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"
"A kind of scientific expressionism and creative exploration of curiosity, Imagining the Tenth Dimension might not rewrite the theories of Stephen Hawking, but it is certain to give you pause."
- Maria Popova, Brain Pickings
Brain Pickings (www.brainpickings.org) has just posted a nice review of my book, here's a link to the article:
Brain Pickings is a human-powered discovery engine for interestingness, culling and curating cross-disciplinary curiosity-quenchers, and separating the signal from the noise to bring you things you didn’t know you were interested in until you are.
Poll 86 - "The third dimension is space without time. This means it's actually impossible for us to see the third dimension by itself, because even with our hand in front of our face it takes a certain amount of "time" for the light to travel to our eye." Poll ended October 6, 2011. 80.9% agreed, while 19.1% disagreed.
This was an idea discussed in Imagining the Third Dimension, and I'll end today's blog with the video for that entry for those of you who haven't watched it yet. This speaks to how easy it is for us to forget that "time" is part of what we're looking at every moment, so seeing space by itself is really impossible - the space we're looking at has to have a duration or it's not possible for us to see it.
With the way this poll question is phrased, it seems to me that it should be an open-and-shut case, but nearly one out of every five persons answering this poll question don't agree. Is it possible to ask this question any more simply? If the third dimension is space without time, and the fourth dimension is space with time, how can we talk about the third dimension by itself? In other words, how can we view anything in the third dimension without taking a certain amount of "time" to do so?
Sure, we can have abstract discussions about 2D objects that have length and width but no depth, but there still have been many hours of debate over whether it would be possible for anyone to see something that has no depth, to the point where some people say this means the second dimension can't exist. By the same token we can talk about 3D objects that have length width and depth while we ignore the fourth dimension. But if a 3D cube had no duration, shouldn't exactly the same question come into play?
A way out of this conundrum would be to suggest that we're assuming that an abstract object like a 3D cube has infinite duration: like the original description of a meme as defined by Dawkins, the cube would then be an information pattern which can be transmitted across time and space, from one mind to another, instantaneously. Does that mean that it would be safe to assume that a 2D object has infinite duration in the third dimension, and that's how we would be able to see and talk about such an object? If we're talking about abstract forms similar to a plane or a cube, that reasoning follows.
But what about 3D objects like a human being, or a planet? Clearly, they don't have infinite duration, they have a point where they start to exist, and another point where their existence ceases. This, then, is where we can get into difficulties of language. If I say "this is a cube", am I referring to an abstract concept, or am I referring to a physical object like a child's building block? "This is a cube" could apply to either, but the two have very different expressions within the dimensional constructs that we're exploring here.
This confusion continues as we add dimensions: a tesseract is a four-dimensional hypercube. If I say "this is a tesseract", what am I referring to? A concept? Or something that really exists as an object which has a specific duration within the fifth dimension? Therein can lie some of the pitfalls of language - we need to make it clear which interpretation we're using, or these discussions can sometimes seem contradictory.
So remember - the next time someone tells you the second dimension can't exist because something with no depth is impossible, tell them the third dimension has the same problem. If you're talking about something that has length, width and depth, but no duration in the fourth dimension, then that would be impossible for us to see. And clearly, what you and I are a looking at right now with our eyes and their "3D" atoms and molecules, is something larger than the third dimension.
Poll 85: "Do you agree with this idea from the June '11 issue of Scientific American? The division between the quantum and classical worlds appears not to be fundamental...few physicists now think that classical physics will ever really make a comeback at any scale." Poll ended September 8, 2011. 71.2 % agreed, while 28.8% did not.
This has been an interesting metamorphosis: in 2006, when my book was published, a number of people criticized it for being so cavalier with taking the concepts of quantum mechanics and applying them to our "warm and wet" macro/classical world. What does Feynman's sum over histories have to do with the choices you and I make? How do the instantaneous connections of quantum entanglement relate to consciousness and life? These questions do not seem quite as far "out there" now as they did back then, and the burgeoning field of quantum biology is a great example of the kind of paradigm shift we're talking about here.
For more discussion about these ideas, here's a link to Poll 60, which back in March 2010 asked whether people accepted that the so-called "dividing line" between the quantum and macro world is a completely artificial construct. The results were similar: a very large majority agreed with this idea back then as well. I would also refer you to an entry from a couple of months ago called "We are All Quanta", in which I said this:
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.
