Randomness and the missing 96 per cent

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBDaZiMF8jg

junk DNA
DNA that does not code for proteins or their regulation but constitutes approximately 95 percent of the human genome.
- from American Heritage Dictionary

dark energy
A form of energy hypothesized to reside in the structure of space itself, responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe.
- from American Heritage Science Dictionary

In blog entries like Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Dark Information and Dark Energy, Linelanders, and the LHC we've talked about the astonishingly large amount of the universe that appears to be "missing". In entries like Google, Memes, and Randomness and How to Make a Universe, we've talked about the idea that grouping and symmetry order could be what operates upon the information that becomes our reality to create the universe in which we live. And in blog entries like John Wheeler and Digital Physics, Making New Connections, and Changing Your Genes, we've talked about the quantum physics idea that parts of the past can be changed by our current observation, a fact that seems to defy our common-sense ideas of how the world works.

With all that in mind, here are two facts that might be revealing more about the nature of our reality than we realize:

• 95% of a human being's genome appears to be random repetitions and noise.
• 96% of the universe is completely undetectable dark matter and dark energy.

Don't both of those numbers seem much higher than we should expect them to be, yet remarkably similar? With only 90% hidden, even an iceberg has more to show than would appear to be indicated by these two basic facts about our universe and us as life within it!


A direct link to the above video "God 2.0" is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-Y4xseftgQ

In entries like Time in Either Direction and God 2.0, we've talked about the patterns that create the world around us from out of a background equilibrium state. Are these high percentages an indication of grouping and symmetry order at work (as Gevin Giorbran suggested) on an underlying fabric which is ultimately random? Could we be seeing evidence of this underlying pattern, which exists not just in the present, the past, and the future, but outside of time completely? If you look up "normal distribution" in wikipedia, you are shown the bell curve, which is the natural result of random generation of data.

The graph shown here is from that wikipedia article. If you add up the dark blue and the medium blue data from this bell curve, you are looking at what is known as "two standard deviations" from the mean (the mean being the exact center of the graph). And what do two standard deviations add up to? Why, 95.4%, virtually right in the middle of the 96% of the universe that is missing, and the 95% of the human genome that appears to be noise.

Does it seem backwards to be looking at bell curves when we're talking about unlikely probabilities? It does if you believe our universe was the inevitable and only outcome possible - in other words, if you don't believe there is a multiverse of universes out there, most with different basic physical laws than our own. I believe that dark energy and junk DNA could be showing us that our universe is not in the center of this bell curve, but on the outside edge: in other words, the least likely parts of the bell curve represent both the reality we are observing, and the genetic outcome that creates us as living creatures. The central part of this bell curve, then, is in the patterns and higher-dimensional shapes that occur in the extra dimensions. For our genome and our universe, the missing/unexplainable 95% makes more sense when viewed from those extra dimensions: but ultimately most of the potential shapes that exist within the omniverse are not connected to our universe, they are connected to the other possible expressions of matter and energy that exist out there within timelessness.

Which takes us back to our old friend, the oft-maligned Anthropic Principle: if we are really thinking about all possible universes and all possible expressions of life, then the one unique universe and the one unique expression of life that we are witnessing here in our little corner of the omniverse is only a tiny subset of a much larger expression of other versions of the possibilities that are out there within the information that becomes our reality, or any other reality.

A direct link to this video for "Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLXhj7TK520

In entries like Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains, we looked at the random, burbling, fields of indeterminacy that might occasionally generate a partial universe or a partial bit of organized information, from a random collection of quantum outcomes that would (with even less likelihood of success) occasionally coalesce into a universe as complex and detailed as the one in which we live. In God 2.0, we looked at the patterns that create our reality, and how what you name those patterns has more to do with your point of view than what is really happening. Now let's think about this: is the fact that our universe is missing 96% of itself really a very strong indication of the fact that it comes from higher dimensional patterns the sum of which have only a third-standard-deviation likelihood of falling outside of the bell curve of random noise? Randomness and patterns, patterns and randomness - it's all in the way you choose to look at the data.

Let's finish this entry with a song about how unlikely our universe really is when you look at the biggest picture of them all: "The Anthropic Viewpoint".


A direct link to this video for "The Anthropic Viewpoint" is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=du86lNCvOdA

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Unlikely Events and Timelessness

Wormholes

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mi2Nh_C8Pzk

In my book I talk about wormholes, an interesting topic to look up in wikipedia, and how the "folds" we talk about in the Imagining the Tenth Dimension visualization are really another way of thinking about the wormholes that science has been theorizing about. My project is unique, though, because it provides us with a "filing system" for how the different aspects of our reality are derived, and this logical organization gives us a way to envision how our universe is kept from wandering off into some other universe where the fine structure constant is different from ours: because it is constrained within the seventh dimension. But ultimately, we are talking about what physicists like Brian Greene are asking us to hold in our minds: a place where everything for every universe and every possible expression of matter and energy exists simultaneously. As Dr. Greene says:

"Just as we envision all of space as being out there, as really existing, we should also envision all of time as being out there, as really existing too." - Brian Greene

If you go to the Preamble link at the main tenth dimension website you will see a list of recommended books to read which connect to the ideas in this project, which includes Brian Greene's writing.

So, the animation for this project continues to generate a steady string of comments and questions. One of the ones that came up recently was this: "would a wormhole be in the 4th dimension? or the fifth?", and my answer to that question would be "depends on the wormhole". This question is also discussed in the tenth dimension faq, but it seemed like a good topic to tackle here in more depth.

Counting to Seven

According to the line of reasoning that comes from this project's "filing system" of how our reality is derived, a wormhole in the third dimension would allow instantaneous teleportation to other locations with no passage of time, a fourth dimensional wormhole would allow time travel to one specific causal future/past, a fifth dimensional wormhole would allow travel to other possible futures and pasts that are logically consistent with our current "now", and a sixth dimensional wormhole would allow travel to other logically incompatible pasts/futures - like where it's 2008 but the attack on the twin towers never took place, or dinosaurs aren't extinct. A seventh dimensional wormhole would allow travel to other different-initial-conditions universes that have a different fine structure constant and different laws of physics from the universe in which we live (and as such most of those other universes would not be a place where our physical bodies could exist or survive).

Eight
That was a far as I took the analogy in my book: since each extra dimension becomes more and more unlike our own spacetime, this gets harder and harder to visualize with each additional dimension. But let's continue this thought experiment now: by the time you're in the 8th dimension, you may well be in the highest dimension which can express matter in any way, and this may be the dimension where you are able to fold across universes which are derived from multiple or oscillating fine structure constants, but as a speculation that's getting pretty out there. As I've said before in this blog, the fact the Garrett Lisi's E8 rotation is also based upon an eight dimensional matrix may be able to be tied into this, but that remains to be seen.

Nine
The ninth dimension could well be what physicists like Wheeler and Boltzmann were thinking about as they described the roiling, fluctuating, underlying fields of quantum indeterminacy where partial bits of order are continually appearing and disappearing ("John Wheeler and Digital Physics" and "Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains" are two blog entries related to this). The ninth dimension would be mainly fragmentary bits of order, some of which could then organize into the dimensions below, and this is where I would place things like "big picture memes" or (as quantum computing expert Seth Lloyd says) initial yes/no states for the beginnings of different possible universes. So a ninth dimensional wormhole might be what you use to jump from the "I prefer universes that start from a high degree of order" meme that our own universe is within, to the "I prefer universes that change very little over their entire existence" organizing pattern that would be elsewhere in the ninth dimension. This all relates to the idea that "information equals reality", a phrase I first learned from Anton Zeilinger, and one that other quantum physicists use as well.

Ten and Beyond
The tenth dimension is the enfolded symmetry state where everything achieves equilibrium (a concept from this project that Dr. Sean Carroll is coincidentally now also promoting) - so no wormholes are possible in the tenth dimension because anything that disturbs that equilibrium state takes us into the dimensions below and the potential expressions of mass and energy again. Likewise, since this project says time is just a direction, not a dimension, and M-Theory says there are ten spatial dimensions plus one of time, I would say you can't have an eleventh dimensional wormhole because time isn't a dimension, it's a direction.

I also say that "time" is always a subset of the dimension above the one you're examining, because time is part of the causal/probabilistic set of expressions that are directly accessible from the current dimension in its current state. As I discussed in "The Flipbook Universe", without the fourth dimension, the third dimension has no way to change from state to state. In "Time in Either Direction" I talked about physicist Sean Carroll's ideas on this - time is only one of the possible ways of navigating through the dimension above. A wormhole would be another, but wormholes (folds) would allow us to jump from one part of the possible realities to another without traveling through the causal/probabilistic relationships that we are party to as we travel down our entropy-derived line of time as a particular direction within the fourth dimension.

Here's a song about the seven dimensions that define our unique universe: it's called "Seven Levels":

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7r2NJop0cs


While we've been playing with these ideas, we should keep in mind that wormholes are not just science fiction: and folding your mind around these concepts can be a mind-expanding experience.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: The Google Suggestions Time Capsule Project, 2nd quarter report

Song 11 of 26 - The Anthropic Viewpoint

The eleventh of the 26 songs is called "The Anthropic Viewpoint". Scroll down below the following videos for the lyrics and a brief discussion of how this song ties into the project. A blog post which lists all 26 songs, including 1 video for each song can be found by clicking here.



A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=du86lNCvOdA


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfe_3bEH-jE


A direct link to the above karaoke version is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EB3MzLoB5uw

THE ANTHROPIC VIEWPOINT
music and lyrics (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

(This song combines the concept of the “Anthropic Principle” as advanced by Stephen Hawking in his “The Universe in a Nutshell” with Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, one of the central points of Douglas Hofstadter’s amazing “Gödel, Escher, Bach”, and throws in some strange ideas of my own. And it’s got a good beat and you can dance to it.)

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain
The only thing that I know for certain
In everything that you say and do
The only thing you know for sure is you
Believe in that and you will be okay
You could live to fight another day, some day

Pay no mind to those tiny little voices
Every day you gotta make some choices
Make ‘em right and you can carry on
Make ‘em wrong and you will soon be gone
And if it seems just a little unfair
Get used to it, cause the stars don’t care, don’t care

In the anthropic viewpoint
The reason we’re here is because we’re here
And if it were impossible
Then we wouldn’t be

If there’s other worlds then we’ve just missed ‘em
No way to know what’s outside our system
We’re like goldfish livin in a bowl
What’s beyond it we can never know
All we can do is theorize
Cause we can never… get outside, outside

In the anthropic viewpoint…

So here we are in the Hydrogen Conspiracy
That’s the way that it certainly appears to be
What’s the reason, where’s the rhyme
How’d we end up on this line
All those other possibilities
They’re just as real, but they don’t have me
It’s no big deal, not worth a fuss
They’re just as real, but they don’t have us, have us

In the anthropic viewpoint
The reason we’re here is because we’re here
And if it were impossible
Then we wouldn’t be


As I say in a previous blog entry about this song, the poor ol' Anthropic Principle has certainly had a rough ride, some people just plain refuse to take this idea seriously. In the wikipedia article about the anthropic principle, you will see there are many different flavors of this idea. Let me try to describe the particular version that appeals to me in the context of what we're imagining here: if there is a multiverse of universes, with each universe springing from its own unique set of initial conditions, most of these universes would be uninhabitable by life as we know it. So how did we get so lucky as to be in a universe fine-tuned to our needs? The answer is that we couldn't exist in those other universes, so that's why "we" (that is to say, "life as we know it") aren't in them. The upshot of that idea, though, is that some of those other universes with completely different basic forces and structures could have within them organized bits of matter and energy that are completely and utterly alien to what we think of as life, and they could be marvelling at how miraculous it is that the universe they live in has been so finely tuned to their own unique needs!

