The Tenth Dimension FAQ

Frequently asked questions about "Imagining the Tenth Dimension: a new of thinking about time and space":

1. Who is Rob Bryanton, and why did he create this project?
2. Aren't there really only 3, or 4, dimensions and the rest is unproven?
3. Why ten dimensions and not some other number?
4. Doesn't science (M Theory) say there are 11 dimensions?
5a. I've watched the animation but I still don't understand the logic, can you help?
5b. Doesn't the animation misrepresent what a 2D flatlander would see?
6. Is it really possible to "fold" a dimension, and what would happen if you did?
7. Isn't free will an illusion, and isn't everything about our universe inevitable?
8. Is this science? Philosophy? Both? Neither?
9. Does God/spirituality fit into this way of imagining reality?
10.Is this project about Kabbalah, chakras, meditation, hallucinogens, etc?
11. Is this project about memes, creativity, connections across time and space?
12. Is this project about consciousness and the quantum observer?
13. Is this project about the end of the world, the Mayan calendar, Kurzweil's Singularity etc?
14. What are the resources being provided with this project?
15. How can I find out more about the 26 songs Rob created for this project?

Please respond to this post with any important questions you think should be added to this FAQ list.

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


A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySBaYMESb8o

FAQ 14 - What are the resources being provided with this project?

(Click here for the complete Imagining the Tenth Dimension FAQ list)

14. What are the resources being provided with this project?

The forum for this project is at tenthdimension.com/forum
The most recent post to this blog is at tenthdimension.com/blog
The main address for this project is tenthdimension.com
The text only version of the animation is available at tenthdimension.com/textonly.php
The original animation can be viewed, downloaded, or embedded from revver.com
A page that links to the animation directly, and provides links to other content is here.
An annotated version of the animation with lots of video blog links is here on YouTube.
There's a continuously playlist of project related videos at tenthdimension.tv.
You can click here and here to read two short free-verse poems that sum this project up.
Click here for a blog entry listing hundreds of words and phrases that can be entered that bring up links related to this project as the top response (this list is, of course, a snapshot in time since google's responses change on an ongoing basis).
You can hear all 26 songs Rob created for this project here, which also connects you to discussions of how these songs fit it into this way of visualizing reality.
An archive listing and discussing the polls from the tenth dimension blog is found here.

This project is based upon a book by Rob Bryanton, "Imagining the Tenth Dimension - a new way of thinking about time and space".
You can search through the book using Google Book Search, or using Amazon.com's Search Inside This Book.
A summary of the chapters and their content can be found here.
A summary of reviews for the book can be found here, and more can be found here.
A pdf of the review of the book by Tom Huston of What is Enlightenment? magazine can be donwnloaded here, or viewed at the What Is Enlightenment? site here.

There are 26 songs associated with this project. Videos for those songs, as well as numerous video blogs by Rob Bryanton can viewed at Rob's channel on Youtube.
These songs, and others by Rob Bryanton, can also be purchased at amiestreet.com
The book, a high quality version of the animation in flash and quicktime, and the songs are all available for download under a Creative Commons license at tenthdimension.com/digital
Also available there are the book in Audiobook format, as well as a downloadable pdf.
Hard cover and soft cover versions of the book as well as Tenth Dimension T-shirts are available here.
Gevin Giorbran's wonderful book Everything Forever is also available at the store.
These books are also available for purchase through your local Amazon and other online booksellers.
The followup to Imagining the Tenth Dimension is called "O is for Omniverse", go to omniverse.tv for more about this exciting new project.

FAQ 13 - Is this about the end of the world, the Mayan Calendar, Kurzweil's Singularity?

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13. Is this project about the end of the world, the Mayan calendar, Kurzweil's Singularity, etc.?

