Selfish Genes and Selfish Memes

Quantum physics tells us everything is information. Memes and genes are both patterns in a specific fourth dimensional line that stretches from the beginning point (which in our universe's biggest picture of all is the big bang) to the ending point (which in our biggest picture of all is absolute zero and timelessness). Those memes and genes, in the indeterminate future/past of quantum mechanics, fan out into the fifth dimension, which is where Kaluza proposed and Einstein eventually agreed that our physical reality exists.

In smaller sections, selfish genes through the ages are really just a fourth (or fifth) dimensional pattern, and the rise and fall of species attached to those genes through the ages is just as easy to imagine as is it is to imagine the rise and fall of ideas: either can be visualized as shapes that have a beginning and an ending, once you have gotten used to the Tenth Dimension way of imagining reality. This is an important idea which I have referred to before: everything has a beginning and ending, and that's just as true whether you're talking about dinosaurs, the Macarena, or what we think of as the spirit or the soul.

That's also true whether you're talking about things that can be considered evil: which takes us to the idea that there is a global awakening from a bad dream that is beginning to happen right now. No question, that's a very political idea... but it is also a hopeful idea. This awakening is going to represent a big change from the power structures that we have suffered under for the last century or two. George Harrison got it right, All This Must Pass before we can get on to better times.

Web 2.0 has an awful lot to do with that, something that mainstream media is having trouble assimilating. How does the first guy in line for the iPhone end up being one of the most talked about celebrities in the world? Celebrity for the sake of celebrity gives ambitious people like Mr. Packer the fifteen minutes of fame promised to him by Andy Warhol. But this is not just about the new generation's media. What do the currently rising popularity of people like Deepak Chopra and Paul McCartney have in common? Their work speaks to the underlying truths that define our reality.

Imagining the Tenth Dimension is also part of that picture - it has done more than just capture the attention of an audience of almost two million. By showing people who were previously without hope that indeterminacy and the multiverse tell us that there are other versions of our lives where we do better than we are doing right now, it gives us an easier target to strive towards. And that's especially true for people who are trapped in repeating loops of addiction or negative behavior. Unfortunately it's much less true for the starving child in Africa, but that could be changing soon as well.

Last blog we looked at the question What Do You Want to Change? Realizing how everything fits together is an important part of that idea, and that's true whether we're talking about memes, spimes, or our shared consensual reality. Next blog, we'll talk about the Wii Generation and how that has the potential to tie into the new awakening.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

What do you want to change?

Last blog ended with the big question: what do you want to change?

One of the big ideas Imagining the Tenth Dimension has been pushing is memes. This term, introduced to us by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, refers to ideas and beliefs that propogate themselves across time and space in much the same way that our genes have done so since the beginning of life on this planet. I have been arguing that memes (rhymes with "teams") are more than just an intellectual concept. If, as Anton Zeilinger, professor of physics at the University of Vienna has been quoted to say, "quantum physics requires us to abandon the distinction between information and reality", then memes are just another way of looking at the information that creates the multiverse from which our universe is a slice.

As the social networking world of Web 2.0 starts to become more and more integrated and cross-connected, we are finding ways to instantaneously track the rising and falling of memes which shape our world. This is a paradigm shift which seems completely natural to the under twenty-fives of the western world, who have spent all of their lives with computers in their homes, and were part of BBS communities long before the internet rose to prominence. This generation are comfortable with a feeling of inter-connectedness through Web 2.0 which the baby boomers (of which I am one) can only begin to dream. How much longer will it take before this connection to people of similar interests around the world finally corrects the free-fall in under-30 voter turnout we have been seeing for the last thirty years? That change is already beginning.

All around the world, people who felt powerless are starting to realize that they have more control of their futures than the highly-concentrated power structures of the twentieth century had taught them to believe. As people wake up, the clamor for the latest football to the groin video on YouTube is gradually being joined by a connected world with serious concerns about the future of this planet. As these memes start to become more dominant, we can see how they are like any other waveform in the information that creates our reality - resonance and entrainment starts to kick in, and tipping points that change our consensual reality become more and more possible.

In the physical world, books like Steven Strogatz's "Sync : the Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order" have shown us how vibrational patterns can be transmitted across rooms, causing pendulum clocks to fall in synchronization with each other, or across fields and valleys, causing huge swarms of fireflies to blink off and on in unison. New developments such as WiTricity are showing how resonance can be used to induce an electric impulse without wires, giving us hope for electronic devices that will some day charge themselves.

