New video - Poll 79 - Gravity from the Fifth Dimension?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iM41wQM2yGk

Next: Imagining the Second Dimension

Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs - July Report

Previous lists:
. April 08 . May 08 . June 08 . July 08 . August 08
. September 08 . October 08 . November 08 . December 08 .
. Top 100 Blog Entries of 2008 . May 09 . June 09 . July 09
. August 09 . September 09 . October 09 . November 09 .
. December 09 . Top 100 Blog Entries of 2009 .
. January 10 . February 10 . March 10 . April 10 . May 10 .
. June 10 . July 10 . August 10 . September 10 . October 10 .
. November 10 . December 10 . Top 100 Entries of 2010 .
. January 11 . February 11 . March 11 . April 11 . May 2011 .
. June 2011 . 


Based upon number of views, here are the top blogs for the last thirty days.

1. Proof The Multiverse Equals Many Worlds
2. New Video - The Quantum Observer  
3. Poll 78 Will the LHC Reveal Extra Dimensions?
4. New Video - Changing Your Brain
5. Poll 77 What if the World's a Simulation?
6. Poll 76 - No Space, No Time, No Mass
7. Poll 75 - Waves, Curves and Frames
8. New video - Language and the Mind
9. Poll 74 - Twins, Photons, and Mass
10. New Video - Is Spacetime Flat or Curved?







And as of July 26th, 2011, here are the twenty-six Imagining the Tenth Dimension blog entries that have attracted the most visits of all time. Items marked in bold are new or have risen since last month.

1. Jumping Jesus (1)
2. What's Around the Corner? (2)
3. Mandelbulbs (3)
4. An Expanding 4D Sphere (4)
5. Just Six Things: The I Ching (5)
6. The 5th-Dimensional Camera Project (6)
7. Roger Ebert on Quantum Reincarnation (7)
8. Vibrations and Fractals (8)
9. Light Has No Speed (10)
10. How to Time Travel (11)
11. Is Reality an Illusion? (12)
12. Creativity and the Quantum Universe (9)
13. Our Universe Within the Omniverse (13)
14. Dancing on the Timeline (14)
15. 10-10-10 Look Before You Leap (15)
16. Magnets and Morality (16) 
17. Monkeys Love Metallica (17)
18. Gravity and Love (21)
19. Bees and the LHC (25) 
20. Consciousness in Frames per Second (19)
21. Simultaneous Inspiration (20)
22. Poll 44 - The Biocentric Universe Theory (18)
23. Changing Your Brain (23)
24. Time Travel Paradoxes (new)
25. Polls Archive 54 - Is Time Moving Faster? (22)
26. Complexity from Simplicity (24)

Which means that this worthy submission is leaving our top 26 of all time list this month.

26. Flow (26)

By the way, if you're new to this project, you might want to check out the Tenth Dimension FAQ, as it provides a road map to a lot of the discussions and different materials that have been created for this project. If you are interested in the 26 songs attached to this project, this blog shows a video for each of the songs and provides more links with lyrics and discussion. The Annotated Tenth Dimension Video provides another cornucopia of discussion topics to be connected to over at YouTube. And as always, here's a reminder that the Tenth Dimension Forum is a good place to converse with other people about these ideas.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Imagining the Second Dimension

New video - Poll 78 - LHC and Extra Dimensions

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZDs43U115U

Next: Gravity from the Fifth Dimension?

New Video - Poll 77 - Living in a Simulation

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgbuKJnlW10

Next: Poll 78 - LHC and extra dimensions

Poll 83 - Is Energy Not Conserved?

Poll 83 - "Cosmologist Dr. Sean Carroll says energy is not conserved in general relativity, because as our spacetime universe expands so does the amount of energy. Do you agree with him?"

This poll ended July 13 2011. As you can see here, more people disagreed than agreed, which is really not that surprising: haven't we all been taught that there is a finite amount of energy in the universe? Isn't the Law of Conservation of Energy one that can never be broken? Every time a new "free energy" device is announced, the critics chuckle and say "that's impossible, you can't get something for nothing". So what's Dr. Carroll thinking about here?

I've talked in this blog a number of times about Sean Carroll's writing, and it should be obvious by now that I'm a fan. His blog on the Discover Magazine website is called "Cosmic Variance", and if you go there right now I'm sure you'll find some new entries with some nourishing food for thought. This poll question relates to an entry of his from 2010 called Energy is Not Conserved, and I invite you to follow the link and read the entire piece. Here's a couple of paragraphs to whet your appetite: 

...It’s clear that cosmologists have not done a very good job of spreading the word about something that’s been well-understood since at least the 1920's: energy is not conserved in general relativity.

The point is pretty simple: back when you thought energy was conserved, there was a reason why you thought that, namely time-translation invariance. A fancy way of saying “the background on which particles and forces evolve, as well as the dynamical rules governing their motions, are fixed, not changing with time.” But in general relativity that’s simply no longer true. Einstein tells us that space and time are dynamical, and in particular that they can evolve with time. When the space through which particles move is changing, the total energy of those particles is not conserved.

There's much more to his entry than that, but reading these words is what prompted me to create the poll question we're looking at today. If you are in the camp who disagrees, please read Dr. Carroll's whole entry and see if he changes your mind about this fundamental question on the nature of our reality.

Some of the other entries where I've talked about Sean Carroll's ideas include I'm You from the Future, Flow, How to Time Travel, Temporal Mass, and What's Around the Corner? You might also recognize him from his appearances on the excellent documentary series Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, which if you haven't had a chance to watch I would highly recommend. Next week, we're going to talk about some of the ideas raised in that series with a set of entries that begins with "Imagining the Second Dimension".

Till then, enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: New video - Poll 77 Living in a Simulation

New video - Poll 76 No Space, No Time, No Mass

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyXLYckyoF8

Next: Poll 83 - Is Energy Not Conserved?

New Video - Poll 75 Waves Curves and Frames

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSqU4ypIPNw

Next: New video for Poll 76 - No Space, No Time, No Mass

The Pencil Visualization

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzvWy0MNAkk

(This beautiful animation of a rotating four-dimensional "tesseract" comes from the wikipedia article on hypercubes.)
With Imagining the Tenth Dimension, we're talking about how our reality springs from ten spatial dimensions. Some cosmologists have claimed that the tenth dimension is beyond our comprehension, that it's impossible for anyone to actually imagine such a thing. With this project, we've used logical puzzles to help us to do so, building one layer, one concept upon another. Really, this is the basic process of all learning: we start from simple concepts, and we grow from there.

Remember: we're talking about spatial dimensions here, and that means that each spatial dimension is at right angles to the one before. Let's use a paper and a pencil to visualize what that means.

Start with a piece of paper.  If you have a piece of paper on your desk and you stand a pencil straight up on it, that pencil is at right angles to the paper.

So a single point on the paper would be like the "zero" we start from in my animation, and if, right on top of that point, we were to stand the pencil on the paper, the pencil would be like the first dimension. A simple line on that paper can represent the first dimension, in which case the pencil would be like the second dimension. Or a square on that paper is like the second dimension, and the pencil would be in the third dimension. A picture of a cube on that paper is like the third dimension, in which case the pencil is like the fourth. A picture of a tesseract represents the fourth dimension, and so the pencil is like the fifth. And so on! Obviously, this gets harder and harder to visualize as the number of edges increases with each additional dimension, but the logic keeps working. If our paper had a picture of an enneract on it (a nine-dimensional hypercube), then it would be like our pencil was in the tenth dimension!

But what's all this about "tesseracts" and "enneracts"? If you go to the wikipedia article on hypercubes, you'll see that the point we started from can be called a "zero-cube", the 1D line can be called a "one-cube", and so on. Here's the whole list: 

0-cube    a point
1-cube    a line
2-cube    a square
3-cube    a cube
4-cube    a tesseract
5-cube    a penteract
6-cube    a hexeract
7-cube    a hepteract
8-cube    an octeract
9-cube    an enneract
10-cube  a dekeract

We're about to look at diagrams of orthographic projections of these multi-dimensional objects, this is what they would like projected onto a 2D surface like a piece of paper or a video screen. To imagine what we're looking at here, let's start with an easy one - the cube. Do you see how the 3-cube seen at the left here corresponds to the solid cube on the right? The projection at the left would be what we'd see if our cube was made out of wire, and the shadow it casts would show all the different edges of the cube. With a solid 3D cube like the one on the right, we know those other edges are there, but they're hidden from our view.