Well, indirectly, yes, but this is not the prime focus of the project. If we are really acknowledging the existence of a multiverse of universes, and a spacetime tree of different probabilistic outcomes creating parallel versions of our own universe, then it must stand to reason that throughout history there will be people who have made predictions that in other versions of reality came true. Which also means that we can't discount the possibility that some portion, no matter how small, of the predictions that are being made right now could also come true at some time in the future branches of the spacetime tree that our observed reality ends up being upon.
Once we've seen a major prediction not come true (Y2K, for instance), some of us can become dismissive of all such predictions (whether those predictions be good or bad). Imagining the parallel universes of possible outcomes that are coming towards us in our probability space means that we have to consider each prediction about the future on its own merits.
Here are some blog entries about these ideas:

The End of the World
Death?
Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains

While persons promoting the Mayan Calendar beliefs, or Ray Kurzweil and his predicted coming Singularity, are not talking about the destruction of the world, they are talking about an end to times as we know them, and a shift to some new mode of existence for our world. Here's one of the sections from the book where I deal with the subject of predictions:

It seems that no matter where you are in history, at a specific moment there will always be a certain small contingent of the population who are predicting the end of the world. Usually it’s some conveniently distant amount of time away from the present to be a cause for concern, but not so close as to immediately leave the person spreading the news with egg on their face (as I write this paragraph in 2006, the Mayan calendar’s December 21 2012 looks like a good upcoming contender for an end-of-the-world focal point some portion of the public are likely to become caught up with).
But eventually the deadline for all good predictions of the end has to arrive, and like the celebrated Y2K scenario, its promoters are then left looking a little foolish. In the anthropic viewpoint, we can imagine how those people also exist on different timelines where their predictions did come true. The reason we’re here on our current timeline to question what went wrong with their predictions is because on the timeline where they were right, we would no longer be here. Perhaps there were also people in Atlantis, or Mu/Lemuria, or in the ancient sunken ruins off of Cuba or south of Okinawa, who issued dire warnings of impending disaster, and who got to say one last “I told you so” before the end of their civilizations really did come to pass?

FAQ 12 - Is this about consciousness and the quantum observer?

(Click here for the complete Imagining the Tenth Dimension FAQ list)

12. Is this project about consciousness and the role of the quantum observer?

Absolutely! Now that famed physicist Anton Zeilinger's experiments in Austria are proving that "realism" does not exist - in other words, the universe really is being created by observation, this project is more relevant than ever: read about Zeilinger's work in Local Realism Bites the Dust. Physicist Sean Carroll's ideas about an equilibrium state which exists "outside of time" is also clearly related to this, read about Dr. Carroll's theories in Time in Either Direction. In the animation, the image of a person viewing one part of the indeterminate waveform to collapse (or more correctly, to observe) the version of reality they are in is key to this discussion. But there is much more to it than that. Here are some blog entries discussing these ideas:

John Wheeler and Digital Physics
Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains
Boredom and Consciousness Part One
Boredom and Consciousness Part Two
Boredom and Consciousness Part Three
Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains
Disorders of the Mind
Constructive Interference
The Bicameral Mind
Seeing Eye to Eye
Conspiracies and Quantum Mechanics
See No Future
What Do You Want to Change?
I Remember Flying
Addictive Personality

FAQ 11 - Is this about memes, creativity, connections?

(Click here for the complete Imagining the Tenth Dimension FAQ list)

11. Is this project about memes, creativity, connections across time and space?

No question! Here are some blog entries that discuss this set of ideas:

I Know You, You Know Me
Collective Intelligence, Cognitive Surplus, Chaos
The Geometry of Music
Music and the Dance of Creativity
The Universe as a Song
Connections
Intuition
YouTube and Conceptual Framing
Memes / Tag Clouds / Spimes
Spirituality, Connections, and the Tenth Dimension
Selfish Genes and Selfish Memes
Facebook and Secret Societies
Information Equals Reality
Visualizations
Google, Memes, and Randomness

FAQ 10 - Is this about Kabbalah, chakras, meditation, hallucinogens?