By now it should be clear that even though we are imagining ten dimensions, a concept from string theory (and the jury, of course, is still out on string theory or the need for higher dimensions at this time), most of what we are really talking about with this project is the fascinating world of quantum mechanics. A recurring theme here is that there are surprising leaps that we can make when we recognize that our physical reality of probabilistic outcomes from chance and choice is completely analogous to the quantum world and Everett's many-worlds interpretation. In a blog entry called Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains, we saw one of the ways to take this idea to an extreme. Could every possible universe, no matter how fragmentary or unstable, still have a quantum observer within it? For me, this relates back to the conundrum of what happened in our own universe before life began - how was any version of the wavefunction observed/collapsed when there were no quantum observers? In my blog entry "Boredom and Consciousness Part One", I talk about respected physicist John Wheeler, whose famous diagram of an eyeball looking back at its own tail representing the big bang would be one of the startling ways of resolving this question - could a certain amount of information about our universe have been in an indeterminate state for billions of years, and it wasn't until life began observing/collapsing the wavefunction that the initial conditions for our universe were fine-tuned? Such a wild idea would, I suspect, have been immediately rejected as science fiction if it had not come from an accepted member of the mainstream physics community.

I'm a big fan of the anthropic viewpoint, because it helps us to put things into that biggest-picture-of-all perspective that I'm such a fan of. Because our own universe is already so unimaginably huge, it can be very easy for us to think that's all there is, and could possibly be. With this way of visualizing reality, by the time we've imagined three dimensions of space, three dimensions of time/probability, and three dimensions of organizing patterns that may or may not end up being expressed as probabilistic time or space, and wrapped all of that up into the enfolded, unobserved whole which I describe as the tenth dimension, our own universe is just an infinitesimally tiny subset of all that. Still. With all the different possible expressions of matter and energy which exist as potential within the quantum fabric underlying reality, isn't it an amazing and humbling thing that we get to be a part of all that? That's why the chorus of this song is so gosh-darned happy.

I agree that when you glibly sum up the anthropic principle as "the reason we're here is because we're here", it's easy to dismiss the concept as faulty, circuitous logic. Nonetheless, this song sticks by its guns: all of those other universes exist as potential within the multiverse, and the reason we're in the one we're in is because we couldn't possibly exist in the other universes that would not allow us to. This idea even extends to the parallel universe created by all of the other timelines for own universe which are not accessible to us from our current "now": if it were impossible for us to be in the universe where it was 2008 and the twin towers in New York were still standing, then we wouldn't be. And sure enough, we aren't in that version of our universe! We'll explore that idea more when we get to song 15, "What Was Done Today".


Some of the other blog entries that talk about the ideas from this song:

You Can't Get There From Here
Evidence of Parallel Universes
The Multiverse and Dark Matter
Everything
Time as a Spatial Dimension

Many of the videos for my songs are also available at YouTube, if you search for videos by 10thdim. You can audition and buy a high-quality mp3 of this song (and others by Rob Bryanton) at amiestreet.com. Included at amiestreet are 6 channel "stems" of this song and some of the others for remixing and mashups (and you can click here to play with a six-channel mixer that lets you audition and play with those stems). There is also an instrumental track of this song (and others) available from amiestreet for karaoke purposes. Finally, you can also download this song and other items from the tenthdimension digital store, and the items at that store are released under a Creative Commons license.

