Poll # 19 - The LHC is going to be successful in proving the existence of extra dimensions.
Poll ended July 28 2008. 71% agreed while the rest disagreed.

Poll # 20 - The LHC will reveal the source of dark matter and/or dark energy.
Poll ended August 8 2008. 63% disagreed while the rest agreed.

Very interesting! While neither of the questions had a resounding victory, this blog's readership are leaning towards the LHC finding proof of extra dimensions, but more readers also believe the LHC will not find the source of dark matter and dark energy. What can we make of this?

These two poll questions relate to discussions in my blog from a couple of weeks ago: Dark Energy, Linelanders, and the LHC, as well as Randomness and the Missing 96 per cent. There are many articles out there about the Large Hadron Collider, which is scheduled to go online this month, and what it may or may not find. Will it reveal the Higgs Boson, called by some the "God Particle"? Will it reveal evidence of extra dimensions, or the source of dark energy? Naturally, I am rooting for the extra dimensions discovery, as the whole discussion of extra dimensions in an environment where some mainstream physicists are claiming their existnce is unprovable conjecture would be finally laid to rest. My biggest fear for the LHC is that it will only reveal another forest of tinier and tinier particles, leaving science with the task of coming up with an even larger and more powerful particle collider for further experiments in the decades to come.

The July 21st edition of New Scientist magazine had an interesting article related to all this, here are some quotes:

Awaiting a messenger from the multiverse

by Stephen Battersby

AT THE most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the twin colliding beams of protons have been switched off for a few hours. All seems quiet, but both the giant machine and the foundations of physics are about to be shaken by a tiny time bomb. Hiding within a copper plate deep inside one of the accelerator's massive detectors is a peculiar interloper: a particle that is waiting to explode, and with its incandescent fragments write a message from beyond our universe.

If this particle does appear at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, it could change the nature of physics. Physicists might have to abandon their goal of explaining the fundamental basis of our reality and just accept that the properties of matter and energy in our universe arose at random. It could mean not only that we live on a small planet in an insignificant solar system in one of a trillion galaxies in the universe, but our own universe is just one insignificant slice of an unimaginably vast and diverse multiverse.

To many physicists, that is anathema; but not to Savas Dimopoulos of Stanford University in California or his colleague Nima Arkani-Hamed at Harvard University. In 2002, they first began to wonder what a multiverse might mean for particle physics.

This was at a time when the multiverse was being discussed, albeit reluctantly, as a solution to a cosmic problem. Astronomers had discovered a repulsive force pushing the galaxies apart, caused by an inherent energy present in space. Often called the cosmological constant, no one knows what is generating this force.

On the face of it, physics has a ready-made explanation. According to quantum theory, the vacuum, or the space between particles, is not totally empty. It is home to short-lived "virtual" particles that flicker in and out, created by the fundamental quantum fuzziness of the world. Although that might be a hard concept to swallow, it is an enormously successful idea. The calculations of quantum field theory show that these virtual particles cluster around the ordinary, solid, long-lived particles of matter, changing their properties in ways that accurately match many experimental observations.

It is relatively easy to devise a model of particle physics in which virtual particles with positive and negative energies cancel out exactly to zero, but why they should almost cancel each other out, leaving us with a tiny residual energy, is much harder to see.

One physicist had already predicted this, however. In the 1980s, Steven Weinberg at the University of Texas in Austin adopted a controversial line of argument called the anthropic principle, which roughly states that the universe has to possess properties that make it hospitable to life, otherwise we wouldn't be here to see it.

He started by pointing out that if our cosmological constant were only 100 times as big as observed, we would be in trouble. Its repulsive force would have stretched out the thin gas of the early universe, preventing it from ever collapsing into stars and planets. But if you have a lot of universes, each with a random value of the cosmological constant, there's going to be at least one with an energy density of roughly a few joules per cubic kilometre. That would enable the existence of planet-dwelling life forms who would then be in a position to observe this value of cosmological constant.

Such a range of universes might sound like wild speculation, but some respected cosmological models imply that there could indeed be many universes, perhaps even an infinite number. In the theory of eternal inflation, for example, our own universe is just one offshoot of an endlessly growing "tree" of universes.