In the world of ideas spreading across the internet, new initiatives are springing up daily. Sites like edge.org have done much to bring new intellectual explorations to the forefront, including books like "What We Believe but Cannot Prove". John Ondrasik (of Five for Fighting fame) has created a site called "What Kind of World Do You Want" which encourages people to post videos about their hopes and dreams, and promises to donate money to one of six charities as people watch these videos. Microsoft is promoting their "I'm Making a Difference" campaign, which donates money every time people registered with the program use Windows Messenger. The Fire the Grid project goes even further, inviting people around the world to meditate on peace and healing for the planet at a certain time on July 17th... could the initiative which moves our world into a new phase really be that close?

Let's ask ourselves this: what stands in the way of us as a planet reaching a tipping point, a chaos-theory-style bifurcation, where enough people can desire a specific change that our consensual reality is affected through resonance and entrainment? Projects like Julius Popp's Bit.Fall (which tracks common words from the internet and puts them into visually stunning computer controlled waterfalls), We Feel Fine (which track the emotional words that bloggers use associated with the word "feel" and creates fascinating real time animations of how, where and when these words are being used) are pointing the way to the future of cloud tagging. Newly popular YouTube videos from younger contributors, like "Stand Up For World Peace" are showing how simple ideas can be imaginatively presented (Norman McLaren style in this case) and create a huge amount of conversation and response in the Web 2.0 world. And the video "Prometeus - The Media Revolution" gives us a plausible scenario for how things could develop over the next few decades.

I believe that Imagining the Tenth Dimension has the potential to be part of that change. Almost two million people have visited the tenth dimension website and seen my new way of imagining reality, plus the hundreds of thousands more who have seen copies of the video at revver, youtube, and so on. I have been hearing from people all over the world who are excited about its implications. A few video bloggers (like this one and this one) have posted their thoughts on YouTube. A tenth dimension fan from Greece has translated the voiceover into Greek subtitles and posted the result at Google Video. The book has been sold in dozens of countries around the world, and discussions are now beginning for translation of the book into other languages. As we approach the first anniversary of the launch of the tenth dimension website, the tenth dimension meme shows no sign of slowing down, and for that I am very grateful.

Enjoying the journey,

Rob

PS - here, just for fun, are some more videos of some of the songs from the tenth dimension project.

Conspiracies and quantum mechanics

Last blog I mentioned "Quantum Enigma", a book by two physics professors from the University of California at Santa Cruz, Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, which takes a serious look at the role of consciousness in quantum physics. Here are a couple of interesting quotes from the website dedicated to their book:

"Quantum mechanics is the most battle-tested theory in all of science. Moreover, one third of our economy depends on things designed with it. Fine! But it also tells us that by your conscious choice you can bring about either of two contradictory situations. This is so far demonstrated only with small things, but it is today being shown true for larger and larger objects. And it is generally accepted by physicists that quantum mechanics applies to everything."

"For the most part, in our teaching of quantum mechanics we tacitly deny the mysteries physics has encountered. We hardly mention Niels Bohr's grappling with the encounter between physics and the observer and John von Neumann's demonstration that the encounter is, in principle, inevitable. We largely avoid the still-unresolved issues raised by Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Eugene Wigner, David Bohm, and John Bell. Outside the classroom, physicists increasingly address these issues and often go beyond the purely physical. Consciousness, for example, comes up explicitly in almost all of today's proliferating interpretations of quantum mechanics, if only to show why physics need not deal with it. The many worlds interpretation, for example, is also referred to as the many minds interpretation, and a major treatment of decoherence concludes that an ultimate understanding of the implications of quantum mechanics would involve a model of consciousness."

Now I'm not for a moment suggesting here that Rosenblum and Kuttner subscribe to my visual way of imagining the dimensions, but there are many direct parallels between what they are describing above and the conclusions I reach in my book.

Anton Zeilinger, professor of physics at the University of Vienna has been quoted to say "quantum physics requires us to abandon the distinction between information and reality". If what we are navigating through right now is a sea of information across the dimensions, observing one slice out of all the possible slices as we travel down our limited line in the fourth dimension, then the patterns we are observing have as much to do with our role as quantum observers as they do with the sequence of events that got us to today.

So, if there is a multiverse of universes out there, and apparently infinite branching timelines within each of those universes, then there should always be a sequence of events that we could track from the beginning of the universe to now that tells us why "this is the way things are" as opposed to "this is the way things aren't". I'm only being somewhat frivolous in my book (and in my song "The Anthropic Viewpoint") when I say that we are living in the Hydrogen Conspiracy: what hidden agendas and preferences for one reality over another caused hydrogen to be the most popular atom in our universe?