Ultimately, we are all quanta. We are created by constructive interference, so saying that we're wavicles also works, but each of us is a unique pattern, and a subset of something larger.
Is Imagining the Tenth Dimension a Theory of Everything, a TOE? At best it points the way to where a theory might lie, which is why I prefer to call it a "new way of thinking". But if classical physics is really destined to never "make a comeback", then it seems apparent that any self-respecting TOE has to acknowledge the underlying quantum nature of our reality, end of story.
Poll 84: "Physicists Leonard Susskind and Raphael Bousso say in their new paper that the multiverse and the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics are formally equivalent. Do you agree with them?" Poll ended August 11, 2011. 87.1% agreed, while the remainder disagreed.
I've used this quote from Raphael Bousso before, this comes from an article published in the October 2008 edition of Seed magazine: "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. This has been called the 'worst prediction in the history of science' and the 'mother of all physics problems'.”
And in entries like Holograms and Quanta and The Holographic Universe, I've talked about related theories by Leonard Susskind. To see these two leading-edge cosmologists put their heads together to come up with a proof that ties directly to the contentions of my project was a great thrill for me in 2011.
Are we a shadow of the fifth dimension, an extra-dimensional version of Plato's Cave? That is the conclusion I believe we can draw from these Holographic Universe theories. And as we saw in my video Imagining the Fifth Dimension, if Everett believed that the different parallel universe outcomes for our universe reside in a subspace which is orthogonal to space-time, isn't that also another way of describing how our reality comes from the fifth dimension? This is still a controversial idea from my project, but I believe Bousso and Susskind are pushing us closer towards reaching that understanding, and I'm happy to see how many visitors to this blog accepted the basic thesis of their paper.
The Scientific American blog entry describing my project so favorably was also a great thrill for me in 2011. As we now begin the fabled year of 2012, I can't wait to see what happens next. Enjoy the journey!
After receiving a number of requests to do so, I've gone back to the style of my original animation and am now releasing a series of videos which explain my approach to visualizing each dimension in more detail. The first in the series is Imagining the Second Dimension, and these videos will work all the way up to the ninth dimension over the next couple of months.
Just for fun, I released a series of videos for songs from my 1983 album Rob Bryanton - Alcohol and Other Drugs. This album, a collection of pop/rock songs featuring my good friends Jack Semple on guitar/bass and Cal Harle on drums, was quite innovative for its time: songs from the album received radio playlist airplay, but the album was recorded on four-track cassette. Check it out, I'm still very proud of this album.
As we saw in The 5th Dimensional Camera Project, a team of scientists at Oxford were introduced to my way of visualizing the extra dimensions by Anab Jain and Jon Ardern, and one of those scientists participated in a video explaining the fifth dimension as our "probability space", a concept I promote with this project.
My company Talking Dog Studios continued to develop expertise in Augmented Reality, and created a set of kiosks which are on permanent display at the Mall of America, in an installation called Create Your Mayo Clinic Health Experience. Meanwhile, our Augmented Reality game ScavengAR Hunt, which can be played on iPhones and Android Phones, is continuing to develop a worldwide audience, and other smart phone demonstrations like our Halloween AR have also been popular.
O is for Omniverse, my followup book created in collaboration with visual artist Marilyn E. Robertson continues to be available at Omniverse.tv, and other Imagining the Tenth Dimension books, t-shirts, and DVDs are available at www.tenthdimension.com/store. Meanwhile, at www.tenthdimension.com/digital, various files are available for download, including high quality versions of the original animation, books in non-copy-protected pdf format, mp3s of various songs, and the audiobook version of Imagining the Tenth Dimension. The first two sections of the audiobook (the Preamble and the Introduction) are also posted on YouTube.
As we see up at the top here, I've been posting monthly reports with "top ten blogs of the month" and the latest top 26 blogs of all time for almost four years now, and at the end of 2008,2009, and again at the end of 2010 I published a Top 100 Tenth Dimension list. I'd like to continue that tradition this year, so the list below is in the same format as the last two years, showing the month the blog entry originates from. Also, just for interest's sake, I've put a number at the end of each line indicating the position that blog entry held in our 2010 report. Thank you tenth dimension fans for your support!
To everyone out there, I send you my best wishes and fond regards for the upcoming year. I particularly want to thank the continuing stream of people who write to me every day thanking me for changing the way they think about reality: I am grateful for your kind words of encouragement. Enjoy the journey in 2012!
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