Those of you familiar with my project will recognize many common themes in this article that relate to this ideas I have been promoting with Imagining the Tenth Dimension. Here are some related blog entries:
The Spacetime Tree
Unlikely Events and Timelessness
The Omniverse
Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains

So: will the LHC find proof of extra dimensions, but not the source of dark matter and dark energy, as this blog's participants have predicted? The idea I have promoted with this project (in my book and in blog entries like Dark Energy, Linelanders, and the LHC) is that dark matter and dark energy come from the combined gravitational effects of the neighboring parallel universes in the fifth dimension (for dark matter), and the combined "pull" from other expressions of matter and energy in the sixth dimension and beyond (for dark energy). Will the LHC push us further towards such an understanding? Only time will tell.

Thanks to everyone who participated in those polls, lots more to come. And by all means, if you have a suggestion for a poll question don't be afraid to post it here in the comments.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: The Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs, August Report

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 19 and 20

Click here for the archive of polls 1 to 10.
Click here for the archive of polls 11 to 15.

Poll # 19 - The LHC is going to be successful in proving the existence of extra dimensions.
Poll ended July 28 2008. 71% agreed while the rest disagreed.

Poll # 20 - The LHC will reveal the source of dark matter and/or dark energy.
Poll ended August 8 2008. 63% disagreed while the rest agreed.

Very interesting! While neither of the questions had a resounding victory, this blog's readership are leaning towards the LHC finding proof of extra dimensions, but more readers also believe the LHC will not find the source of dark matter and dark energy. What can we make of this?

These two poll questions relate to discussions in my blog from a couple of weeks ago: Dark Energy, Linelanders, and the LHC, as well as Randomness and the Missing 96 per cent. There are many articles out there about the Large Hadron Collider, which is scheduled to go online this month, and what it may or may not find. Will it reveal the Higgs Boson, called by some the "God Particle"? Will it reveal evidence of extra dimensions, or the source of dark energy? Naturally, I am rooting for the extra dimensions discovery, as the whole discussion of extra dimensions in an environment where some mainstream physicists are claiming their existnce is unprovable conjecture would be finally laid to rest. My biggest fear for the LHC is that it will only reveal another forest of tinier and tinier particles, leaving science with the task of coming up with an even larger and more powerful particle collider for further experiments in the decades to come.

The July 21st edition of New Scientist magazine had an interesting article related to all this, here are some quotes:

Awaiting a messenger from the multiverse

by Stephen Battersby

AT THE most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the twin colliding beams of protons have been switched off for a few hours. All seems quiet, but both the giant machine and the foundations of physics are about to be shaken by a tiny time bomb. Hiding within a copper plate deep inside one of the accelerator's massive detectors is a peculiar interloper: a particle that is waiting to explode, and with its incandescent fragments write a message from beyond our universe.

If this particle does appear at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, it could change the nature of physics. Physicists might have to abandon their goal of explaining the fundamental basis of our reality and just accept that the properties of matter and energy in our universe arose at random. It could mean not only that we live on a small planet in an insignificant solar system in one of a trillion galaxies in the universe, but our own universe is just one insignificant slice of an unimaginably vast and diverse multiverse.

To many physicists, that is anathema; but not to Savas Dimopoulos of Stanford University in California or his colleague Nima Arkani-Hamed at Harvard University. In 2002, they first began to wonder what a multiverse might mean for particle physics.

This was at a time when the multiverse was being discussed, albeit reluctantly, as a solution to a cosmic problem. Astronomers had discovered a repulsive force pushing the galaxies apart, caused by an inherent energy present in space. Often called the cosmological constant, no one knows what is generating this force.

On the face of it, physics has a ready-made explanation. According to quantum theory, the vacuum, or the space between particles, is not totally empty. It is home to short-lived "virtual" particles that flicker in and out, created by the fundamental quantum fuzziness of the world. Although that might be a hard concept to swallow, it is an enormously successful idea. The calculations of quantum field theory show that these virtual particles cluster around the ordinary, solid, long-lived particles of matter, changing their properties in ways that accurately match many experimental observations.

It is relatively easy to devise a model of particle physics in which virtual particles with positive and negative energies cancel out exactly to zero, but why they should almost cancel each other out, leaving us with a tiny residual energy, is much harder to see.