Which is not to say that conspiracies are bogus, but rather that if quantum physics requires us to abandon the distinction between information and reality, then there will always be two ways of looking at how we got to our current situation, only one of which requires us to believe in conspiracies. Personally, I'm inclined to agree completely that our consensual reality in the last hundred years has been manipulated by the powerful to make themselves even more powerful. I also believe that we are nearing the end of that time - as we and web 2.0 wake up, it's going to become increasingly difficult for games that got our world to the precipitously bad situation it is currently in to be played any longer.

In my song Everything Fits Together, there is a chant section that sums this idea up:

There’s a reason why, there’s a reason why
There’s a reason why you feel the way you do
There’s a reason why you do the deeds you do
There’s a reason why you feel the needs you do
There’s a reason why, there’s a reason why

Which is not to say that we are helpless, but rather that the knowledge of how we got to where we are right now can help us to understand what is our own fault and what is the result of other forces acting upon us. The question then becomes: what do you want to change? As Joe Jackson so eloquently put it, "You Can't Get What You Want Till You Know What You Want". I would say those are wise words indeed.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=du86lNCvOdA



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfe_3bEH-jE



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcdjX72VcKI





A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nAS2trDuck

Quantum Theory and the Multiverse

One of the things that has made my eleven minute animation so popular is that it gives the general public a way to imagine the extraordinary implications of quantum physics, and the multiverse, something that many would have thought impossible. Having worked their way through these ideas gives some people a new sense of wonder about the incredible universe in which we live. On the other hand, others have reacted with knee-jerk outrage, dismissing the entire project as "new age What the Bleep hippie crap".

From the outset, I have made it very clear that this is a work of creative exploration and intuition from a non-scientist. Hoping to get over the label of "crackpot" so that we can discuss these unique ideas in their proper context, I have embraced the term: in the scientific community, a crackpot is one who advances ideas even though they have no formal training in the area they are speaking about, and that is a fair description. What I have created is not a theory, it is a framework for discussion, and the almost two million unique visitors who have flocked to the tenth dimension site show that these ideas have strong resonances for a great many people from around the world.

Does acknowledging that I am a composer, not a physicist, make this an easy target for naysayers assuming that this is some sort of a scam, or that my ideas must automatically be wrong? Would I have been smarter to conceal my background and let people assume that this new way of imagining the dimensions is already accepted by mainstream science? My feeling was that these ideas showed too much promise to be discarded, and I have made every effort to be forthright from the outset of this project about my qualifications.

In the current issue of "What Is Enlightenment?" magazine, senior associate editor Tom Huston had some very kind words to say about this project. From a 2 1/2 page article entitled "Your 3-D Universe is So Passé", here are some of his comments:

"...the highlight of the site is a delightfully lucid Flash animation... explaining how each successive dimension builds and expands on the dimensions below it.... and by the time we arrive at the tenth dimension, which comes across as a kind of Teilhardian Omega Point encompassing absolutely every possible timeline of every possible universe, 'there's no place left to go'."
"...the simplicity of Bryanton's ten-dimensional model is striking, and he points out at the beginning of his book that what he's proposing has little to do with the incredibly intricate mathematical formulas comprising the theories espoused by Greene, Randall, and other professional physicists. His multiple dimensions are purely speculative and built on logical consistency, requiring nothing more than a basic grasp of high school geometry to understand."
"His argument hangs together surprisingly well, testifying to the more than two decades of thought he put into his model before revealing it to the world. In chapters with such diverse titles as "The Quantum Observer", "The Paradoxes of Time Travel", and "Memes, Music and Memory", Bryanton's multidimensional matrix manages to make sense out of more mysteries than any one theory should justly be able to handle."
"Some forum participants have remarked on the similarity between Bryanton's model and the ten sefirot of Kabbalah, which represent the hierarchical gradations of divine creation, while others have suggested that the whole thing is just a novel elucidation of the paradoxical wisdom of Zen"
"Bryanton's Imagining the Tenth Dimension is conveying the concept of alternate dimensions to an audience that might never pick up a book on cosmology, string theory, or quantum geometry. And judging from some of the comments it has been garnering in the blogosphere, it's expanding worldviews, blowing minds, and provoking plenty of philosophical and spiritual inquiry as well".

This project is about the interesting ways that physics and philosophy seem to be traveling towards agreement as to the nature of reality. I have compared it to an amazing science fiction book I read as a child, Madeline L'Engle's "A Wrinkle in Time". That book awakened my eight-year-old brain to the possibilities of there being much more to our reality than what we see before us, in the same way that Imagining the Tenth Dimension is doing so for a new generation of thinkers and dreamers. Teachers who have shown my animation to their students have used it as a jumping off point for discussions of multidimensional topology, political theory, philosophy, and cosmology.

As a way to awaken curiosity and challenge narrow thinking, this project has proven to be very effective. As one fan wrote to me, "this isn't string theory, but it's right" (my blog entry about Intuition is, in a way, a response to those kind words). Anyone who has wrestled with the challenging implications of quantum physics, entanglement, the multiverse, and the role of the observer should come away with a sense that we are only beginning to understand how rich and strange our reality and our place within that reality really is. Please check out the book " Quantum Enigma" by Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, two physics professors from the University of Santa Cruz, for a level-headed discussion of consciousness and its relation to quantum mechanics.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

Everything

Everything fits together.

Everything.

Everything has a potential shape in the tenth dimension… but in the tenth dimension it remains as unrealized potential. Things don't really start getting interesting until we precipitate that potential into the dimensions below.

Everything has a place that it begins and a place that it ends: and my visual way of imagining reality allows us to envision how that is true for any idea, or any vibration, or any physical construct, in the universe, and the multiverse.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, this project began for me as a set of songs I had written about the nature of reality. When people didn't seem to understand what I was getting at, I imagined I would create a booklet to go with the CD, and that booklet blossomed into a 220 page book and a popular website. Here are six Big Ideas I've tried to sum up with the six songs that I've finished recording so far for this project :



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nAS2trDuck

1. Everything Fits Together. As we come to understand the interconnectedness of our reality this becomes self-evident, but a lot of people in the world still have not gained this perspective, and they feel needlessly trapped in their lives because of that. By the time you have really imagined the tenth dimension, you have seen what the seers and mystics have been describing for millenia, but you have also seen what quantum physicists and cosmologists are trying to explain to us right now: what is the nature of reality?



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK29fTLXEf0

2.The quantum observer exists whether you believe in this concept or not. So. Whether you believe that everything in this world and this universe are the result of pure chance, blind determinism, and some lucky throws of the dice for cosmology and evolution over the ages… or whether you believe that what we are seeing is the result of a divine intent of some kind… the result, as what we are seeing at this moment will be the same. Both belief systems are compatible, because reality is viewing itself through an Unseen Eye, the “outside the system” viewpoint which Gödel showed us through his Incompleteness Theorems.



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7r2NJop0cs

3. Although there are ten dimensions to reality, all there really are for our own universe is seven, and one of those is the point in the seventh dimension that for our own universe represents the omega we are heading towards and the alpha we come from, all wrapped up as a single unmoving point in the seventh dimension (as I sing in ”Seven Levels”). This means there are really six vectors in our unique reality, and six degrees of freedom/six degrees of separation that tie us all together. When the sixth level is also the first level (like a mobius strip but in the sixth dimension, the quantum observer becoming self-referential/self-aware, the undulating snake grabbing its tail), we are left with the fifth dimension, which is where we really are (as Kaluza proved and Einstein eventually agreed after sitting on the idea for a couple of years). I believe that the golden mean and the stacked dodecahedra forming ubiquitous rotating helices show how matter, energy and memes are organized for our universe in the fifth dimension we are currently navigating through - Dan Winter has compiled some amazing insights into these ideas.



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfe_3bEH-jE


4. From the Anthropic Viewpoint, the reason we're here is because we're here. Is that so bad? It is, if people in power are using fear and ignorance to keep you down, and placing themselves in more and more extreme positions of conspicuous wealth while promoting a system that lets there be starving children and needless suffering in the world. If you pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, you run the risk of being his puppet and his victim! My song takes the opposing viewpoints of determinism and a peaceful/joyful acceptance of the multiverse and pits them against each other throughout the song.