(Click here for the complete Imagining the Tenth Dimension FAQ list)

10. Is this project about Kabbalah, chakras, meditation, hallucinogens, etc.?

Where Are You?
Jake Kotze and Mystical Numbers
David Jay Brown and Psychedelics
The Shaman
Modern Shamans
You are Me and We are All Together
Nassim Haramein
Jumping Jesus
Placebos and Nocebos
Song 16 of 26 - Turquoise and White (a song about meditation and positive visualizations)
Song 2 of 26 - Seven Levels (a song about the interesting connections to the number seven)

This was one of the surprising outcomes of this project for me: I'm no expert on these ideas, but a number of visitors to the tenth dimension forum and my channel on youtube have written in to say they see strong connections between some of the items on the list above and my way of visualizing reality. For a project that is trying to find a central meeting point between science and philosophy, physics and spirituality, this may not seem like a surprising outcome, but the breadth of the different belief systems that people have said they see connections to is a thrill. Here are some blog entries about this:

Vibrations
Tuning Into Reality
Crossing Your Arms to Change Your Trajectory
Boredom and Consciousness Part Three

You might also be interested in the "Altered States" area of the tenth dimension forum. And Tom Huston's article about this project in What Is Enlightenment magazine also touches upon these ideas, you can view a pdf of that article by clicking here.

FAQ 9 - Does God and spirituality fit into this?

(Click here for the complete Imagining the Tenth Dimension FAQ list)

9. Does God/spirituality fit into this way of imagining the dimensions?

Talk about a hot button issue! In the tenth dimension forum, questions surrounding God have generated hundreds of posts. But this is also the source of division in this project: some people become immediately suspicious when they see a scientific discussion that acknowledges the possibility of spirit, and some religious people assume that this project must be atheistic because it talks about science.

The goal of this project is to come up with a way to meet in the middle, and that is both its strength and its achilles heel. Luckily, there are a growing number of people in the world who are willing to discuss the middle ground this project is exploring: where science is revealing the truth about the nature of our reality, and that truth has to acknowledge the role of consciousness, creativity and free will.

Here are some blog entries discussing various ideas surrounding this topic:
What's Around the Corner
I Know You, You Know Me
God 2.0
Is God in the Seventh Dimension?
God? Or the Multiverse?
Gevin Giorbran - Gone But Not Forgotten
The Stream
Beer and Miracles
Happy Birthday Paul

Tom Huston's article about this project in What Is Enlightenment? magazine also does a good job of exploring the spiritual side of this project, you can view a pdf of that article by clicking here. And here is an interview where Tom discusses these ideas with me at some length.

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

FAQ 8 - Is this Science? Philosophy? Both? Neither?

(Click here for the complete Imagining the Tenth Dimension FAQ list)

8. Is this Science? Philosophy? Both? Neither?

My answer, as you might expect, would be "both". This question was one of the first polls held at this blog. Since there are some opposing factions from both science and religion who believe that only their viewpoint is true, this can be a problem for projects like mine that move towards the idea that both might be describing the same thing using different terminologies and viewpoints.

Here are some of the blog entries about this discussion.

You Are the Point
Life is But a Dream
Time in Either Direction
Anime, Gaming and Cusps
Being More Fifth Dimensional
The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic
The Fifth Dimension is a Dangerous Idea
David Jay Brown and Psychedelics
Creativity and the Quantum Universe
The Omniverse

FAQ 7 - Isn't free will an illusion?

(Click here for the complete Imagining the Tenth Dimension FAQ list)

7. Isn't free will an illusion, and isn't everything about our universe inevitable?

This hard line view of our reality is called Hard Determinism, and more people have been taught to embrace this grim viewpoint than I would ever have suspected. Is every choice I make, every action I take, already pre-determined? If it were, how could I prove otherwise? No matter what I think, do, or say, no matter what random event causes good or bad fortune to come my way, a hard determinist can declare that it's all just a mechanistic outcome of processes that were set in motion at the very beginning of the universe and which will continue until its end.

"Free will" is discussed in entries like You Are the Point, What's Around the Corner, The Past is an Illusion, The Spacetime Tree, The Fifth Dimension is a Dangerous Idea, The Flipbook Universe and Monkeys Love Metallica.

This Hard Determinist approach is sometimes also tied into the Anthropic Viewpoint: even if the potential for all those other universes where other probabilistic outcomes and choices might have come to be is acknowledged, there are scientists who will tell you that those universes are irrelevant, because they in no sense of the word ever really came to "exist": they were, and remain, only as unrealized potential. Click here to read an interesting debate as to whether the "other universes" of the multiverse should be thought of as real or not. This debate is between two well-respected experts in the field of quantum mechanics who I quote from regularly, Seth Lloyd, and David Deutsch.