One physicist had already predicted this, however. In the 1980s, Steven Weinberg at the University of Texas in Austin adopted a controversial line of argument called the anthropic principle, which roughly states that the universe has to possess properties that make it hospitable to life, otherwise we wouldn't be here to see it.

He started by pointing out that if our cosmological constant were only 100 times as big as observed, we would be in trouble. Its repulsive force would have stretched out the thin gas of the early universe, preventing it from ever collapsing into stars and planets. But if you have a lot of universes, each with a random value of the cosmological constant, there's going to be at least one with an energy density of roughly a few joules per cubic kilometre. That would enable the existence of planet-dwelling life forms who would then be in a position to observe this value of cosmological constant.

Such a range of universes might sound like wild speculation, but some respected cosmological models imply that there could indeed be many universes, perhaps even an infinite number. In the theory of eternal inflation, for example, our own universe is just one offshoot of an endlessly growing "tree" of universes.

Those of you familiar with my project will recognize many common themes in this article that relate to this ideas I have been promoting with Imagining the Tenth Dimension. Here are some related blog entries:
The Spacetime Tree
Unlikely Events and Timelessness
The Omniverse
Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains

So: will the LHC find proof of extra dimensions, but not the source of dark matter and dark energy, as this blog's participants have predicted? The idea I have promoted with this project (in my book and in blog entries like Dark Energy, Linelanders, and the LHC) is that dark matter and dark energy come from the combined gravitational effects of the neighboring parallel universes in the fifth dimension (for dark matter), and the combined "pull" from other expressions of matter and energy in the sixth dimension and beyond (for dark energy). Will the LHC push us further towards such an understanding? Only time will tell.

Next - a combined archive of polls 16 through 20

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 18

Click here for the archive of polls 1 to 10.
Click here for the archive of polls 11 to 15.

Poll #18 - Max Planck said: “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”
Poll ended July 14 2008
70% agreed while the remainder disagreed.

This relates to so many ideas we have looked at with this project, but most notably Godel's incompleteness theorum, which says it is impossible for us to get "outside the system" we are part of and describe the system in its entirety. The equilibrium state of the underlying quantum fields in their unobserved state is equivalent to how I am describing the tenth dimension - and, as I have always said, attempting to observe any part of the tenth dimension immediately collapses you into some part of the other dimensions. Tying this concept to string theory ("if no strings are vibrating in the tenth dimension, no reality is created in the dimensions below") is one of the interesting connections I see between my way of visualizing how our reality is constructed and mainstream scientific theory.

Next - Poll Questions 19 and 20 - Will the LHC prove the existence of extra dimensions? Will it reveal the source of dark energy/dark matter?

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 17

Click here for the archive of polls 1 to 10.
Click here for the archive of polls 11 to 15.

Poll #17 - Max Planck said: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
(Poll ended June 30 08)
70 % agreed while the rest disagreed.

Another more succinct version of this quote is "science progresses by funerals".

As a person with an unusual approach to thinking about how our reality is derived, which some people embrace and some people reject as bunk, I of course take some comfort from Max Planck's idea presented in this quote. Will my dimensional hierarchy's connections to mainstream science ever be embraced by the mainstream or will this remain nothing more than an intellectual curiosity? Only time will tell. History is full of naysayers and established experts who ridiculed new ideas: there are many famous quotes that have been gathered in various places around the net. Michio Kaku, in his new book Physics of the Impossible, starts each chapter with quotes from famous historical figures and their comments on new ideas. This one, from a respected physicist just over a century ago, is typical of the kind of thinking that Max Planck is referring to:

"Radio has no future. Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. X-rays will prove to be a hoax." - Physicist Lord Kelvin, 1899

Next Poll Question - is it impossible to completely know a mystery that we're part of?

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 16

Poll #16 - Zero plus zero equals zero. What does infinity plus infinity equal?
(poll ended June 16 08)

5% said "zero", 70% said "infinity", 15% said "two infinities", and 8% said "none of the above".

This poll is a continuation of similar questions asked in the preceding couple of polls, where you will find some useful discussion about the "many roads to infinity" concept that can make questions like the one in this current poll seem contradictory. The first answer, "zero", for instance, would make sense in the following context: if I start with a line, and place a point on the line, all of the values heading in one direction on that line would be heading towards infinity. Meanwhile, all of those values in the opposite direction would also be heading towards infinity. Is there such a thing as "positive infinity" and "negative infinity" when we look at things in this way? If there were, then adding those two values (or concepts) together should cancel each other out and leave us with zero as the answer. My preference with this project is to say that because infinity is not a number, the infinity that you head towards in either direction on any particular line in any particular direction is ultimately heading towards the same thing: infinity. But keeping in mind the idea of a perfectly balanced equilibrium state which in this project is the tenth dimension in its unobserved state, an idea which also ties to the work of Dr. Sean Carroll which we've been talking about in this blog, does give us a way to think of how a point of indeterminate size, a perfectly balanced equilibrium, and "zero" all are interconnected ideas.

Next poll question - Does science progress by funerals?

Click here for the archive of polls 1 to 10.
Click here for the archive of polls 11 to 15.

Other blog entries discussing infinity, timelessness, and Dr. Sean Carroll:
Unlikely Events and Timelessness
The Spacetime Tree
The Annotated Tenth Dimension Video
What Would a Flatlander Really See?
Wormholes
God 2.0
Daily Parrying
Time in Either Direction

Moving Dimensions and Synchromysticism

I've been talking a lot with this project about those underlying patterns and shapes that create our reality, and how mysteries like intuition, quantum entanglement, simultaneous inspiration, wave-particle duality, synchronicity, and the soul as a collection of memes can all be tied together once you begin to embrace the timeless viewpoint. Physicists have been saying that "time is an illusion" for a century! But even those physicists (as I discussed in my blog entry Unlikely Events and Timelessness) seem to have difficulty getting their minds completely wrapped around a place where all possible universes and all possible outcomes exist as one simultaneous whole, completely outside of what we know of as time and space.


A direct link to this video for "Everything Fits Together" is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcdjX72VcKI

The main theme of this project is "Everything Fits Together". With chapter one of my book, I worked through a way of visualizing reality that ultimately leaves you with a picture of the underlying perfectly-balanced symmetry state from which our universe and all other possible realities must spring. The other ten chapters of the book then explore the ramifications of all this, and the continuing popularity of my website and my tenth dimension animation show that a growing number of people around the world are being introduced to this way of visualizing reality. Those noisy few who have dismissed my project as pseudoscience are part of an old guard fiercely defending an antiquated viewpoint: a viewpoint which refuses to accept how deep and wide the underlying omniverse is, and which refuses to accept that there are many other universes out there which are just as real as our own, and which refuses to accept that our universe or any other of those possible universes are all just temporary deviations from that underlying background state.

Ever hear of Dr. Elliot McGucken and his Moving Dimensions Theory? Dr. McGucken is a respected physicist and an internet pioneer, check out the description of his work attached to his currently-out-of-print book at Amazon, or the links I have attached to his name and his theory. Moving Dimensions Theory is summed up with an idea very similar to what I've been talking about here:

The only way to stay stationary in the fourth dimension is to move at the speed of light. Ergo the fourth dimension is expanding at the rate of "c" relative to the three spatial dimensions.

Here's a video blog I posted last week. Watch the visual for this for a moment and imagine this as a representation of what Dr. McGucken is describing: each new copy of our 3D world, one planck length away from the next, creates an expanding set of "points", which we string together to create what feels like our continuous 4D line of time; and because this fourth dimension is being created at the speed of light, this becomes the maximum possible speed for a 3 dimensional object.


A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBDaZiMF8jg

Thinking of how each additional dimension is at "right angles" to the one before is another way of thinking about this same idea... and if there were only one possible "line of time" from the big bang to the end of the universe, then Dr. McGucken's expanding fourth dimension would be as far as we need to go. But recognizing that the multiple outcomes of Everett's multiverse are at yet another right angle to the fourth dimension is, I believe, still an important key: as Kaluza proved and Einstein eventually agreed, our reality comes from the fifth rather than the fourth dimension, and this breakthrough idea (which allows a way for us to imagine the constantly expanding parallel-universe-versions resulting from chance and choice for our universe) is central to my project.