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBJnWADnJr4


5. One of the things modern society has taught us to be suspicious of is the integrated mind - despite the fact that, as my song ”Automatic” says, “we've all been running on automatic since we were back in the trees”. I believe Julian Jaynes got it right: what we think of as consciousness now is a recent development, probably from the last few thousand years, and prior to that time we existed in a more integrated frame of mind, where ideas for doing things and intuition (remembering the future that already exists) were heard as internal “voices in the head” that people of the time viewed as the voices of ancestors, or spirit guides, or the commands from a God. That integrated state is still one we all can fall back into without realizing when we're doing repetitive activities, and sometimes find we have to use when we're performing complicated or challenging physical or mental activities. A mind that is not constantly nattering on to itself with its narrator voice is a productive mind, and a healthy mind, and something that proponents of meditation strive towards.



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4dkYKxP4aM

6. Sometimes you just have to find a way to relax, because tension and fear and hatred are your enemies. Even a short five minute meditation once a day can help to tune you into your own internal voices, let them be heard or let them be quiet, and can help to move you to a better place in the ten dimensions. Turquoise and White is my song about getting away, even if it's only for a few minutes in your mind. Indirectly, it's also about physical stance and how something as simple as adopting a more alert or a more relaxed posture can change mental attitude, and changing your mental attitude can instantly put you on a trajectory to a better part of the multiverse, even though your location down here on our limited fourth dimensional line doesn't change one bit.

What is reality? All we are is a set of ideas across the dimensions. And that is a beautiful and wondrous thing.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

Intuition

Our minds are all about recognizing patterns, sorting things out, finding sense within the noise. There are days when I feel plugged into a hidden world of synchronicity and surprise messages from the universe, and there are days when I feel like my poor ol' brain is not quite all there.

One of the things people like best about my way of imagining the ten dimensions is that it shows an intuitive and self-consistent visual picture of how reality could be constructed. As Tom Huston mentioned in the article in the current issue of "What Is Enlightenment?" about my project, I have been constantly surprised at the number of people who tell me that what I have portrayed can easily be made to fit with their own belief system and their own experience: from physics teachers to long distance faith healers, from excited kids to deep-thinking philosophers, from people of various spiritual backgrounds, to people who have taken various hallucinogens who tell me their visions are easily explained by my way of imagining reality.

Will my intuition one day be confirmed by science? That would be the most wonderful bit of synchronicity ever. I'm a composer, not a physicist! What drove me to create my tenth dimension site and its accompanying book was the feeling that I had stumbled upon something unique twenty years ago: the idea seemed so self-evident to me that I knew it was just a matter of time before other people would be talking about the same ideas. Three years ago, when I was forced to face the possibility of my own mortality (I almost bled to death on the operating table during a routine surgery gone wrong), I found the spare time and the resources to begin putting my ideas to paper, and, beginning last summer, to send them out to the world through the web. Twenty years ago I was a person out in the middle of the Canadian prairies, with no hope of being heard. Now, with virtually no promotion other than word of mouth, the beautiful social networking world of the internet has drawn over one and a half million visitors to my website. Web 2.0 is waking up to this new way of imagining reality, and I am no longer just some dude in the middle of nowhere with a crazy idea.

Once you have my way of imagining the dimensions in mind, you can see a way to combine free will and determinism, and how multiverses could exist “just around the corner”. But this is not just about our universe of matter and energy, it is also about the “quantum observer”: I propose that the universe of memes and spirit are interacting with the physical universe across these same ten dimensions to create forms of order, life, and the desire for continuance. Being interested in “what happens next”, I propose, is one of the basic dividing lines between inanimate molecules and the first building blocks of life, but it can also seem self-evident that our unlikely universe has been interested in its own continuance since the very beginning.

Every minute of every day, we avoid doing the things that will stop us from continuing along our line of time, and I wonder how many accidental death victims would tell you from the afterlife “I just didn't see it coming”, or “it was too late for me to get out of the way”: if you can see your own impending death, there might be a way for you to stop it from happening.

A few weeks ago I read an article about research conducted by scientists (including Nobel Prize laureate Brian Josephson) into our ability to see into the immediate future. If our future already exists as possible branches in the fifth dimension, then isn't that what we are sensing every moment we refuse to step off the curb in front of the vehicle speeding by? If I didn't have a sense of what is happening next, how could I carry on a conversation, or finish typing this paragraph? Even a goldfish can see far enough into the future to get out of the way of danger.

Likewise, I was reading this month's Wired magazine this morning, which has a great article about the research being done into athletes who seem to be able to predict the future and sense outcomes long before their teammates: could Wayne Gretzky's legendary ability to be able to make plays be borne in part from an enhanced ability to see the future?

Then tonight I saw a great new blog entry from "CP" on the zaadz website, entitled ”No One Likes You in the Future”, and I felt once again that the world is connected together in ways behind the scenes that we can only begin to imagine.

