How Big is... Augmented Reality

My company, Talking Dog Studios, has been creating Augmented Reality projects for a while now. We've recently put up a couple of free sites for people to play with, both have similar designs but will likely appeal to very different groups.

The one that just went up now is called "How Big is a Planet?". You can go to the website and try it out yourself, it's at howbigisaplanet.com . Here's a video demonstrating how the site works:


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

I think there's something about actually seeing the scale of related things when you hold them in your hand that sticks in your memory more than just reading about such things. Seeing yourself hold Mars and then seeing yourself hold Jupiter gives you a "mental slap" that makes it more likely to remember this kind of information. The following site is based upon the same principle, but this time we're comparing the relative sizes of a developing baby during its nine months of development in the womb. Here's a video:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkuEXH1pTCQ

Again, it's one thing to read about how teeny an embryo is only one month after the egg has been fertilized, and it's quite another to hold it in your hand. If you'd like to try it out yourself please go to howbigisthebaby.com . Both of these sites would make great teaching aids, but they're also just fun to play with. One thing to note - once you have the marker showing the baby or the planet in the position you like, you can quickly take the marker out of view and the object remains, useful if you want to see yourself with these planets and babies without having to hold the tag. And when you see something you like, you can click on the "Take a Picture" button and save a picture of yourself to your hard drive, or automatically share it with your friends on facebook.

Is taking a picture of yourself with a baby in front of your tummy a good way to let your family know you're expecting? Well, that's a personal decision. But having watched both kids and adults have a great time playing with these websites, I'm hoping that you will enjoy them as well.

If you'd like to know more about Talking Dog Studios and augmented reality, here's a link to our website.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

What's Around the Corner?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K_MgAfeZkk

Last time, in "A Hug From Another Dimension", we returned to Edwin Abbott's imaginary 2D creatures, the flatlanders, and the idea that a 3D person passing through the flatlander's plane would appear very strange indeed to the flatlander. It has been rightly pointed that in my original 11 minute animation I show the flatlander world not as they would see it, but as we would see it viewing from "above" their plane. While that perspective is boggling enough, the "lines all in the same plane" that a flatlander would really see is even more difficult for people new to these concepts to try to imagine.

Why do we talk about flatlanders? Because with this project we're talking about spatial dimensions: the ways that our 3D reality relates to the flatlander's 2D reality gives us some useful clues to the relationship between any spatial dimension and the next. Since the extra dimensions beyond spacetime that physicists talk about are all spatial dimensions (or "space-like" as some prefer to say), thinking about how the simplest spatial dimensions relate one to another gives us tools for imagining the more complex ones. The key to remember with all this is that each additional spatial dimension is at "right angles" to the one before: so each new dimension allows an observer to see "around the corner" in a way that was unattainable from the previous dimension. This time, let's work through the dimensions with that idea in mind.

0

We start with a point of indeterminate size. We can imagine this point to be any size we choose, and it can exist in any dimension. Let's say that's all you really are - a point. What will it be like for you to exist within each of the spatial dimensions?

1

You are a point on a one dimensional line. You can look in either direction on your line, but whatever's nearest to you obscures your ability to see anything beyond. If there were nothing else on your line to get in the way, you would be looking towards infinity in either direction.

What if you wanted to see what lies beyond any nearby objects on your line? You would need a way to move on your line. For you, "time" would be a direction in the second spatial dimension, and it would be what you use to change from state to state, from position to position, which would allow you to see "around the corner" to what lies beyond. Think about what the third dimension would be like for you on this one dimensional line - it would be omni-directional, all around you.

2

Now you're a point on a two-dimensional plane. You can look in four directions on your plane, and the new directions are at "right angles" to the previous ones. If there were nothing else on your plane, you would be looking towards infinity in four directions.

What if there were nearby objects that were obstructing your view and you wanted to see around them? You would need a way to move within your plane. For you, "time" would be a direction in the third spatial dimension, and it would be what you use to change from state to state, from position to position, which would allow you to see "around the corner" to what lies beyond. Think about what the fourth dimension would be like for you on this two dimensional plane - it would be omni-directional, all around you.

3

Now you're a point within a three-dimensional space. You can look in six directions from within your space, and the new directions are at "right angles" to the previous ones. If there were nothing else within your space, you would be looking towards infinity in six directions.

What if there were nearby objects that were obstructing your view? Since we're already living in a 3D world, this is the easiest for us to picture. If that object were a building, for instance, and you wanted to see what was on the other side of the building, you would need a way to move within your space. For you, "time" would be a direction in the fourth spatial dimension, and it would be what you use to change from state to state, from position to position, which would allow you to see "around the corner" to what lies beyond. Think about what the fifth dimension would be like for you within this three dimensional space - it would be omni-directional, all around you.

Up to now this has been fairly simple to visualize, because we're so familiar with these dimensions from our basic day-to-day experience. But this logic continues to work all the way up. Understanding what that means to us is an important key to understanding the connections between the quantum world, Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation, and the multiverse landscape.

4

Now you're a point within a four-dimensional "hyperspace". You can look in eight directions from within your hyperspace and the new directions are at "right angles" to the previous ones. If there were nothing else within your hyperspace, you would be looking towards infinity in eight directions.

What if there were nearby objects that were obstructing your view and you wanted to see around them? You would need a way to move within your hyperspace. For you, "time" would be a direction in the fifth spatial dimension, and it would be what you use to change from state to state, from position to position, which would allow you to see "around the corner" to what lies beyond. Think about what the sixth dimension would be like for you within this four dimensional hyperspace - it would be omni-directional, all around you.

If we think of the quantum wave function for our spacetime as existing within the fourth spatial dimension, we are in one of the "worlds" of Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation, and another phrase for what obstructs our view beyond our spacetime would be the cosmological horizon. For people who believe there is nothing more than the fourth dimension, it can be easy to assume that free will does not exist and that there is only one "world", one inevitable version of our universe which exists from its beginning to its end. If there's really nothing more beyond the fourth dimension then we are all like riders on a train, unable to change whatever we're about to observe. What if we wanted to get off that train track and see what lies beyond, see what other "parallel universe" versions of our universe are out there? The same logic continues to apply, so that's the fifth dimension. Because those other worlds are causally connected to our current one by the probabilities of the quantum wave function along with the choices that are made, let's call the fifth dimension our "probability space".

5

Now you're a point within a five-dimensional probability space. You can look in ten directions from within your probability space and the new directions are at "right angles" to the previous ones. If there were nothing else within your probability space, you would be looking towards infinity in ten directions.

What if there were nearby objects that were obstructing your view and you wanted to see around them? You would need a way to move within your probability space. For you, "time" would be a direction in the sixth spatial dimension, and it would be what you use to change from state to state, from position to position, which would allow you to see "around the corner" and see what lies beyond. Think about what the seventh dimension would be like for you within this five dimensional probability space - it would be omni-directional, all around you.

So what does "obstructing your view" mean when we're in a five dimensional probability space? Here's a couple of examples. Because the probabilistic outcomes for our universe's wave function of possible state are causally connected, no matter where we are in the fifth dimensional version of our universe there are going to be parallel universe versions which are "around the corner" and can't be seen from our current position. For instance, the version of our universe where it's 2010 and Elvis is still alive must exist within the set of all possible states, but no amount of choice or chance will allow us to see that version from here - it's just like our inability to see what lies on the other side of a building, we need to use the next dimension up to move to a different position if we want to be able to see that version of our universe. Also, quantum physicists talk about the wave function of our universe including the possibility of extremely unlikely events -- like one of us now disappearing here and reappearing on the moon. Why do we never see such events? Because they are like seeing the other side of a building: we need to move through the sixth dimension to be able to see that version of our universe, because those events lie outside of our cosmological horizon.

For we spacetime creatures our actual "now" is always really a point in the fifth dimension, being observed one planck frame at a time. This is why physicists suggest that the fifth dimension is "curled up at the planck length": not because the fifth dimension is small, but because the granular nature of spacetime only allows us to view the fifth dimension through our tiny little planck-length window. We look around us and see what feels like a solid, continuous reality, but physicists are now proving that this is an illusion. The fact that our spacetime reality is divided into planck-length "frames" is also part of the recent theories suggesting that our 4D universe is actually the shadow of a 5D hologram!

Now, as we move on to think about the sixth dimension we are thinking about the wave function for All Possible States for our particular universe. This wave function includes all the possible states for our universe, including those which are not causally connected to each other: the version of universe where it's 2010 and dinosaurs aren't extinct should have some possibility of existing, but that version is not connected to our own version of 2010. Because both chance and choice are participants in choosing what version of the universe we observe, this 6D space for our universe also would include versions of the universe that each of us would never choose to observe (like the one where I go crazy and kill my neighbors). And as we said, it also includes the states which we can't observe because the event is so unlikely it would take longer than the existence of the universe for the event to occur (like the version where one of us now disappears from here and reappears on the moon).

6

Now you're a point within a six-dimensional wave function space. You can look in twelve directions from within your wave function space and the new directions are at "right angles" to the previous ones. If there were nothing else within your wave function space, you would be looking towards infinity in twelve directions.

What if there were nearby objects that were obstructing your view and you wanted to see around them? You would need a way to move within your wave function space. For you, "time" would be a direction in the seventh spatial dimension, and it would be what you use to change from state to state, from position to position, which would allow you to see "around the corner" and see what lies beyond those nearby obstructions. Think about what the eighth dimension would be like for you within this sixth dimensional wave function space - it would be omni-directional, all around you.

What's outside of our wave function space? By the time we've imagined every possible state for our universe, no matter how unlikely some of those states might be, haven't we got everything covered? In other words, what's hidden from view within a point in the sixth dimension? Now we're starting to think about the multiverse landscape of other universes with different basic physical laws from our own. Up to now, no matter how we twisted and turned in the dimensions we were in, we were always confined to our universe, with its specific value for gravity, its specific planck length and speed of light. To look "around the corner" and see one of those other universes, we need to move through the seventh dimension.

7

Now you're a point within a seven-dimensional multi-universe space. You can now look in fourteen directions, and the new directions are at "right angles" to the previous ones. If there were nothing else within your multi-universe space, you would be looking towards infinity in fourteen directions.

What if there were nearby objects that were obstructing your view and you wanted to see around them? You would need a way to move within your space. For you, "time" would be a direction in the eighth spatial dimension, and it would be what you use to change from state to state, from position to position, which would allow you to see "around the corner" and see what lies beyond. Think about what the ninth dimension would be like for you within this seventh dimensional space - it would be omni-directional, all around you.

String theory suggests that our universe is embedded in a seventh-dimensional "brane". What if you moved to a different seventh dimensional brane to observe a completely different universe? Would that be the same as moving to a different 7D "point" within this way of visualizing the dimensions? That's what I'm suggesting. A different "point" might define a universe with a different strength for gravity, or a different speed of light. So once we defined any arbitrary second "point" there would be a line that passes through our point and this second one, but there would still be a huge number of other universes that would not be on the unique line we had just created. To get to those other universes not on our 7D "line" (a line that exists within a space defined by 7 pairs of directions all at right angles to each other!) would require us to travel through the 8th dimension. By the time we get to the 8th dimension, then, we are able to consider all possible universes that could have a physical expression, so what we're talking about by now is also sometimes called the "multiverse landscape".

8

Now you're a point within an eight-dimensional multiverse space. You can look in sixteen directions from within your multiverse space and the new directions are at "right angles" to the previous ones. If there were nothing else within your space, you would be looking towards infinity in sixteen directions.

What if there were nearby objects that were obstructing your view and you wanted to see around them? You would need a way to move within your space. For you, "time" would be a direction in the ninth spatial dimension, and it would be what you use to change from state to state, from position to position, which would allow you to see "around the corner" and see what lies beyond. Think about what the tenth dimension would be like for you within this eight dimensional space - it would be omni-directional, all around you.

Although Garrett Lisi's E8 rotation is not usually described as being a way to represent actual spatial dimensions, I think it's fascinating that his theory also suggests that interlocking 8 dimensional patterns would be able to describe any particle in our universe. What do we need to go beyond the 8th dimension for? Because there are still other ways of organizing the information that becomes reality that don't actually become physical realities (for more about the "Information Equals Reality" concept, look up digital physics).

That's why it's useful to think of the ninth dimension as being our information space.

9

Now you're a point within a nine-dimensional information space. You can look in eighteen directions from within your information space and the new directions are at "right angles" to the previous ones. If there were nothing else within your information space, you would be looking towards infinity in eighteen directions.

