a new way of thinking about time and space ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ by Rob Bryanton
--author and research scientist David Jay Brown says: "one of the most brilliantly-conceived and mind-stretching books that I've ever encountered".
--science fiction author Greg Bear says: "a fascinating excursion into the multiverse - clear, elegant, personal and provocative"
(This picture was created by my Facebook friend Annamaria Paizs, a Hungarian born Dutch artist living and working in Breda the Netherlands. It's called "Whitehole". Click here for other examples of her work. Thanks Annamaria!)
This video accompanies a blog entry published earlier this year called Gravity and Free Will, which was tied together with a look at the results from four recent poll questions here at this blog.
Last entry, in Threes, we worked our way through the Three Becomes One concept we explored earlier this year, and we arrived at thinking about spin. "Spin" ties together with Triality, Twistor Theory, Garrett Lisi's E8 rotation, Dan Winter's fractal compression/decompression, Nassim Haramein's point-based physics, and Marko Rodin's Rodin Coil. Could all of these different approaches be related? Let's watch a couple of movies.
This YouTube movie is titled Infinite Division. It uses visuals from a number of other videos and presents the ideas of Nassim Haramein using clips from a live presentation of Nassim's from a few years ago.
Here's a second video: this one features Randy Powell, who has studied with Marko Rodin, and has been working on ways to visualize the spin-based vortex mathematics of Rodin's work. As you'll see, in this ten minute video Randy makes some astonishing claims about the importance of this work and his group's intention to turn this knowledge into an open source project with far-reaching implications for humanity! Does this make him sound like a crackpot? Of course it does. But if these claims are supportable by hard math, then we may be looking here at a way of harnessing the Information Equals Reality paradigm I've been promoting throughout the life of this project. What do you think about this ten minute presentation?
How does the concept of infinite division relate to my approach to visualizing the dimensions? The answer is encoded into the logo I created for my project: at the core of this is the point we start with (the zero) and the point we end with (the ten), and those are connected. All of the other dimensions represent ways of dividing up the information that becomes reality, and so are shown in this graphic to be revolving around or "outside" the conceptual line which connects those starting and ending points. Those points, by virtue of being of indeterminate size, are really equivalent, but it's helpful to think of the zero as representing the drive towards division down to the infinitesimally small, and the ten as representing the drive towards encompassing the infinitely large "point" of the Omniverse.
Ultimately all of that information exists as potential within the beautifully balanced symmetry state that exists both before and after our universe or any other information set. So, if all possible states already exist and we are each merely observing infinitely dividable "slices" from instant to instant, is it possible for us to sense the future? Next time we'll look at a new science experiment on that question, with an entry called "Evidence for Seeing the Future?".
The above video is tied to a previous blog entry from last January of the same name, Dark Flow.
Last time, in Placebos and Biocentrism, we returned to the idea that so much of what we talk about with this project is tied to visualizing our reality from "outside" of spacetime, a perspective that many of the great minds of the last hundred years have also tried to get us to embrace. Here's a quote I just came across from Max Planck that I think is particularly powerful:
As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.
It's so easy to look at some of the phrases from this quote and imagine them on some new age site, where mainstream scientists would then smugly dismiss these ideas as hogwash from crackpots. Like me, folks like Dan Winter and Nassim Haramein also sometimes get painted with the crackpot brush, but they are both serious about the ideas they are exploring, and they are not far away from the ideas that Max Planck promoted above, or that I have been pursuing with my project.
On July 1st of this year, I published a well-received blog entry called Love and Gravity. It looked at some new age ideas about wellness and spirituality, and related them to some mainstream science ideas about extra dimensions, timelessness, and the fact that physicists tell us that gravity is the only force which exerts itself across the extra dimensions.
Last week Dan Winter forwarded me a link to a new web page of his which yet again seems to tie into the same viewpoint that I'm promoting: Dan is calling this new page "Gravity is Love". As usual, this page is a sprawling collection of graphics, animations, and articles, most of which are found on a number of Dan's other pages, but there's important new information here as well. Here's a few paragraphs excerpted from the page which will give you the flavor of what Dan is saying about this concept:
Love really IS the nature of gravity! First we discovered Golden Ratio identifies the change in pressure over time- of the TOUCH that says I LOVE YOU: goldenmean.info/touch Then we discovered (with Korotkov's help) ... that the moment of peak perception- bliss - enlightenment- was defined by Golden Ratio in brainwaves : goldenmean.info/clinicalintro Then medicine discovered: the healthy heart is a fractal heart. ( References/ pictures: goldenmean.info/holarchy, and also: goldenmean.info/heartmathmistake Then - I pioneered the proof that Golden Ratio perfects fractality because being perfect wave interference it is therefore perfect compression. It is my view that all centripetal forces- like gravity, life, consciousness, and black holes, are CAUSED by Golden Ratio in waves of charge. Nassim Haramein says that although he sees Golden Ratio emerge from his black hole equations repeatedly - he sees it as an effect of black holes/ gravity - not the cause... Clearly - from the logic of waves - I say the black hole / gravity is the effect of golden ratio and not the other way around! - although some might say that this is a chicken and egg difference - may be just semantics... at least we agree on the profound importance of Golden RATIO.../ fractality... AND love : perfect embedding IS perfect fusion IS perfect compression... ah the romance.
Dan Winter is a fascinating fellow, I hope you can spend some time following the links in the above quote. Next time we're going to look at another somewhat related approach to imagining the extra-dimensional patterns that link us all together, in an entry called Biosemiotics: Monkeys, Metallica, and Music.
Image from wikipedia: "Borromean Rings". With my approach to visualizing the ten spatial dimensions, I group three dimensions together, call that a "triad", and condense it into a single entity so that it becomes a point in the next dimension up. By the time I've done that three times, I arrive at ten, the same number which Pythagoras also defined as the ultimate number encompassing all possible expressions of our reality. Let's look at some of the ways that ancient wisdom ties into all this, starting first with this mystical insight from the current Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America:
In a binary, though, every action is balanced by an opposite reaction, so thinking in binaries is very problematic if you want to foster change. If you’re a mage, you respond to dysfunctions of this sort by shifting numbers. The traditional rule here is that numbers always change in a specific order: one becomes two, two becomes three, and three becomes one and shifts to another level. (The reasons for this rule, again, are too complex to go into here.)
When I came across the above text I was struck by how strongly it seemed to relate to the triads from my approach. Here's another quote, this one from a site dedicated to Chinese martial arts:
Then the link between the qi of the earth and the qi of the sky can be formed, causing the practitioner to shape the unity of heaven, earth and person; three becomes one.
The Dynamics of Creation
In Strength of Gravity, Speed of Light, I summed up the dynamics of creation like this: "One thing pushes against another, and out pops a third thing". Is this a schoolboy description of sex? Sure, why not! Long before sex came along, there's been single-celled fission, mitosis, a dividing apart: that's one kind of creation, binary and asexual. The other is sexual reproduction, a more robust form of creation because it takes elements from two sources and combines them to create something new. Hegel's dialectic is often summed up in a similar way: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
Monad, Dyad, Triad
Pythagoras taught that odd numbers are masculine and divine, and even numbers are earthly and feminine. While such a conclusion might seem misogynistic, it's worth noting that Pythagoras welcomed females into his discipline, and his wife and daughters were accomplished mathematicians. In chapter four of my book, "The Binary Viewpoint", I suggested that the desire to catalog things into yes/no, right/wrong (and so on) tends to be a more masculine approach, while the holistic "yin/yang/both together" tends to be a more feminine one. Does this mean I would disagree with Pythagoras and say that odd numbers are more feminine, because they're less dualistic, less binary? It's an interesting thought.
"One state/an opposing state/both simultaneous" is also, of course, the basis of quantum mechanics, science's most-proven description of the foundation of our reality, and something which I've insisted will eventually be shown to be just as connected to our macro reality as it is to the quantum: it's all part of the same continuum. The June issue of Scientific American has just published an article about the first demonstration of quantum superposition on an object large enough to be seen by the naked eye! This demonstration is a major leap forward: while scientists have previously demonstrated superposition with atoms and molecules, this new experiment shows quantum superposition in an object made out of roughly ten trillion atoms. Suddenly, Schrödinger's cat, usually portrayed as nothing more than a fanciful thought experiment, moves a little closer to being something connected to our actual physical reality.
The Law of Threes
So. Two is a dynamic push and pull, while three is more stable, more balanced. In jokes and in fairy tales, it seems more satisfying when something happens three times. Lots of superstitions gravitate to this number: good luck, bad luck, celebrities dying, and so on are seen to come in threes. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost - entire belief systems are built on threes. To be sure, the phrase "Law of Threes" means a number of things depending upon who you consult, but here's the most popular answer as provided by "Galeanda" at Answerbag.com:
The Law of Threes states "every whole phenomenon is composed of three separate sources, which are Active, Passive and Reconciling or Neutral. This law applies to everything in the universe and humanity, as well as all the structures and processes".
In the final chapter of my book, I reached the conclusion that three systems are interacting, all of which in their unobserved state can be assembled into the tenth dimension as a "point" of indeterminate size. Those three systems are 1) the physical world, 2) the quantum observer who through constructive interference is actively engaged in observing specific aspects of the other two systems, and 3) the "information equals reality" world of memes, patterns, or waveforms.
It's interesting to relate this to Popperian cosmology. Philosopher Karl Popper made a similar proposal that there are three worlds: the physical, the mind which observes, and mental patterns of information. And imagine my surprise to be told that there are branches of Kabbalah which also teach that we can divide our reality into three triads, which can be summed up as the material, the moral, and the intellectual.
Three Threes
Here's an interesting version of my approach to visualizing the dimensions, using ideas connected to the point-line-plane postulate: which, as we've said before, can be used to visualize any number of spatial dimensions.
Start with a point. Choose a second point. Join those two points with a line, you're in the first dimension.
How far away are those two points from each other? Now find an additional point that is the exact same distance away from those first two points but not on the line. What have you created? An equilateral triangle, and you're in the second dimension. The fact that such a triangle can be created with nothing more than a compass and a straight edge is well known to students of sacred geometry and the vessica piscis, concepts we've looked at before in this blog.
Now find an additional point that, again, is the same distance away as those first three points are from each other. What have you created now? This four-sided pyramid is called a tetrahedron. As you can see, it's made from four equilateral triangles, and now you're in the third dimension.
An article published last week in New Scientist magazine suggests that the tetrahedron is the most efficient shape for packing a large number of items into a 3D space. When we're thinking about how three becomes one, imagine collapsing this tetrahedron's outlying points towards any single point. This gives us a useful mental image for seeing how the underlying structures of our 3D space could be connecting to the fourth dimension, as we enfold all of our 3D universe in its current state -- its current "now" -- into a planck-length-sized frame which then becomes a "point" on our 4D line of time.
In Our Universe as a Dodecahedron, we looked at what happens when you rotate five superimposed tetrahedrons so that all their points are equidistant from each other, which took us to the discussion of the now-proven Poincaré Conjecture, and the proposal that the slight curve of our spacetime gives rise to the fifth-dimensional Poincaré Dodecahedral Space that our universe resides within. But once again, if you look at these beautiful symmetrical shapes, can you imagine how all of those points could easily be converged to a single central point?
In that same entry we talked about fascinating fellows like Dan Winter and Nassim Haramein who are showing us ways of visualizing how everything is connected through points or point-like structures. With "Three Becomes One", what we're trying to head towards is a way of imagining an underlying symmetry, and how that symmetry can be enfolded to eventually arrive at the unobserved whole, the big beautiful zero that our universe is moving towards and springing from within timelessness. Pull those points apart symmetrically and you get beautiful shapes like the vessica piscis, the triangle, the tetrahedron, and the dodecahedron. Allow the points to converge and you end up back where we started, at a point of indeterminate size.
Since gravity is the only force that exerts itself across the extra dimensions, that pushes or pulls, it must factor in here at a fundamental level. Let's continue to explore this idea more in our next two entries, Gravity and Free Will, and Gravity and Entrainment.
Enjoy the journey!
Rob Bryanton
P.S.: Pictured at left: diagram showing congruence of null lines from Twistor Theory.
Pictured at right: diagram of Marko Rodin's Rodin Coil.
According to the June issue of Scientific American, there's new excitement about
Twistor Theory and String Theory being united by the highly respected theoretical physicist Ed Witten. A number of people have asked me to talk about the work of Marko Rodin, I wonder what he would have to say about this latest development?
"We start with a point" - the first phrase of the animation that vaulted this project to worldwide popularity four years ago.
"We end with a point" - the conclusion that is reached at the end of the same animation. If the tenth dimension in its unobserved state is indeterminate, then it's just like the point we started from.
"You are the point": that was the title of a blog entry I published early this year. If our reality is defined across ten dimensions, then the fifth dimension would be the half-way point, the node of strongest harmonic resonance for all the vibrations and energy that combine together to create the unique "now" that we are each witnessing at this moment. As we've discussed in entries like The Holographic Universe and Holograms and Quanta, realizing that our reality is created through constructive interference at the fifth dimension is the key to understanding all of the wide-ranging ideas that we have been exploring with this project. Einstein believed our reality is defined at the fifth dimension. Do you?
By itself, a point is of indeterminate size and dimension. As we discussed not long ago in One to the Power of Infinity, it's important to realize that indeterminate is not the same as undefined: things that are indeterminate can also be thought of as being true for any value you care to assign to them. What does this mean?
By the time you use a point to indicate a position within a multi-dimensional space, as you imagine all the sizes that the point could be within its indeterminate range of sizes, a circle (2D) or a sphere (3D) is the shape it takes for anything between the infinitely large or the infinitesimally small versions of that point. This logic continues with the additional dimensions: but while we've spent some time in past blogs looking at rotating hypercubes (a hypercube being the 4D equivalent of a 3D cube), we've never looked at the 4D equivalent of a 3D sphere: the hypersphere. Check out these two mind-bending YouTube animations created by WildStar2002.
In entries like An Expanding 4D Sphere and Finite But Unbounded? we've talked before about these connections between hyperspheres and visualizing the extra dimensions of our reality.
Two entries ago, we discussed our universe within the omniverse, in which we looked at some new scientific theories advanced in the last couple of months suggesting that all possible universes are connected to each other by point-like black holes.
Then last entry we looked at our universe as a dodecahedron. In that blog we returned to the work of Dan Winter, and showed this simple animation from his gigantic goldenproof web page:
After I published my look at the dodecahedron last week, Dan sent me this note:
Nice to have a general intro there. Now you need to add this simple essential statement: after the limited number of axes of rotation which can be contained in cubic lattice (3D),the ONLY way rotating axes of charge can be superposed WITH the necessary constructive wave interference is the way a (5) cube rotates into a dodecahedron, the so called hypercube producing the golden ratio edgeis the ONLY next dimension... 4 there. Then by ratcheting that down a helix - precisely mapping dna you have the 5 axes of rotation superposed (5D). Recursive braiding adds spin axes superposed (and longer wavelengths) to that, where thus DNA is the only biologic structure with access to 10+ dimensions. See how 7 plus 5 makes 12 in dna: goldenmean.info/dnamanifesto The 7 / 5 spin is the essential symmetry recipe (slip knot) of hydrogen, heart muscle and solar core, as well as dna.
On Dan's goldenproof page, he ties the golden ratio in not just with the Poincaré Dodecahedral Space (which we looked at last time as the underlying shape of our universe), but with other topics we've looked at in the last year or two: Garrett Lisi's E8 rotation (pictured at left), which is a bold framework for showing how all the possible particles and forces of our universe are organized, and which Dan explains also incorporates the golden ratio. On the same page Dan also relates his work to the ideas of Nassim Haramein. I've remarked before that Nassim is fond of dismissing ideas of extra dimensions (including his insistence that the first and second dimension don't exist), which could seem to tell us that his ideas are completely incompatible with mine. Nassim tells us that there is only one dimension, and that our observed universe is connected by "points" to all other realities by fractal patterns that can be infinitely divided or infinitely expanded. Where would such an idea tie in to what we're talking about here? In the fifth dimension, which I've been saying all along is really where our reality is defined, one planck frame at a time, to create the fourth-dimensional "line of time" we look back upon from our vantage point as creatures made of 3D atoms and molecules.
One of the things I've been fond of saying is that "life is any process that is interested in what happens next". With Dan's idea of DNA being the only pattern that connects us to the extra dimensions, we have another interesting way of seeing how our "now" is not riding on the single, constrained train track of our linear one-way arrow of time, but is being created one point after another from a fifth dimensional probability space. Visualizing the extended possibilities of this "now" is something we're going to talk more about next week with something called the Fifth-Dimensional Camera Project.
This Wednesday May 12th I'm going to be interviewed by Kelly Howell on what has become the most downloaded self help podcast on iTunes: Theatre of the Mind. We'll talk more about Theatre of the Mind in our next entry.
Enjoy the journey!
Rob Bryanton
Edit: Here's some more info about WildStar2002, the creator of the above Hypersphere animations: his name is Burt Clawson, he's from Salt Lake City, UT, and he's a graphic and web design student. Because of his interest in higher-dimensional geometry, he figured out a way to do these Hypersphere animations using MaxScript in 3D Studio max. Thanks, Burt!
Last time we talked about our universe within the omniverse. Now let's talk about the shape of our own universe. This is an image of a rotating dodecahedron, from wikipedia. This unique platonic solid incorporates the golden ratio, which is often denoted by the Greek letter phi, usually lower case: φ. When you stack a number of dodecahedra together, interesting things happen with the way the different faces and vertices rotate: they can be seen to enfold one into another, and the resulting hints of rotating helix shapes, fractals, and the spirals found in nature link not just to the broad field of sacred geometry, but to cosmological theories about the structure of our universe.
These next two images come from a mind-blowing visualization tool you can download from http://geometrygames.org/: it's called Curved Spaces. In entries like Poll 49 and Poll 58 we've talked about how our universe is not really flat and infinite, but rather slightly curved, making it finite but unbounded. In entries like An Expanding 4D Sphere and When's a Knot Not a Knot? we've also talked about the now-proven Poincaré Conjecture. Curved Spaces includes the Poincaré Dodecahedral Space mode pictured here, which lets you fly through the stacked dodecahedra that would form the surface of the 4D hypersphere our finite but unbounded universe resides within. And by putting a planet earth at the center of each dodecahdron, this fly-through gives us one way of visualizing how Everett's Many Worlds could be defined by our observation of the universe as a series of planck frames, one after another, each frame separate but connected to other possible adjacent frames: another favorite topic of this project.
In older entries like Everything and Seeing Eye to Eye, we've touched on the amazing ideas of Dan Winter, who continues to present an ever-growing body of work. As I've said before, Dan's web pages can seem overwhelming, but there's no denying his passionate pursuit of his ideas. The animated images we're looking at here come from Dan's gigantic goldenproof web page, which you'll see does include lots of graphics, animations, and movie clips if you scroll further down that page. The first two animations I've grabbed from Dan's website show the basic idea, which Dan describes this way:
"These visuals are graphed from my original equation of Golden Ratio on the correct conic dodeca stellation of how Hydrogen Radii- nest/embed into the PLANCK LENGTH (field coupling- to MAKE GRAVITY) - using GOLDEN RATIO - successful wave adding and multiplying (non-destructive compression)."
As you know, the different electron shells of an atom are discrete - when an electron moves from one level to another, it doesn't travel through the intermediate space: it simply pops from one to the other, in a manner very similar to the "flatlander ant on a folded newspaper" concept we showed in the original tenth dimension animation. This is yet another example of how our reality, which seems continuous, is actually divided into tiny little "steps", or "frames" that are each one planck unit apart from the next: not just in space, but in space-time as well.
Dan quotes from The Golden ratio, ionic and atomic radii and bond lengths, a paper by Raji Heyrovska written in collaboration with J. Heyrovsky of the Institute of Physical Chemistry, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague. - The summary of the paper includes the following:
This work arose from the author's finding that the ratio of the radius of hydrogen, estimated recently (C.H. Suresh, N. Koga, J. Phys. Chem. A, 105, 5940 (2001)) by density functional methods, to the ground state Bohr radius is the Golden ratio, which operates in a variety of natural phenomena. It is found that the Golden ratio indeed plays a quantitative role in atomic physics.
Dan cites the above as confirmation of his own ideas about how important the golden ratio is to our fractal, enfolded reality. For me, this all ties back into the idea that our observed universe is being constructed one planck frame at a time by constructive interference occurring in the fifth dimension: which, as I've been saying from the outset of this project, is where our "now" is actually being observed from instant to instant, as it's chosen from a probability space of possible pasts and futures.
Let's look at one more interesting thing about a dodecahedron: it can be constructed from five pyramids, like so:
A tetrahedron is a four-sided pyramid, with each triangular face the same size. At left we see five interlocking tetrahdra. Each one is color-coded so it's easier to tell them apart, and these have been rotated to make all of their outer points equidistant from each other. As you can see in the right-hand image, these points can be joined by pentagons, and when we do so our old friend the dodecahedron emerges once again.
(This picture was created by my Facebook friend Annamaria Paizs, a Hungarian born Dutch artist living and working in Breda the Netherlands. It's called "Whitehole". Click here for other examples of her work. Thanks Annamaria!)
How does the concept of infinite division relate to my approach to visualizing the dimensions? The answer is encoded into the logo I created for my project: at the core of this is the point we start with (the zero) and the point we end with (the ten), and those are connected. All of the other dimensions represent ways of dividing up the information that becomes reality, and so are shown in this graphic to be revolving around or "outside" the conceptual line which connects those starting and ending points. Those points, by virtue of being of indeterminate size, are really equivalent, but it's helpful to think of the zero as representing the drive towards division down to the infinitesimally small, and the ten as representing the drive towards encompassing the infinitely large "point" of the Omniverse.
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