The Forest gives us another way to visualize how our free will ties into this.
Beer and Miracles ties together unlikely probabilities and free will.
You are the Point provides another way to visualize free will as part of the quantum observer process.
Here are some blog entries about The Anthropic Viewpoint, Determinism, Randomness and Bohmian Mechanics, and the Flatlanders concept as it relates to the choices we make.
This entry is about the choices and we make and the stories we tell ourselves.

Things get even more mind-boggling when we start exploring theories about reverse causality, the idea that choice made "now" doesn't just affect our path into the future, but could also cause shifts in the "then" that came before. Related entries include:
Local Realism Bites the Dust
Our Non-Local Universe
The Flexi-Laws of Physics
Alien Mathematics
Changing Your Genes
You Have a Shape and a Trajectory
The Biocentric Universe
Poll 44 - The Biocentric Universe Theory
Placebos Becoming More Effective?

FAQ 6 - Can you really "fold" a dimension?

(Click here for the complete Imagining the Tenth Dimension FAQ list)

6. Is it really possible to "fold" a dimension, and what would happen if you did?

Click here to see a video and read a blog on "Wormholes".

Because some of us were introduced to the term through science fiction, we might jump to the conclusion that wormholes are completely fictional, but there has been some interesting work done by theoretical physicists like Kip Thorne and Stephen Hawking on the subject.

Here is a wikipedia article that leads off with a nice graphic showing how a wormhole is very much like a folding of spacetime. In the tenth dimension animation, when our ant pops out of existence from one branch and reappears on the other, we could imagine that the ant traveled through a wormhole to achieve this.

In my book, in the chapter on time travel paradoxes and popular science fiction writing I go through the following explanation of wormholes as applied to this unique way of imagining the dimensions:

Granted, it would be easy to dismiss this entire discussion by simply saying “time travel is impossible, these are all works of fiction, so to worry about whether the logic of a particular movie or story’s depiction of time travel is accurate is completely pointless”. Nonetheless, it is not just science fiction authors but famous physicists who have postulated the concept of “wormholes” as a way to jump through space and time. A wormhole would be the equivalent of a “fold” in a higher dimension according to the framework we are exploring here, which means we’d be able to categorize what dimension the wormhole was “folding through” by the nature of the outcome. So, a wormhole that allowed you to jump to a different part of our current universe without the passage of time would be folding space, the third dimension, through the fourth dimension. A wormhole that allowed you to jump to a different part of our current timeline (our past or our future) would be folding time through the fifth dimension. A wormhole that allowed you to jump to a different past than the one we currently share would be folding “alternate space-times” (the fifth dimension) through the sixth dimension. And a wormhole that allowed you to jump to a completely different universe with different physical laws than our own would be folding our space-time through the seventh dimension (or above).

Other related blog entries:
The Fifth Dimension is Spooky
How to Time Travel
Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?

FAQ 5a, 5b - I Don't Understand the Animation

(Click here for the complete Imagining the Tenth Dimension FAQ list)

5a. I've watched the animation many times but I still don't understand the logic. Can you help?
5b is below.

Some people get this set of ideas intuitively, some people watch the animation many times before the puzzle starts to fit together for them. Of course, those who believe that time cannot be thought of as a full dimension might tell you the reason you're having trouble understanding the animation is because it makes no sense past the fourth dimension. For those who can get over that mental hurdle, there are still those who have been left with questions. Since this project began, I have posted responses to this question using a large variety of approaches as text responses at YouTube, and in numerous discussions at the tenth dimension forum.

Here are some blog entries that work through the construction of the dimensions using different approaches:

What's Around the Corner?
You Are the Point
Why Do We Need More Than 3 Dimensions?
How to Make a Universe
You Can't Get There From Here
Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains
Hypercubes and Plato's Cave
Flatlanders on a Line

Matthew Buquoi started a thread at the tenth dimension forum (special thanks to Matthew and to Val Clifford for their valuable contributions to this discussion) called "Debunking the Tenth Dimension Video" which provided some good opportunities for discussion of where some of the common confusions lie.