So here I am in the middle of the Canadian prairies, a guy with some unusual ideas about how our reality is derived, reaching out to a worldwide audience. I was interested to come across the work of Jake Kotze recently, who is in Winnipeg, Manitoba (I'm in Saskatchewan, the next province over). Jake has developed a large body of work playing with ideas surrounding the hidden connections not just in the real world but from the work of artists and entertainment media, with the idea that we are all plugged into a giant web of connections across time and space (which means, as I've said before, that these connections are occurring at the fifth dimension, where our reality comes from, and this is why those instantaneous --faster-than-light!--hidden connections I listed at the start of this blog violate no laws of physics).

Now, I've talked about synchronicity with this project before, but with "synchromysticism" Jake has taken this idea to a whole new level. If you're prepared to leave your skepticism at the door and take a look at some mind-bending explorations of the memes that knit our reality together, then check out his blogs: The Blob, and Brave New World Order.

I often end these blog entries with one of the 26 songs about the nature of reality which I have attached to this project. This time, a song about those hidden connections that occur "behind the scenes" to create and explain our universe: "From the Corner of My Eye".


A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyP5jxFe5Po

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Related Entries:
Secret Societies
Daily Parrying
God 2.0
How to Make a Universe
Unlikely Events and Timelessness
What Would a Linelander Really See?
What Was Done Today

Next: The Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 16 to 20

Unlikely Events and Timelessness

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hpf3y_EdHco

One of the stumbling blocks for mainstream science's willingness to embrace my way of visualizing how our reality is constructed is rooted in the difficulty in adopting a truly timeless perspective. In chapter 3 of my book I said this:

As we have been careful to note, our concept of time being a full spatial dimension is often not the accepted notion within the world of physics. Interestingly, science has a bit of a split personality when it comes to discussions of time. So, while Einstein’s theories (and the theories that follow from his concepts) seem to indicate that “space-time” is a tangible fabric which can be bent and stretched, there are many other examples where science treats time as being a completely separate entity: in other words, time becomes a quality which gets overlaid on top of the other spatial dimensions, rather than being just another dimension which is woven together with the ones above and below it.

In the wikipedia article on "time", we find this famous quote: "Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once". According to wikipedia, this quote has been attributed variously to John Archibald Wheeler, Woody Allen, and Albert Einstein. Einstein has many quotes that express similar concepts: for instance, "The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion". What are we talking about here? Timelessness: because that timeless perspective that some of the best minds of the past century have encouraged us to adopt is essential to understanding how this project portrays the underlying structures of reality.


A direct link to this video blog for The Spacetime Tree is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L-BfvDYYWg

Quantum Weirdness
In blog entries like The Spacetime Tree, we have talked about ways of visualizing that "timeless" perspective. In entries like "The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic" and "The Annotated Tenth Dimension Video", we quoted experts like Brian Greene and Michio Kaku, who talk about the strange quantum physics facts that seem unexplainable from our limited fourth dimensional perspective: how could entangled particles instantaneously affect each other, effectively at faster than the speed of light, even across huge distances? How can the wave function of a person include the highly unlikely possibility that they pop out of existence here and reappear on the moon? For me, these are examples of the strong indications that the timeless perspective has to allow for higher dimensional connections - just like imagining a Flatlander on a mobius strip, twisting and turning in the dimension above, our fourth dimensional line has connections, twists and turns that occur in the fifth dimension. We remain unaware of those twists and turns as we travel down our fourth dimensional line. Entanglement violates no laws of physics if it occurs as a result of fifth-dimensional connections, and a wave function that allows for unlikely possibilities is much easier to visualize if we place those "so unlikely they would take longer than the life of the universe to occur" possibilities in the sixth dimension.

One of the Greatest News Stories of 2007
New Scientist magazine named the David Deutsch team at Oxford's proof that parallel universes exist one of the greatest news stories of 2007. Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation is closely tied to this proof. Despite last year's proof, there are still many scientists who reject any Many Worlds type of portrayal as being too extravagant: this interpretation means that with every branching choice or random outcome, another copy of our universe is created. How can there possibly be room for all those universe? There certainly doesn't seem to be room for them in the fourth dimension, which already contains the unimaginably huge vista of seventy sextillion stars that we call our observable universe of spacetime.

The intuitive leap I am arguing for here is that trying to keep the wave function of a branching set of parallel universes that occur at both the quantum and macro level in a logical hierarchy becomes much simpler if we use a model that moves those branching possibilities into the fifth dimension, which is where Kaluza proved and Einstein eventually agreed our reality is defined. But doing so requires us to accept that time really is one of the two possible directions in the fourth spatial dimension, an idea also advanced by Sean Carroll in the June issue of Scientific American.

Scientific American on Timelessness...
In editor John Rennie's introduction to this issue, he talks about popular literature's various explorations of the fourth dimension. He mentions Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five", a wonderful book I have read and enjoyed several times, which includes as a plot element a science fiction race of aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. The Tralfamadorians, it turns out, really do have the timeless perspective we are talking about here; and they view the past, present, and future much as you and I would view a mountain range spreading out across the horizon. Why bring up science fiction as an introduction to an article by a serious physicist about the nature of time? Because that perspective of timelessness that Vonnegut attributed to his Tralfamadorians really is necessary to understanding the underlying nature of reality.

... and on Randomness
Last blog, we talked about randomness and the missing 96% our universe. In his Scientific American article, Sean Carroll also talks about randomness and the likelihood of events to occur:

Imagine that you pour milk into your coffee. There are a great many ways to distribute the molecules so that the milk and coffee are completely mixed together but relatively few ways to arrange them so that the milk is segregated from the surrounding coffee... if you waited for it to happen of its own accord as molecules randomly reshuffled, you would typically have to wait much longer than the current age of the observable universe.

But even Sean Carroll, who along with Jennifer Chen of the University of Chicago proposed the symmetrical-time multiverse scenario he is talking about in his article, occasionally seems to fall into the language traps that come from not completely embracing the timeless perspective. For instance, later in the article as he describes he and Jennifer Chen's theory, he says:

On ultralarge scales, such a multiverse would look statistically symmetric with respect to time--both the past and the future would feature new universes fluctuating into life and proliferating without bound. Each of them would experience an arrow of time, but half would have an arrow that was reversed with respect to that in the others.
The idea of a universe with a backward arrow of time might seem alarming. If we met someone from such a universe, would they remember the future? Happily, there is no danger of such a rendezvous. In the scenario we are describing, the only places where time seems to run backward are enormously far back in our past--long before our big bang.

A direct link to the video blog for Time in Either Direction is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0j8oYNFFbw

The Big Bang, Maximum Entropy, and Timelessness
As we said in a previous blog entry about Sean Carroll's article, "Time in Either Direction", the scenario he is describing is that our universe (or any other universe) is just a temporary deviation away from an underlying background equilibrium state, and I am proposing that the background state he is referring to is very easy to align with the indeterminate tenth dimension as I've portrayed it in my visualization of the dimensions. I would propose, then, that Dr. Carroll saying "long before our big bang" is not really adopting the timeless perspective. It would be more correct to say that those other time-reversal-symmetry universes exist not before, not after, but just "elsewhere" within the multiverse. Once you go "before" the big bang for our universe, and once you go "after" the final maximum entropy state for our universe, you are back into an underlying state where time has no meaning, because everything happens at once within that underlying fabric which we have also come to refer to as the Omniverse.

Likewise, when expert physicists like Greene and Kaku talk about events which have some likelihood of occurring, but they are so unlikely that they would take longer than the life of the universe, shouldn't the same thinking apply? "Longer than the life of the universe" means outside of spacetime, and into the vision of timelessness that we are peering into here. Saying, then, that a wave function event is possible but so unlikely that it occurs outside of spacetime, would, in my way of visualizing reality, mean that it occurs in the sixth dimensional version of our reality - the parallel universes which still exist as potential for the particular different-initial-conditions universe we are part of, but which are inaccessible from our current "now" within spacetime.

While we're talking about unlikely events, let's finish with a song about unlikely events which exist as potential but which we haven't witnessed yet: the song is called "The End of the World".

A direct link to this video for "The End of the World" is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2Y9m34iJVY

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Moving Dimensions and Synchromysticism