So with our "pencil visualization", the 3-cube we're looking at here is projected onto a flat surface, and we can use our pencil to imagine what the "next dimension up" would be when we stand the pencil on end on that surface. Think about a cube, then look at the 4D hypercube animation we started this entry with. Do you see how there are 3D cubes within the shape, and how there are additional edges that are extending out at four-dimensional "right angles" to create a 4D hypercube? This logic continues all the way up - the new lines we see in each of the following drawings come from a new "corner", a new 90-degree angle, that was unavailable in the previous dimension. Think about that as you look at these projections:

Have you watched What's Around the Corner? It explains these concepts using a somewhat similar approach. Here's that video again to close this entry:

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

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: New Video - Waves Curves and Frames

Five Years Ago Today

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lpn0lWl6nn0

Back at the end of June, 2006, we put up tenthdimension.com and showed it to a few people. Initial response was generally very favorable, and we congratulated ourselves on a site that looked like it was going to do all right for itself. But we really had no idea what was about to happen!

On July 2 2006, the site got 2346 hits from 160 unique visitors, not too shabby. Then, some time later in the day on July 3rd, people started sharing the site with each other in a much bigger way, and we were thrilled to see a twelve-fold jump - 30,116 hits from 2,196 unique visitors. Cool! But by the end of the day, we were starting to learn about something known as the digg effect. So many people were trying to access our website simultaneously that some visitors were getting error messages, while others were having to wait minutes for the pages to load. Even with those delays, July 4th 2006 was an amazing day - 451,954 hits from 25,075 unique visitors.

With the support of users on digg and also on stumbleupon, the site saw over five million hits that first month, and that was from almost 282,000 unique visitors. Unbelievable! Five years later, where are we at?

Traffic continues to be steady to the main site, and stumbleupon and digg both continue to bring in new visitors.  By now the website tenthdimension.com has seen almost 100 million hits from almost seven million unique visitors! The video which drew so much attention to the project in the first place has been seen millions of times by viewers on revver, youtube, and numerous other streaming video websites, and my YouTube channel, "10thdim" currently features almost 400 videos created to help explore the ideas behind the project. That channel has also been quite popular, with well over five million upload views and we're now approaching 19,000 subscribers!

(On a side note, "Ice Age in 4D", created by College Humor as a satire of my project also continues to see lots of traffic, it's currently at almost 1.5 million views on YouTube, and of course would have seen many more views on the College Humor website.)

Regrettably, one change I made not long ago at the main site is that I was forced to close my website's forum to new members, as it was the target of so much daily spam (much of it offensive and pornographic) that I couldn't afford the time to keep cleaning it up. There are lots of other ways that people stay in touch with me though, not just through this blog and through my YouTube channel, but through my twitter feed ("10thdim") and my facebook page (rob.bryanton).

One thing I'm noticing lately at my main website is a lot more traffic from pearltrees.com,  which is a "social curation community". As they say on their site, "it's the place where you can organize, discover and share the stuff you like on the web." I was particularly taken with the metaphor they're using for how things are connected to each other because it reminds me of the animated opening we've created for my video blog. This project has been around for a while, but based upon the traffic I'm seeing from it, Pearltrees may be reaching some sort of critical mass right now. Here's a demo video that shows the concept:


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRjooxoNXx4

This graphic representation of interconnected memes also relates to some of the other sites like wefeelfine.org and Websites as Graphs, which we've talked about in past blog entries like Visualizations, and Mindwalk and Twitter. We also discussed memes as shapes that rise and fall over time most recently in the new video for Rebecca Black and QWOP.

So is Imagining the Tenth Dimension a meme that is still on the rise? In this blog, I've been tracking the slow move within mainstream science towards the ideas I've promoted with this project for the last five years. We've moved through the "Not Even Wrong" meme which sprang up about string theory a few months after my book was published, and we're mostly through the "there are really 11 dimensions" meme, as more and more physicists are stating nowadays that it's actually ten spatial dimensions plus one of time. Since my project is about using the logic of spatial dimensions to imagine all ten, and I've been insisting that time is not a dimension but a direction within the spatial dimensions, I'm glad to see the return to the discussion of ten dimensions within the mainstream. Over at my YouTube channel, if we don't include the versions of the original animation, here are the top ten videos based upon total views:

1. Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?
2. Hypercubes and Plato's Cave
3. Why is the Speed of Light the Limit?
4. Imagining the Omniverse
5. We're Already Dead (But That's Okay)
6. Secret Societies
7. Why Stop at Ten Dimensions?
8. The Holographic Universe
9. The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic
10. Augmented Reality - 10thdim Music Videos

So let's close this entry by looking at the number one entry from this list: Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfhOBevrN2U

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: The Pencil Visualization