What if there were nearby objects that were obstructing your view and you wanted to see around them? You would need a way to move within your space. For you, "time" would be a direction in the tenth spatial dimension, and it would be what you use to change from state to state, from position to position, which would allow you to see "around the corner" and see what lies beyond. But because there are no actual physical objects within this nine-dimensional space, only information patterns, things are much more open-ended here, and in that sense the tenth dimension is also all around, and omni-directional to the ninth dimension.

In this way of visualizing the dimensions, we sometimes talk about the ninth dimension as being where the "big picture memes" reside: these would be the general organizing patterns that could result in a universe as specific as ours, or it could be an organizing pattern that expresses a preference towards one kind of order over another, or one kind of universe over another. Michael Shermer, well-known editor of Skeptic Magazine, has said that he is quite willing to accept this as a new way of thinking about what "God" could really be - an organizing pattern that chooses one kind of universe over another.

10

Now you're a point of indeterminate size in the tenth dimension, which some people call the Omniverse. As soon as you try to move, or observe any aspect of the Omniverse, you are spilled back into the dimensions below. In that sense, the tenth dimension is the infinity that all of our other directions were pointing towards, no matter what direction and no matter what dimension we were considering.

The tenth dimension as described in this way of visualizing the dimensions is "outside the system" in the sense that
Gödel used the phrase. It's the unobserved wave function of all possible information states, all patterns, all universes, and it's the enfolded symmetry state that exists both "before" and "after" our universe or any other, as physicist Sean Carroll likes to say. As Gevin Giorbran described it, it's also like a big, beautiful, perfectly balanced "zero" which is not empty, but full of all the other possible states. This means that our universe, like any others, is just a temporary deviation from that symmetry, and symmetry breaking is what makes any universe more interesting than this unobserved whole.


I hope you've enjoyed our tour of the ten dimensions, a logical presentation of ideas that I believe will one day be embraced by mainstream science. In the meantime, even though this is not what you would currently be taught in a university physics class, the five million unique visitors who've been to the tenth dimension website show me that a great many people see resonances and connections between this approach and their own understanding of how reality works, and for that I'm truly grateful.

Thanks and enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

PS - here's a classic clip from Carl Sagan showing us his introduction to the Edwin Abbott concept of 2D flatlanders.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9KT4M7kiSw

Next: Jumping Jesus



A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjR69ddBK78

A Hug from Another Dimension

A direct link to the above movie is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4BxtPuhdzk

I came across this lovely little cartoon created by Sarah Williams, who is working on her film degree in the U.K. and as part of her degree is creating an animation that explores ideas that seem very related to my own project. She is blogging about her explorations at http://sarahmaxinedegreefilm.wordpress.com/
and mentioned my 11 minute animation there, which is how I came across her work. I'm really looking forward to seeing what she comes up with. Let me quote her from her blog as she talks about the above clip:

My idea, which is shown primitively and simply here, is to suggest that there is more than there is.

"There is more than there is". I love that! Wouldn't that make a great t-shirt slogan? Particularly if it were three words on the front, three words on the back so people had to really stop and ponder this seemingly enigmatic phrase for a moment.

In Sarah's movie we are looking at two flatlanders, and then from out of nowhere we see four discs on each side of the characters appear - these, of course, would be the fingers of a three-dimensional creature passing their hands through the two-dimensional plane our flatlanders are living within. These shapes change to a hand and a thumb on either side, and then arms - and finally we realize that this is a "hug from another dimension" being pictured here.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tcsu0rwoeAQ

In The Big Bang is an Illusion, I returned to this important idea: forms and shapes of objects from higher dimensions are going to behave in ways that seem inexplicable to any observers from the dimensions below. As we've explored in blog entries like What Would a Flatlander Really See?, this becomes even more complicated when we realize that what's being shown in videos like the above one from Sarah Williams is still the flatlander world from a "top down" perspective, and that these 2D creatures observing from within the plane of the second dimension are only going to be able to see these 3D fingers, hands, and arms as lines that appear out of nowhere, grow, shrink, and pop out of existence again.

As I've remarked before, my original 11 minute animation shows the ideas from chapter one of my book, and the remainder of the book then explores what all this means from a variety of perspectives. Here's how I conclude chapter one:

Speaking poetically, the tenth dimension is like white noise, an endless field of all colors and vibrations blurred together, balanced and enfolded into a perfect symmetry. Because it encompasses all possible realities without delineation between those realities, it is like a void: a big beautiful zero that is full rather than empty. Where things do get interesting is when we cut cross-sections out of that formlessness to view some specific aspect: like our two-dimensional Flatlander viewing the feet of a human creature visiting from the dimension above as ten lines that become two, there is no way for anyone in a dimension less than ten to perceive all of the possibilities that the tenth dimension contains.