My song Everything Fits Together is about the same idea.




Enjoy the journey,

Rob

The Multiverse and Dark Matter

A half dozen years ago, when I first read in a Stephen Hawkings book about the multiverse, I was immediately struck by how it fit with my unusual way of imagining reality.

Critics of the multiverse concept like to point to this as an unprovable, undetectable fantasy masquerading as a scientific theory, something created by physicists with overactive imaginations, and embraced by nuts like me. How could we prove the existence of parallel universes? Whether you are imagining other universes that spring from other separate sets of initial conditions--other universes that have different basic forces--or whether you are imagining the extreme Many Worlds version of the multiverse that I have come to believe in, which is that every possible branch from any moment in time for every possible universe actually exists... in either case, the easy-to-ask question remains the same: if those other universes exist, why can't we see any evidence of their existence?

One of the more extraordinary claims I have made with this project is that dark matter offers us proof that the parallel universes of the multiverse do exist; and that the source of dark matter is gravitational attraction from those nearby parallel universes of the multiverse which we are constantly branching to (and from!). I believe that dark matter proves that there is more out there than just the single observed universe of hard determinism that we see around us from moment to moment.

Energy and mass are directly related, two sides of the same coin, as Einstein demonstrated. But according to modern science, only four per cent of the universe is accounted for. 73% of the universe is dark energy (the unexplained force which is now causing our universe to accelerate apart from itself), and 23% is the "missing matter" whose gravitational attraction has kept the universe from flying apart as quickly as we would have expected it to, based upon the gravitational attraction of that visible four per cent. So, as I have discussed before, we find ourselves to be living in a “lucky” universe, where the initial big bang conditions created just the right balance between mass and the value of the gravitational force to create a universe which did not immediately collapse in upon itself, or did not immediately fly apart without allowing any significant matter to coalesce.

In a previous blog, I mentioned that experts such as Kaku, Greene, and Randall have told us that of the four basic forces (from weakest to strongest those are gravity, electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force), gravity is the only one that travels across the dimensions. In other words, those other three forces are rooted to the structure of matter within our fourth-dimensional spacetime, while gravity is part of the more basic underlying fabric from which spacetime is constructed. A reader of that previous blog commented that they disagree with this idea because the energy of thought and spirit can also travel across the dimensions, something that I happen to agree with, but here we are talking about what hard science believes about forces and dimensions.

Here's what I say in my book about this idea:

If gravity exists in the fourth dimension and above (which is the current belief of string theorists), doesn’t that mean our new way of viewing the ten dimensions offers a much simpler explanation of dark matter? If all other possible timelines do really exist, then isn’t it conceivable that there will be a certain amount of gravitational pull from the fifth dimensional paths that are most adjacent to our current point in time, with the amount of “gravitational leakage” diminishing as we travel further away on a different fifth-dimensional path from our own fourth-dimensional line?

At any moment in the history of the universe, the number of future paths available to be chosen out of the quantum waves of indeterminacy will be the same. This is not to say that some paths won’t take on substantially more significance for us as a species or for each of us as individuals, but rather that the sum of all available choices that are available will always be the same, which is why the “dark matter” gravitational pull our universe experiences does not constantly fluctuate up and down.

Plus, as we’ve already discussed, Feynman’s “sum over paths” concept tells us that there are an equally large number of paths which could have been taken to arrive at the current moment, even though each of us are aware of only one of those paths. This means that the picture we’re now imagining has an equally large amount of “gravitational leakage” that would be coming from those paths as well. This concept helps us to imagine how the gravitational pull from those other dimensions is not just pulling us forward in time towards the many branches we could be about to take, but is also coming from all of the paths which could have been taken to get us to any particular moment on our fourth-dimensional line.

In my personal opinion, this is the most exciting confirmation that the ten dimensions as we are imagining them here could truly be connected to the structure of reality–in this context, dark matter has a simple explanation. All we have to do is accept that time is a spatial dimension rather than a quality that we overlay on the other dimensions.

One of the verses of my song "The Unseen Eye" talks about this same concept:

And the missing dark matter that binds the universe
The mysterious mass that science cannot find
Is in the many worlds of possibility
That are just around the corner in time

Here is a link to a previous blog which prints all the lyrics to that song. And here, for fun, is a video of that song:



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK29fTLXEf0

Coming up: "Ghosts and Intuition"

Enjoy the journey,

Rob