A user comment at YouTube asked for clarification on the jump from the 5th to the 6th dimension, this is what I replied:

Think of the fifth dimension as our probability space. Our fourth dimensional line is being chosen from probabilistic branches that exist within the fifth dimension: our 4D timeline is like the stalk of a dandelion, and the 5D branches are like a dandelion gone to seed, branching out in different directions from the end of that stalk.
But there are many possible expressions of our universe that aren't available to us from our position in the fifth dimension because of what has come before: so no amount of choice, chance or circumstance will make those available branches include the version of our universe where it's 2008 and Kurt Cobain is still alive. To get to that version of the universe, then, requires us to move through the sixth dimension where every possible expression of our universe's "spacetime tree" exists simultaneously, including the branches that we will never be able to witness, and the ones that we will choose to never witness.

5b. Doesn't the animation misrepresent what a Flatlander would see?

In a word: yes. This idea is explained in the book but not in the animation. To watch a video and read a blog about this this, click here for "What Would a Flatlander Really See?".



Draw a picture of a flatlander on a flat piece of paper. Now pick the paper up and hold it horizontally at eye level, so that all you can see is the leading edge of the paper. Now you are in the flatlander's plane, and you can start to imagine what it would be like to have a flatlander's perspective: all the flatlander can perceive is lines within his plane. As with our own 3D world, whatever's closest conceals what's further away, so if you look very carefully at our drawing of our "one-eyed-Jack" flatlander in the animation, you would have to conclude that all this poor fellow can see is the inside of his own face!
Likewise, what we are seeing in the animation is a "top-down" perspective of the flatlander's world, as seen from our 3D perspective. In the animation, portraying what a flatlander would really see seemed like too big a logical leap to ask of people just starting to be introduced to these ideas, but this criticism does come up regularly so in retrospect I probably should have included this idea in the animation. Oh well!
Imagining a flatlander with two eyes allows us to think of a form of binocular vision where the flatlander's brain would be able to assemble the slightly different image of lines coming to one eye and the other, and tell which lines were closer, which ones were curving away, etc.: but this is no different from we humans, who are taking the mostly 2D information coming in to each eye and assembling that into a 3D representation in our minds. I say "mostly" 2D because we are also able to move our heads around, which even with one eye covered does give us some additional information about what is close and what is far away - so this would be the case for a "one-eyed-Jack" flatlander as well. If the flatlander moves his head around he is able to gather additional information about the lines he is perceiving, but to our 3D minds this information would most likely still be very confusing: because all the flatlander would see is a jumble of lines all in the same plane.

Here are links to a few of the forum entries where this is discussed:
http://www.tenthdimension.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=1212
http://www.tenthdimension.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=1114

Other related blog entries:
Are Pictures More Important in Science?
The Long Undulating Snake
What Would a Linelander Really See?


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


A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySBaYMESb8o

FAQ 4 - Aren't there 11 dimensions?

(Click here for the complete Imagining the Tenth Dimension FAQ list)

4. Doesn't science (M Theory) say there are really 11 dimensions?
This question was asked a lot more during the first few months of this project, when it was launched back in the summer of 2006. It still comes up from time to time. M Theory says there are 11 dimensions, but one of those is time. This framework for discussion says that time can be enfolded back into the ten spatial dimensions, and that time for whatever dimension you are examining is the way you move from one state to another. For we three dimensional creatures, we think of time as being in the fourth dimension. A two-dimensional flatlander would think of time as being in the third dimension. In any case, time is only a limited way of viewing the full dimension that it resides in.

Further reading on this:
Time is a Direction
Hypercubes and Plato's Cave
Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?