In any dimension lower than ten, all that can be viewed of reality is cross sections. But that is what makes our existence so interesting: not the infinite “white noise” of possibilities; but that out of all those possibilities that could be, we are in this very specific one, right here, and right now.

While we're talking in this blog entry more about the "mechanics" of what a flatlander would and wouldn't see, we also should be thinking about the metaphysical implications. Could there be higher-dimensional shapes and patterns that are affecting us all in ways that may seem just as mysterious as the "hug from another dimension" that Sarah Williams shows us here? The fact that Sarah is also interested in those ramifications is one of the reasons that I'm excited to see where her explorations lead.

Just a reminder, by the way, that my book is now available as a 6 hour long collection of mp3s. If you're interested in hearing rather than reading the book, this is what you've been waiting for! Go to tenthdimension.com/digital for more info.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDCbUsPZkg4


Here's some other blog entries that explore what those shapes and patterns from the other dimensions might be:
Are Pictures More Important in Science?
When's a Knot Not a Knot?
The Map and the Territory
What's South of the South Pole?
The Long Undulating Snake
Do Shamans See Other Dimensions?

Next: We'll continue this discussion of ways to imagine extra dimensional shapes and patterns with What's Around the Corner?

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Quantum Suicide

One of the very first questions that was asked at the tenth dimension forum back when it started over three years ago went something like this: "If all these different branching universes exist, what does that have to do with me? My life still sucks."

Coincidentally, a very successful project called "The Secret" about how our thoughts create our reality was launched within months of the launch of my website and book Imagining the Tenth Dimension. Last time, in Ringing in the Brain, and in previous entries like The Biocentric Universe and The Biocentric Universe Part 2, we've looked at just how far science is willing to take the idea that our observation is creating the reality we see around us.

While I have tried hard not to position my own project as being "use the power of the tenth dimension to find your way to happiness and riches" (because it's not really as simple as that), such ideas still do relate to what we're talking about here - if a "best possible you" (however you choose to define that phrase) already exists within the current probability space of Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation, then how do you get there? In Now vs. the Future, I talked about how phrases such as "attitude affects outcome", "healing starts from within", "eye of the tiger", and other positive visualization techniques make even more sense in the context of the Many Worlds Interpretation. I also talked about the experience many of us have had personally with elderly family members, and which many health care providers see on a regular basis: when people lose their interest in tomorrow and their will to carry on, death is on its way.

In the last few blog entries (including Beer and Miracles, Conscious Computers?, Seeing Time, Feeling Colors, Tasting Light, and The Fifth Dimension is Spooky), we've been dancing around the connection between the quantum wave function and consciousness, or what some people prefer to call "the soul". What carries on after we die, and what does that have to do with quantum mechanics? Here's a link to an interesting wikipedia article on "Quantum Suicide and Immortality".

In Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?, I quoted from cosmologist Max Tegmark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

The critique of many worlds is shifting from 'it makes no sense and I hate it' to simply 'I hate it'.

The wikipedia article we're talking about now relates to a thought experiment proposed by Max Tegmark (and a number of others according to wikipedia) which is sometimes referred to as "quantum suicide". It's basically just a re-telling of the Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment, but Tegmark makes it much more personal.

A person holds a gun to his head, which is hooked up to a quantum detector looking at a subatomic particle. The gun is designed to fire only when a certain spin is detected. The person pulls the trigger, and in half of the parallel universes resulting from the moment, the gun fires. But in many of the remaining universes, he pulls the trigger again. This process can be repeated indefinitely: each time with the person surviving in half of the remaining universes. This scenario then takes us to a realm similar to Zeno's Paradox - even though the number of universes where the gun doesn't fire are halved with each additional pull of the trigger, there should always be branching universes remaining where the gun doesn't go off, no matter how many times the trigger is pulled.

What I've been trying to get people to understand is that anyone who is alive right now and reading this blog is just as much an example of this same thought experiment - when you think about all the silly risks taken, all the near-miss accidents or malicious acts, all of the things that could have conspired to end anybody's life before now, you are thinking about Everett's Many Worlds. In a great many of those other parallel universes you are already dead, and in many more universes than that you never existed at all! The fact you are alive in the universe you're observing right now really is a statistical marvel, such an unlikely quantum outcome when you consider all the possible outcomes, that we should each be amazed at our continued existence every moment of every day.

What Tegmark would be horrified to hear, I'm sure, is that some on the internet are now saying that if you were in one of the universes from his thought experiment where you took the bullet and you died, your consciousness would leap into one of the parallel universes where the gun just clicked, hence the phrase "quantum immortality". While I'm quite willing to discuss the possibility of ghosts as manifestations of consciousness that exist past a person's death (see blog entries like Auras, Ghosts, and Pareidolia, Do You Believe in Ghosts, Happy Birthday Paul and Going to the Light), I think this quantum suicide concept can be easily misconstrued: the universes where you die and don't get to see the rest of your life are just as real as the ones where you beat the odds and get to continue on. If you die you die, and what happens to your consciousness after that is very different from what happens while you're in your physical body.


There's a blog entry I put up not long ago called Suffering in the Multiverse, it gets into this discussion in a very deep way. Some of my other blog entries about death, statistically unlikely events, and the multiverse include:
The Statistical Universe
Roger Ebert on Quantum Reincarnation
Unlikely Events and Timelessness
We're Already Dead (But That's Okay)
Randomness and the Missing 96 per cent
Elvis and the Electrons
Have Each of Us Already Died?
Gevin Giorbran: Everything is Forever

What it all comes down to is this - we are all lucky to be here, and whatever processes you care to imagine to have contributed to this "now" are worthy of your sense of wonder, and deserving of your praise. That's what song 26 of my 26 songs attached to this project is about: it's called "Thankful".



A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIfN1RM9X6I

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: A Hug From Another Dimension

Ringing in the Brain

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXwqokws42s

One of the ideas I discussed in my book is that ringing in the ears (tinnitus), doesn't actually come from the ears but from the brain. The image at the left, an artist's rendition of nerve cells in the brain according to its caption, comes from a BBC science news story published a few days ago which shows new medical studies confirming this idea to be what's really happening:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8287791.stm


The name of the article is "Technique Can Pinpoint Tinnitus". Here's a few paragraphs:

Tinnitus is a condition where sounds are heard in one or both ears when there is no external source.

While doctors had thought tinnitus was generated by ear problems, they now believe it is generated in the brain.

The team at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit used a special scanner to map the locations in the brain. They hope it will allow more targeted therapies to be developed.

The scan is called magnetoencephalography (MEG) and it measures the very small magnetic fields generated by intracellular electrical currents in the neuron cells in the brain.

The team at the Henry Ford Hospital have already tried using chips which generate electrical noise directly in the brain in two patients to try to interfere with the tinnitus signals.

Here's what I said in my book about tinnitus:

Here is a useful saying in discussions of life and consciousness: “that which ceases to change ceases to exist”. When the brain processes input from the auditory nerve, it tends to reject any continuous noises which do not change–like, for instance, the noise of the air molecules in the room banging into each other, or the sound of an air conditioner. In other words, for our consciousness, the noises (or smells, or continuous aches and pains, and so on) which cease to change, will cease to exist because the brain stops them from being considered for processing. When we listen back to a tape recording, we are surprised at how much background noise there is because we're hearing what’s really in the room, without the phase reversed noise cancellation the brain uses to remove those continuous noises. Now, when the internal mechanisms of the ear are damaged, usually through exposure to excessive sound levels, we end up with an imbalance, where the brain is correcting for frequencies that are no longer coming in. This manifests itself as tinnitus, or “ringing of the ears”. It turns out that the ringing we hear is not from the ears, but from the brain itself, as it attempts to cancel out particular frequencies that are no longer coming in from the auditory nerve.

This is an example of how the brain is processing a huge amount of data, while our conscious minds are completely unaware of the process. It is only when things are not functioning normally that we start to see evidence of what’s going on “behind the curtain”...