Next song: 12 of 26 - The End of the World

Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLXhj7TK520


Last week, in an entry called "Google, Memes, and Randomness" we talked about how something as complex as our universe and the multiverse of other universes really could spring from randomness. Now, here's a link to a fascinating article in yesterday's New York Times:
www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/science/15brain.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

This article includes a reference to the Boltzmann Brains conundrum: an idea that ties very nicely to some of the ideas we explore regularly in this blog. Let me try to sum up Boltzmann's idea: by the time we're imagining a fabric that includes every possible expression of matter and energy, that must mean there are many expressions which are not complete universes, but rather just fragmentary bits of order, and those fragmentary bits could be observed by something approximating a mind within each fragmentary universe. The disturbing idea this leads to is that within the multiverse of all possible universes there could be all these "brains" floating around (not physical brains of course, but this startling image helps to make the idea stick in our minds). This is all discussed in the above article, which also touches on some of the more metaphysical ramifications of all this.

To be clear, the Boltzmann Brain scenario is similar to the tale of Schrödinger’s Cat: it was originally offered as an extreme example of the absurd conclusions that might be drawn from applying quantum thinking to the macro world. The idea does have more power, though, when we accept the proof offered by a team of scientists at Oxford equating quantum probability states with our macro-world's probability states. Is it really such a great leap to imagine there could be organized systems representing an "observer" in many of those other universes within the infinite set of all possible universes?

Infinity or Infinities?
We keep returning to the concept of infinity with this project: some people like to think of infinity as being only one thing, and therefore they jump to the conclusion that I'm talking nonsense when my way of visualizing the dimensions uses phrases like "draw a line to yet another infinity". Here's a simple example of the same concept: the numbers following the sequence 1,2,3,4,5... extend out to infinity. But let's take any two of those numbers, 1 and 2 for instance: how many numbers are there between 1 and 2? There's 1.1, there's 1.2, there's 1.75689425... there are an infinite set of numbers between 1 and 2. Finding different ways to get to infinity is what this is all about: and as Michel from Norway recently reminded me in the tenth dimension forum, "two parallel lines meet at infinity".

Thinking of infinity as being the unobserved fabric of quantum indeterminacy shows a way to imagine how all those infinities connect together, and the parallel universes resulting from choice, chance and circumstance for our universe (as infinite as those branches appear to be) is still just one more subset of all the possible expressions of matter and energy, memes and spimes that we're playing with here.

Here's another way to describe the dimensions, which acknowledges that every single dimension extends out to its own version of infinity:

0 - a point of indeterminate size
In this way of imagining, 0 and 10 are very similar concepts - both are of indeterminate size. The common practice of referring to "0" as infinitely small isn't really correct then: a point on a graph can be any size we care to imagine it being because its size is not relevant, just its location. And to be clear, 0 is not a dimension, it's just where we start our description.

1 - a line created by a certain set of "points", extending to infinity
Start with a point, add a second point, join them together with a line. The line you have drawn is a line segment with those two points as its endpoints, but that line can be extended out in either direction to infinity

2 - a plane created by a certain set of 1D lines, extending to infinity
Draw a second line. As long as the second line is not directly on top of the first, those two lines are now part of an infinite plane that passes through those two lines.

3 - a space created by a certain set of 2D planes, extending to infinity
Any two planes that are not directly on top of each other become part of an infinite 3D space that passes through those two planes.

4 - a line created be a certain set of "3D points", extending to infinity
So 3 is our 3-dimensional space. What would "not directly on top of each other" be for 3D space? It would be 3D space in a different state. Look at your watch: let's call whatever time you see at the instant you looked "now", or the universe in one state, and we'll call that a point. Three o'clock tomorrow afternoon is another state, and we'll call that our second point. Joining those two points creates a line segment, and the ends of that line can be extended back to the Big Bang and forward to the end of the universe.

But as I've said many times here, the big bang is an illusion, it's better to think of it the way physicist Seth Lloyd describes it - the first binary yes/no that separates a particular universe out from the indeterminate background. So the fourth dimension can be thought of as a line that extends to infinity in either direction, and the big bang is just a point on that line, same with the "end" of the universe.