Likewise, some people wonder why this project doesn't spend time talking about Calabi-Yau manifolds. There are some important tie-ins with this project to concepts from string theory that are worthy of note: for instance, string theorists are saying our reality is created by the interaction of a seven-dimensional (D7) brane and a three-dimensional (D3) brane. The idea from the Imagining the Tenth Dimension project that the basic laws for our three dimensional reality are defined at the seventh dimension could be thought of as a way to tie this in. Likewise, the idea that the higher dimensions are curled up down at the planck length and therefore invisible to us ties in quite easily: our "line of time" is being constructed from the available probabilistic choices at the fifth dimension, one planck length at a time. This means that, like the flatlander on the mobius strip, our line of time is actually twisting and turning in the fifth dimension but we are unaware. Imagining that the higher dimensions could also have a shape that we see as a Calabi-Yau manifold is really not that big a stretch: a Calabi-Yau manifold is just another way of visualizing how are universe is enfolded within the extra dimensions. It should still be noted, though, that string theory is not the main focus of this project, and the math tools that string theorists use are inherently vastly more complex than the way of visualizing the higher dimensions that we are playing with here.

For more on this:
Flatlanders on a Line
How to Make a Universe
An Expanding 4D Sphere
Slice of Reality
The Holographic Universe
What's Around the Corner?

FAQ 3 - Why Ten Dimensions?

(Click here for the complete Imagining the Tenth Dimension FAQ list)

3. Why ten dimensions and not some other number?

One of the common arguments surrounding this concept is a presumption that ten was arbitrarily picked, perhaps because we humans have ten fingers so we like the number. Some people prefer the idea that there are infinite dimensions, some people say there is really only one dimension (our physical reality), and of course some people have their own specific interpretation of the word "dimensions" that disagrees with other interpretations, which can also draw them to conclude that this project is not about dimensions at all. Here is a blog entry that discusses this project's use of the word "dimensions", and here is a blog entry which shows how this way of visualizing agrees with the most basic definition of that word from wikipedia.

Three
Some believe that three-dimensional space is the only thing that qualifies for the word "dimensions". To their way of thinking, time is not really a dimension, it's just a quality that is overlaid on the first three spatial dimensions.

Four
Most of us are used to the idea that space is three-dimensional, and even that spacetime can be thought of as four dimensional, but some are not willing to say that time is a full spatial dimension. Here is a blog entry about that idea. Entries like "Time is a Direction" and "Hypercubes and Plato's Cave" also explore this concept.

Five
Some prefer to use the term "spacetime tree" to refer to what we're talking about here, and even those who use that term are not necessarily imagining anything more than the fourth dimension. From our big bang, at both the quantum and the macro level, there are a branching set of probabilistic outcomes, only one of which we are currently within. We look back in time and see a straight line of "time's arrow", which this project says is a line in the fourth spatial dimension. The only place where the entire spacetime tree for our universe is available is at the first instant of the big bang (or, within the Information Equals Reality paradigm, the very first step of the selection process that differentiates our universe from any of the others having different basic physical laws). From there on, certain probabilistic choices are no longer available because of previous outcomes, which is why our line of time does not wander into the parallel versions of our universe where it's 2010 and dinosaurs aren't extinct (for instance). The idea that the higher dimensions are invisible to us because they are "curled up" down at the planck length is completely compatible with this way of imagining reality. Different blog entries discussing the fifth dimension can be found here, here, and here. Other popular blog entries about the fifth dimension include "The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic", "The Fifth Dimension is a Dangerous Idea", and "Your Fifth-Dimensional Self".

Six
The sixth dimension, would be where we would find all possible branches for our spacetime tree, including the branches that are currently unavailable to us from our fifth-dimensional probability space because of what has come before, and those upcoming branches that we choose to never witness (like the branch where I stop typing this entry and run down the street naked instead). Blog entries discussing this way of imagining the sixth dimension can be found here, here, and here.


Seven
Seven is another number that commonly comes up for the highest imaginable layers to our reality, and the way of imagining reality that we're exploring here does indeed assign a special significance to that number. Here is a blog entry about that idea. As an aside, it does seem significant that string theorists are proposing that our universe is created from the interactions of a three-dimensional brane with a seven-dimensional brane.

Eight
According to this way of imagining reality, eight is most likely the highest dimension that can contain any physical expression of matter. In late 2007 a new theory deriving the basic forces and particles of our universe from an E8 matrix received favorable attention. Here is a blog entry playing with some ideas surrounding that discovery.