As I've said elsewhere, one of the criticisms of the Many Worlds Interpretation is that it's "too extravagant" to ask us to imagine that a new universe is created with each new action of chance or choice. Likewise, it may seem unreasonable to assume that the brain is processing data coming in from some of those other universes in ways that are not apparent to our conscious minds. Tinnitus is a great example of what happens when one of those complicated processes that are already occurring in the brain all the time goes slightly out of balance. How much more is happening "behind the curtain" that we have yet to discover? This idea has been explored elsewhere in my book, and in a number of other blog entries including Creativity and the Quantum Universe, Seeing Time, Feeling Colors, Tasting Light, Beer and Miracles, The Biocentric Universe Part 2 and You Have a Shape and a Trajectory.

The idea that our brains are doing much more than we realize to create the reality we see around us is also the point of my song From the Corner of My Eye. Here's a video of my friend Ron Scott singing that song:

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

Enjoy the journey!

Rob

PS - Just a reminder that we now have my book available as a 6-hour-long set of mp3s - an audio book of the revised and expanded third edition of the book. Interested? Go to tenthdimension.com/digital .

Next: Quantum Suicide

Tenth Dimension Audio Book

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDCbUsPZkg4

One of the requests that has come up quite often is people wanting an audio book version of Imagining the Tenth Dimension. A couple of months ago I released a revised and expanded version of the book that adds additional information to the end of each chapter, showing ways that some of the wacky ideas I proposed when I published my book in 2006 are now moving closer to the accepted mainstream of science and cosmology.

I'm pleased to announce that you can now go to www.tenthdimension.com/digital and download a set of mp3s featuring Catherine Haines reading the revised and expanded version of my book. This totals over six hours of listening time, and I'm hoping this will help even more people to discover why my book has continued to be so popular with readers from around the world.

Thanks for your support, everyone!

...and enjoy the journey.

Rob

Next: Another one of those wacky ideas I wrote about in 2006 which are now being confirmed by mainstream science: "Ringing in the Brain"

The FIfth Dimension is Spooky

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

Am I referring to this blog entry as "spooky" because it's now October and Hallowe'en is coming up? No. This blog entry is about what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance".

Last blog, in Seeing Time, Feeling Colors, Tasting Light, we touched upon the idea that Albert Einstein had problems with some of the implications of quantum mechanics, and specifically the idea that observing a particle "here" might be able to instantaneously affect the observation of another entangled particle far away, even on the other side of the universe. To show that he thought this sounded more like superstition than science, he called such implications "spooky".

On the same subject, in my book I talked about the entanglement experiments of physicist Nicolas Gisin and his team at the University of Geneva:

Entanglement is easily explained within the dimensional concepts we are now exploring. We can imagine that these atoms are still directly connected or somehow directly adjacent to each other in a higher spatial dimension, even though they may be, for example, 11 kilometres away from each other in the third dimension (as they were in the entanglement experiment conducted by Nicolas Gisin and his team at the University of Geneva in 1997). With entanglement, it seems possible that we are seeing direct evidence of actions in higher-dimensional geometry that show how time is just another spatial dimension rather than a separate concept. And from our new perspective, we have another way to show that Einstein’s concepts regarding “no faster-than-light motion” are not being violated.

In 46 - Is the Big Bang an Illusion?, and 47 - Are Pictures More Important in Science?, we returned to an idea from Stephen Hawking that there is an important part of our reality which is at "right angles" to our spacetime. While he used the term "imaginary time" to refer to this, I've tried to show that what he is really talking about is the fifth spatial dimension, and this fits into so many other ways that science is talking about where our reality comes from that I am continually amazed that I appear to be the only one talking about how this concept makes these ideas fit together. With entanglement, two particles can be widely separated, and observing one of those particles causes the other entangled particle to instantly be affected by the first observation. If those particles were ten light years away from each other, we are not talking about how that second particle would be affected ten years from now once the information from the first particle traveled to the second one - we are talking about that information transfer happening right "now" at both positions. What made people like Einstein skeptical about this implication is that it implied that a faster-than-light connection of some kind was occurring. What I want people to understand is that "faster than light" has no meaning once you are in the fifth dimension, because any fourth dimensional point can be connected to any other using the additional degree of freedom that the fifth dimension affords, with no violation of the limits of spacetime.

Nicholas Gisin and has team have continued to refine their experiments since I published my book. Here's a few paragraphs from a recent article in Science Now written by Phil Berardelli which talks about Nicholas Gisin's more recent work. The name of the article is "Quantum Physics Gets 'Spooky' ":

This might be a rare case about which Einstein was wrong. More than 60 years ago, the great physicist scoffed at the idea that anything could travel faster than light, even though quantum mechanics had suggested such a condition. Now four Swiss researchers have brought the possibility closer to reality. Testing a concept called "spooky action at a distance"--a phrase used by Einstein in criticizing the phenomenon--they have shown that two subatomic particles can communicate nearly instantaneously, even if they are separated by cosmic distances.

Physicist Nicolas Gisin and colleagues at the University of Geneva in Switzerland split off pairs of quantum-entangled photons and sent them from the university's campus through two fiber-optic cables to two Swiss villages located 18 kilometers apart. Thinking of the photons like traffic lights, each passed through specially designed detectors that determined what "color" they were when entering the cable and what color they appeared to be when they reached the terminus. The experiments revealed two things: First, the physical properties of the photons changed identically during their journey, just as predicted by quantum theory--when one turned "red," so did the other. Second, there was no detectable time difference between when those changes occurred in the photons, as though an imaginary traffic controller had signaled them both.

The result, the team reports in tomorrow's issue of Nature, is that whatever was affecting the photons seems to have happened nearly instantaneously and that according to their calculations, the phenomenon influencing the particles had to be traveling at least 10,000 times faster than light. Given Einstein's standard speed limit on light traveling within conventional spacetime, the experiments show that entanglement might be controlled by something existing beyond it. Gisin says that once the scientific community "accepts that nature has this ability, we should try to create models that explain it."

Okay, that's heady stuff. But there are some additional sentences in this article that I'd like to take one at a time because they're very important.

Although the research doesn't demonstrate spooky action at a distance directly, it does provide "a lower boundary for the speed" necessary for the phenomenon, says theoretical physicist Martin Bojowald of Pennsylvania State University in State College.

In other words, even though the Nicholas Gisin team's experiment only showed that the connection was at least 10,000 times the speed of light, the limitations of their experiment could not prove that the connection was instantaneous. I feel certain that no matter how this experiment is improved in the future, we are always going to see indications that these connections really are instantaneous, and in fact that it's harder for us to imagine how such effects could be occurring at all if they're not the result of a higher dimensional "folding" of spacetime as per the kinds of concepts we're always talking about with Imagining the Tenth Dimension.

Cosmologist Sean Carroll of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena says that it's "yet another experiment that tells us quantum mechanics is right" and that there "really is an intrinsic connection between entangled particles, not that some signal passes quickly between them when an observation is performed."

I've quoted Dr. Carroll a number of times in blogs like Time in Either Direction, Scrambled Eggs, The Spacetime Tree, Unlikely Events and Timelessness, and What's Before and After?. It seems that the more I read about his viewpoints, the more I would love to sit down and have a coffee with him some time, as there seem to be so many connections between the intuitive leaps I have made with my project and the science that Dr. Carroll is pursuing.

And physicist Lorenza Viola of Dartmouth College says there's much more to be determined. "I am sure we are not finished unveiling what the quantum [effects] due to entanglement really are and how powerful they can be."

(EDIT: as a lovely coincidence, Sean Carroll posted a new blog entry a couple of weeks after I posted this entry, his entry is called Spooky Signals From the Future Telling Us to Cancel the LHC.)

For me, this concept relates to the powerful idea of how right "now" we are each navigating through a fifth-dimensional probability space, one planck length at a time, and that Einstein's "spooky" entanglement shows us that each succeeding "now" is actually a point in the fifth dimension rather than the fourth. This makes sense whether you're thinking about the wave function of possible universes as per Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation, or how the fifth dimension and above from our perspective appear to be "curled up at the planck length" even though they're really not, or the idea that our universe is created holographically at the fifth dimension by interference patterns created by this planck length granularity of spacetime. Understanding how much everything within our "now" is connected to things that are outside of our spacetime is the key, and the fact that ancient spirituality and modern science are pointing at the same concept doesn't mean one is right and the other is wrong.

Everything fits together in probability space. Think about that one for a moment, and enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

PS, Here's some other blogs where we've talked about Einstein's "spooky" feelings about quantum mechanics:
The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic
Wormholes as Dimensional Foldings?
The Long Undulating Snake
Norway's Reverse Deja Vu

Next: Tenth Dimension Audio Book