5 - a plane created by a certain set of 4D timelines, extending to infinity
5 is our "probability space", or "spacetime tree" as some have described it in the tenth dimension forum. The "bush-like branching structure" of the David Deutsch team's recent proof is equivalent to this, which means this occurs at both the quantum and the macro level. So: take one timeline that could extend forward or back from this moment (this "now", as we called it), then think of another alternate version that could also occur from that same "now", and those two lines define an infinite plane that passes through any versions of our spacetime that are logically consistent with our current "now".

6 - a space created by a certain set of 5D planes, extending to infinity
Stay with me now: the spacetime tree for our particular "now" doesn't include a version of the universe where it's 2008 and Kurt Cobain is still alive. That would be a different fifth-dimensional "plane". Imagining that other "Kurt alive" plane along with the "Kurt dead" plane that we find ourselves to be in, then, is the same conceptual leap as imagining one 2D plane and another different 2D plane, and extrapolating how 3D space is derived from that.

Why do we say "certain set of timeline branches", then? Here's why: the version of the 6th dimension that our current timeline is/must be part of is still constrained by the basic physical laws that are unique to our universe. No amount of choice, chance, and circumstance, at either the quantum or the macro level, moves us to a universe where the laws are different, and that is what we mean by a "certain set" of timelines in this context.

Could there be more than one version of the big bang that this infinite observed/unobserved sixth-dimensional structure passes through on its way out to infinity? Certainly, but only to the extent that there are always random fluctuations, quantum outcomes, small decisions made that in the big picture do not affect things for our overall universe to the point that its existence is no longer possible. But the 6th dimension, like the other dimensions, is an infinity. That infinity encompasses all the possible "beginnings" and "endings" for our particular universe, and it includes all of the possible paths that are not available to us from our current position in spacetime but which are still constrained by our basic physical laws. The idea proposed by physicists like John Wheeler of "reverse fine tuning" of our universe through quantum observation was discussed in my blog entry "Boredom and Consciousness", and this gives us a way to imagine how our current universe really could have multiple slightly-different-versions of the Big Bang within its 6D space.

7 - a line created be a certain set of "6D points", extending to infinity
Take the 6th dimensional structure we've just imagined, that is a point in the seventh dimension. Take the structure representing all possible outcomes for some other universe that has different basic physical laws, that is a different point in the seventh dimension. The line that passes through those two points extends to infinity in either direction.

8 - a plane created by a certain set of 7D lines, extending to infinity
Now think of the seventh dimensional line that passes through the point representing our universe, and the point representing another universe where the value for gravity is different. That line extends out to infinity in either direction, but it doesn't pass through universes where some other constant varies. To get to the infinite plane that passes through those two different lines takes us to the 8th dimension.

9 - a space created by a certain set of 8D planes, extending to infinity
The 9th dimension is the way you get from one of those planes we've just imagined to another, and the space that passes through those planes may not, as I've said many time before, be able to actually express any physical realities itself - at that point we are dealing only with the "information" side of the "information equals reality" concept. But once again, there is a timeless unobserved infinity that this 9th dimension stretches out to. Imagining the 9th dimension, then, as being filled with "Boltzmann Brains", each being an observer of some fragmentary organized bit of information/reality, is what the above New York Times article is referring to. In my book and this project, I have preferred to imagine the 9th dimension as being the place where "big picture memes" are found: organized patterns that have the potential to generate one kind of reality over another in the dimensions below.

10 - 9D as a point of indeterminate size, everything as potential only
Ten, then is the infinite unobserved quantum fabric. Attempting to observe any aspect of this collapses us into some or all of the dimensions below.

Our poll question ending soon is about Google and the way it has changed the way we interact wth information. If Information Equals Reality, then that is a very big question indeed for all of us as Boltzmann Brains floating in our perceived reality.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

PS Two other blog entries that work through a way to imagine our hierarchy of dimensions are "You Can't Get There From Here" and "How to Make a Universe". Now, for fun, here's a new video created by Ryan Hill, for my song "Big Bang to Entropy".


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