Common Criticisms Part 5

A direct link to the above video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmQqDJwnmAw

This is a discussion of ten proposed reasons for why critics of Imagining the Tenth Dimension are saying people shouldn't watch my videos. See part 1 here. See part 2 here. See part 3 here. See part 4 here.


Reason #5: Because "there is no 'fourth' dimension".

That, of course, is the title of a minutephysics video, which I'm providing a link to here. My response to that video (in which he states that it's wrong to talk about THE fourth dimension as if it's a separate entity from any of the other dimensions) is that it's amusing for a few reasons. One, of course, is that most schools of thought do indeed treat "time" as the fourth dimension, and they certainly do say that its "temporal" quality makes it unique and different from the other dimensions. Two, minutephysics' point becomes clearer in the video when he says "as a matter of fact there is no third dimension either". But the funny part is in either case he'd be agreeing with me, in that I also ask people not to get hung up on what label you put on each additional spatial dimension, as long as you are visualizing a way in which the new dimension encompasses the previous ones and is orthogonal to the previous ones, as that is a basic concept behind spatial dimensions. "Spatial" is the important word here, because theorists do indeed say that the extra dimensions are spatial, or at very least "space-like".
And finally, even if you're going to argue that it's incorrect to add labels of any kind to each specific dimension, it's very odd to say "we just can't tell these dimensions apart" (again quoting Henry). If you are comparing the 2D world of the creatures from the book both Henry and I recommend, Edwin Abbott's Flatland, with a 3D world, there is definitely some new quality that gets added with each new spatial dimension, something that was inaccessible from the realm of the previous one. So whether you call the additional degree of freedom added by the fourth dimension ana/kata, duration, time/anti-time, or some other words you want to make up you are still acknowledging that there was something you couldn't get to until you added this new spatial dimension.

Common Criticisms Part 4

A direct link to the above video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7_2dApY6_I

This is a discussion of ten proposed reasons for why Henry of the popular YouTube channel minutephysics and his supporters are saying people shouldn't watch my videos. See part 1 here. See part 2 here. See part 3 here.


Reason #4: Because this is all pseudoscience.
"Pseudoscience" is an easy label to paste on anything with which one disagrees. There are physicists who have become celebrities and published popular books based upon their rejection of string theory and its extra dimensions. Lee Smolin says that theorists not interested in this field can find themselves unable to receive funding for their research into alternative theories. And Peter Woit says that this is not even science because it makes no falsifiable predictions. So even though I've made it clear that what I'm showing is only a creative visualization of ten spatial dimensions and not a scientific theory, what I'm trying to help you visualize is a concept that some physicists will tell you is nonsense even before they work through my ideas. Likewise, my willingness to explore the existence of free will automatically make me wrong in the eyes of those who have been taught to believe we're all helpless automatons acting out predetermined chains of events set in motion from the beginning of the universe. And have I ever tried to hide the fact that I believe there is evidence for consciousness as a process that can have connections "outside" of our narrow space-time window? Of course not, and anyone who has read my book or watched any number of the over 400 videos I've posted so far to YouTube will know that. And while these all may not be mainstream ideas, there are certainly scientists out there doing research into these same questions. Do all scientists agree on all ideas? Of course not. But exploring new ideas is what science is all about.

The above video, which is just under two minutes long, mentions the following articles:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/09/19/free-will-and-quantum-clones-how-your-choices-today-affect-the-universe-at-its-origin/
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2012/10/22/evidence-of-premonitions-hinted-at-in-new-study/ http://www.frontiersin.org/Perception_Science/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00390/abstract
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=psychedelic-healing

Common Criticisms part 3

A direct link to the above video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggHqZwHbmc8

This is a discussion of ten proposed reasons for why Henry of the popular YouTube channel minutephysics and his supporters are saying people shouldn't watch my videos. See part 1 here. See part 2 here.


Reason #3: Because Rob Bryanton is only making videos to get rich and sell his book.

Imagining the Tenth Dimension has always been about the discussion of a set of ideas that I first became fascinated with over 30 years ago. But these videos are at best my hobby. Is it a bad thing that I make any money at all from something I'm passionate about? Some of minutephysic's supporters say yes, that's a bad thing.
To make it perfectly clear that I'm not doing this to get rich, in July 2009 I posted a non-copy-protected pdf of my book to bit torrent, and that book continues to be shared on numerous torrent sites in distribution numbers that I find hard to fathom. But since my goal has always been just to get people talking about these ideas, I'm thrilled to see people all over the world downloading and reading my book.

Meanwhile... since minutephysics, as he now rapidly approaches 100 million views on his year-and-a-half-old channel is obviously making substantial money from his click-through ads, his sponsors, his t-shirt sales, and whatever other merchandising plans he has in the works, I'm sure he's a very happy camper. So do I think it's a bad thing that Henry is making stacks of cash from his videos? Of course not, I'm a fan and I've told him so. And what's wrong with people making some money from a project that they care about?

Common Criticisms part 2

A direct link to the above video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nlSZ8NOnEg

See part 1 here. This is a discussion of ten proposed reasons for why Henry of the popular YouTube channel minutephysics and his supporters are saying people shouldn't watch my videos.