Nine
Some people who have stayed with this line of reasoning up to here have said that nine is really the last full dimension, since the tenth is only a point of indeterminate size. Since that point is the unobserved whole of every possible expression of matter and energy, of the information that potentially equals our reality, and it encompasses every possible expression of the dimensions below, I'm standing by my claim that there are really ten dimensions, but I understand why some think I'm bending the rules a bit as I get to the end. My blog entry "You Can't Get There From Here" talks about these ideas, as does What's Around the Corner?.

Ten
String theory says there are ten dimensions. M Theory says there are 11 dimensions, but one of those dimensions is time. If we can accept that time is not a dimension but the way you move from one state to another in a specific dimension (whichever dimension you care to examine), there is a way to fold all these ideas together. The fact that mystical systems like Kabbalah also assign a special significance to the number ten may be coincidence, or may be because of what I'm talking about: that eventually we are all going to arrive at a meeting place where science, spirituality, and ancient wisdom will be shown to be talking about the same things. Wouldn't it be far stranger if, when science finally comes up with the grand unified theory of everything, there was not something that felt intuitively right to us about those revelations, since we are participants within that reality?

Finally, here is an embedded player which should allow you to listen to a 47 minute interview conducted with me by Tom Huston, Senior Associate Editor of EnlightenNext Magazine, which gets into more of the arguments for picking ten as "the" number.



You can listen to this file right now using the above embedded player. The mp3 for this interview is available for download from archive.org under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike license - click here to download the file.

That same interview is also now available on youtube:

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

FAQ 2 - Aren't there really only 3 (or 4) dimensions?

(Click here for the complete Imagining the Tenth Dimension FAQ list)

2. Aren't there really only 3 (or 4) dimensions and the rest is unproven?

The traditional viewpoint has been that there are three dimensions of space, and that time is not a full dimension but rather a quality which gets overlaid upon our 3D space. Some accept that spacetime can be thought of as four dimensional but that is far as they will go, there are no dimensions beyond spacetime.

Books like Lee Smolin's "The Trouble With Physics" have stated that the study of string theory (and its extra dimensions) became so prevalent that it was at the expense of other avenues of study that didn't require the existence of higher dimensions. In the past year, with Smolin's book and Peter Woit's "Not Even Wrong" catching the imagination of the mainstream press, it became fashionable to dismiss any higher dimensional theories as being nothing more than mathematical self-indulgence. That pendulum is swinging more to the center where it should be now.

Which is not to say that the idea of extra dimensions being unnecessary has gone away, but rather that areas of research that do and do not require their existence are now being pursued somewhat more equitably. While thinking of spacetime as being fourth-dimensional has support within the scientific community, the hunt currently continues for incontrovertible proof of any extra dimensions beyond four. One of the more interesting possibilities is the recent discovery of a void 1 billion light years across that contains almost no stars, galaxies, or dark matter: some scientists are proposing this could be the evidence of our universe colliding with another, an event which could be proof of extra dimensions, which also ties to the string theory idea that there could be ten to the power of five hundred universes within the multiverse.

For the general public, it's easy to understand why extra dimensions are questioned - we can't see them, they don't affect us, why should we believe they exist? Here are some of the blog entries discussing extra dimensions and their possible existence:

What's Around the Corner?
Time is a Direction
Hypercubes and Plato's Cave
Why Do We Need More Than 3 Dimensions?
Dr. Mel's 4D Glasses
Information Equals Reality
Scrambled Eggs
Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?
Are We a 3D Sphere on a 4D Hypersphere?
Strength of Gravity, Speed of Light
Finite But Unbounded?

FAQ 1 -Who is Rob Bryanton?

(Click here for the complete Imagining the Tenth Dimension FAQ list)

1. Who is Rob Bryanton and why did he create this project?

My blogger profile is here, it is a brief introduction to who I am.

A blog entry about some of this project's underlying ideas is here.

A blog entry about how this book ended up being written is here.

The main Preamble link at tenthdimension.com also talks about my intentions.