Reason #2: Because it's dangerous.
In his video Common Physics Misconceptions Henry asks this question about simplified ideas that are often taught as a way of introducing more complex concepts to students: "is that an excuse to mislead our children about the true nature of things? No." And yet teachers the world over have always used this technique. Why? Because this is how knowledge is conveyed. You start with something simple and basic, then once those concepts are understood you build idea upon idea until you arrive at university-level classes and beyond. In many cases, teaching university-level concepts to young children is simply not a viable option.
Since my original video was published online in June 2006, and first appeared on YouTube in January 2007, there are people who first watched my original video a number of years ago who are now entering university. Almost every day I get messages from people saying things like this: "Thank you Rob Bryanton for opening my eyes to the wonders of the universe. You are the reason I am now pursuing a degree in one of the sciences."
Did I somehow destroy these people's minds, make them unable to learn? Or did I wake them up and get them interested in the concepts that minutephysics talks about regularly in his videos (most of which I find to be excellent).
"But Rob", one might ask. "Surely these students would have eventually stumbled across some other video, or book, or teacher who awakened their sense of wonder?"
Of course! That's life. But that's not an argument for removing something that has already inspired millions of fans from around the world to want to learn more.

Here are the some of the ideas that are NOT wrong which my visualization can help you remember:

- a "wormhole" is a hypothetical construct which can be visualized as a "folding" of spacetime
- some theorists say the fifth dimension and above are compatified, or "curled up at the planck length"
- Kaluza showed how general relativity and Maxwell's equations could be resolved at the 5th dimension
- A phase space is defined as "a space in which all possible states of a system are represented, with each possible state of the system corresponding to one unique point in the phase space."
- M-theory says that our reality comes from ten spatial dimensions plus time. This visualization arrives at a "timeless" tenth dimension, and does this by saying that time is not a dimension, it's a direction, or a way of describing change from state to state within the phase space of any of these spatial dimensions
- Michio Kaku says that antimatter can be described as "matter which is moving backwards in time", and while there are other ways of describing antimatter this approach is accepted as being equivalent
- this visualization shows how our observed reality is created from timeless "frames" of 3D space, and we're "locked in" at the seventh dimension. Some string theorists have said our universe is embedded in a D3 and a D7 "brane", or membrane.

Common Criticisms part 1

A direct link to the above video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gj_Zgdr9R_8

Henry of the popular youtube channel minutephysics has recently been making comments trying to get people to stop watching my channel, and since then we've seen hundreds of negative comments suddenly being posted by his followers on my videos. Since there are a great many other YouTube channels devoted to discussion of the ways that physics and philosophy, science and spirituality might have interesting connections, it leads me to ask one simple question: why?

This is the start of a series where we will look at ten reasons that have been posted recently by Henry and his followers on my YouTube Channel:

Reason #1: Because it's wrong.
Since I've always said this is "a new way of thinking about time and space", and that "this is not the explanation for string theory", this is the easiest claim for minutephysics to make. He doesn't agree with this new way of thinking, and as the self-declared spokesman for the world of physics he feels justified in saying my ideas are not worth discussing. But what does it mean to say something put forth not as a scientific theory, but as a creative way to visualize the ten spatial or space-like dimensions theorists have told us our reality is derived from, is "wrong"? If I show you an image of a bowling ball on a rubber sheet and say "this is a way of thinking about gravity", would your response be there are no bowling balls and rubber sheets in space, so that visualization is worthless? Sometimes a picture conveys an idea quite well without requiring people to understand the calculations that make the idea correct. And if I draw you some pictures that give you a way of visualizing ten spatial dimensions, each one orthogonal to the next, then I've introduced you to an idea you might want to learn more about. Isn't that a good thing?

Next: Reason #2: Because it's dangerous.

The World Ends in Two Weeks

The world ends in two weeks - in some part of Everett's Many Worlds multiverse. But will it be the part that you and I are observing? That's what my song The End of the World is all about. Enjoy!



A direct link to the above video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2Y9m34iJVY

Poll 94 - Shadows and Symmetry

Poll 94 - "Rob Bryanton says 'the brighter the light, the darker the shadow. Our universe arises from a breaking of an underlying symmetry." Do you agree with him?"  Poll ended June 25 2012.  81.3% agreed, and 18.7% did not.

Well, well, it would be interesting to run this poll again now and see if people are changing their opinion on this one yet. Here's a link to a Scientific American article published a few days ago, with the title Supersymmetry Fails Test, Forcing Physics to Seek New Ideas. It discusses the latest revelations from the Large Hadron Collider, which appear to rule out an idea which was has dominated science for decades, because particles predicted by Supersymmetry are simply not appearing at energy levels predicted by "SUSY" (as Supersymmetry is affectionately known).

Here are a few paragraphs from the article:

Supersymmetry has dominated the particle physics landscape for decades, to the exclusion of all but a few alternative theories of physics beyond the Standard Model.

“It's hard to overstate just how much particle physicists of the past 20 to 30 years have invested in SUSY as a hypothesis, so the failure of the idea is going to have major implications for the field,” said Peter Woit, a particle theorist and mathematician at Columbia University.

The theory is alluring for three primary reasons: It predicts the existence of particles that could constitute "dark matter", an invisible substance that permeates the outskirts of galaxies. It unifies three of the fundamental forces at high energies. And — by far the biggest motivation for studying supersymmetry — it solves a conundrum in physics known as the hierarchy problem.

Please follow the link to read the whole article, which was written by Natalie Wolchover and Simons Science News.

Where does this leave my poll question? The fact remains that science believes equal quantities of matter and antimatter should have been created at the beginning of the universe, and supersymmetry was just one possible explanation for the actual imbalance that we observe. Does this strengthen the argument for extra dimensions? Is, as I've suggested with this project, the underlying symmetry state not a function of space-time, but rather a function of an underlying ultimate ensemble which is very much "outside" of space-time? That is what I continue to propose.

So. Even with Supersymmetry now falling off the table for likely theories of reality (and make no mistake about it, this is big news!), the symmetry state that I'm describing doesn't require supersymmetry, but it does require extra dimensions. As science marches on to deeper and deeper understanding of the world around us,  those extra dimensions appear more inviting than ever as the real explanation for the mysteries that remain.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton