Wrapping It Up in the Tenth Dimension

"Why isn't there nothingness? Nothingness would have been decidedly elegant. In the Ultimate Multiverse, a universe consisting of nothing does exist. As far as we can tell, nothingness is a perfectly logical possibility and so must be included in a multiverse that embraces all universes."

- Brian Greene, discussing a concept which with this project we have called the Omniverse, in his book The Hidden Reality

At the end of the Introductory chapter of my book, I said this:

"...the point of this exercise will be that by imagining all ten dimensions, we will have imagined a fabric that can account for all aspects of reality. A tall order! Let’s begin."

How do we get to the tenth dimension from the ninth? As with every other dimension, we envision a point that encompasses the entire ninth dimension, and call that a "point" in the next dimension up. Persons familiar with my animation know what I say next:

"...if we’re going to imagine the tenth dimension as continuing the cycle, and being a line, then we’re going to have to imagine a different point that we can draw that line to. But there’s no place left to go! By the time we have imagined all possible timelines for all possible universes as being a single point in the tenth dimension, it appears that our journey is done."

But is our journey really done? Far from it. The ramifications of this way of visualizing the dimensions are many indeed, and that's why I continue to find things to discuss about this project in my blog, and that's why I've published about four hundred videos at my youtube channel over the past five years since this project was launched. Some of the ideas that we haven't even touched on yet since we started this latest series two months ago include the following:

1. Some people suggest it's arbitrary to stop at ten dimensions. Did we run out of fingers so we decided there couldn't be any more? Indeed, if you're not assigning any meaning to the individual dimensions, then the point-line-plane postulate allows you to keep adding as many dimensions as you want. People also ask Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions? In my book and my blog I've insisted that ten is really all you need to consider all aspects of reality, and that supporters of M-Theory acknowledge that there are ways in which the 11 dimensions they are talking about are functionally equivalent to the ten dimensions string theory is talking about. The graphic at right comes from New Scientist magazine, in a recent special feature called "Instant Expert: Theory of Everything", please do follow the link to read the whole article.

Another way of showing this equivalence is to say that M-Theory proposes ten spatial dimensions plus time. With my project, I say that time isn't a dimension, it's a way of describing change from state to state within any  dimension: so the tenth dimension with no time is the Ultimate Ensemble that Max Tegmark spoke of, or the timelessness that Gevin Giorbran spoke of in Everything Forever, or the Ultimate Multiverse that Brian Greene refers to in the quote with which we started this entry. As I said in my original animation, if there were no superstrings vibrating in the tenth dimension, there would be no reality precipitated in the dimensions below: no time means no vibrations, no change. And because every one of the spatial dimensions we're looking at here are mutually perpendicular to the others, change in the tenth dimension automatically affects the entire system in various ways.

2. A number of people who have watched my animation notice that by the time you get to ten in its unobserved state, in a way you're back to where you started - with a point of indeterminate size. As I've said before, this was the intent of the helix logo created for this project - the 0 (or nothingness) and the 10 (or the Omniverse) really are connected concepts, and that's why I represent them as being on a line inside the other dimensions as you can see in the animation below. Would this connection allow for a repeating cycle effectively creating infinite dimensions? Though some people have suggested that idea, it doesn't feel quite right to me. The idea that there are really no dimensions, that there are just infinite vectors within one underlying fabric which is dimensionless, actually resonates more strongly for me, because that's a way of describing the tenth dimension using a different mindset. But personally, I still believe there are good reasons to believe in the existence of extra dimensions beyond space-time, and that there are good opportunities within these paths to the infinitely large and the infinitesimally small for us to consider the continuously repeating recursion that relates conceptually to Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop, or John Wheeler's  description of the universe as a self-excited circuit. In Imagining the Ninth Dimension, we looked at Stuart Kauffman's idea that there is a force for ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, and we'll return to ideas related to all this further on in this entry.

3. This takes us to a very big question. If we're trying to build an image which reflects "all aspects of reality", how do life and consciousness fit into this picture? Erwin Schrödinger's definition of life is that it's "a unique process which creates pockets of negative entropy". Physicists talk about the beginning of the universe being the most highly ordered/lowest entropy version of our universe, and how the "arrow of time" represents an overall climb in the amount of entropy, despite the efforts of life within these little pockets where (as Dylan Thomas put it so beautifully) it 'rages against the dying of the light'. This theme of life and consciousness being like a fire, a spark, that somehow engages with space-time and our fifth-dimensional probability space to keep itself moving forward is the theme of a number of the 26 songs I created for this project. I talked about those songs and this way of thinking about life and creativity in a blog entry called Novelty.

4. The phrase "self-excited circuit" comes from a paper published in 1979 by physicist John Wheeler, you can read about it in the wikipedia article on Digital Physics. As part of his "Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU)", Christopher Langan (who some readers will know as "the smartest man in America") has published an animated version of the simple drawing Wheeler created for his paper on the self-excited circuit, showing a "U" (standing for universe), incorporating an eyeball representing the quantum observer, looking at its "tail" that represents the "information" side of the "information equals reality" concept that we talk about regularly with this project. Wheeler also coined the phrase "'it' from 'bit'"which ties nicely to these discussions. That animation is pictured below.

So is the universe itself a self-excited circuit, that was most excited at the big bang and is slowly winding down from there? Or was the universe in a superposition of possible states until life first emerged somewhere, and began observing more organized versions of the universal wave function from that point on in the world line? The Biocentric Universe theory supports the latter idea. Perhaps Stuart Kauffman's God 2.0 supports the former? I think there's interesting evidence for both ideas, but ultimately I lean more towards the idea that there are organizing patterns in the extra dimensions which exist outside of time and space which have selected this (or any other) universe, and which keep the universe from dissolving into chaos. Gravity and Love is a blog entry from this past December which takes this idea out to a more metaphysical level if you're interested. I have used similar logic to argue for dark matter and dark energy as evidence of extra dimensions.

In my follow-up book to Imagining the Tenth Dimension, which is a collaboration with visual artist Marilyn E. Robertson called O is for Omniverse, we devoted the letter "J" to John Wheeler:

j is for John Wheeler, a famous physicist
who drew a strange eyeball looking at its tail
as a way to imagine that some branches of our line
might be changed in the past as we look back from today
so the branching tree that extends from "now"
is even more surprising: it branches either way

Here's a video showing the letters "I" and "J" from that book, you can see a lot more if you go to omniverse.tv. 

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA_epL_rEW4

5. If the universe had the least amount of entropy at its beginning, does that mean that in a sense Schrödinger thought it was the most "alive" back then? Gevin Giorbran's remarkable insight, in his book Everything Forever, was that we're not moving from low entropy to high entropy with our arrow of time: instead we're moving from a high grouping order to a high symmetry order. I like this because it allows for a way to imagine a universal creative force which expresses itself throughout the world line of the universe, and which makes sense when we view our universe as a single data set from a timeless perspective. From our own vantage point, then, both time and anti-time represent the same thing: a naturally occurring return to balance. Ultimately our universe or any other arises from a breaking of symmetry, and "outside" of this system is a return to the underlying fabric of reality: the unobserved tenth dimension, the Ultimate Ensemble, the Teilhardian Omega Point, the Godelian "outside the system", the computational underpinnings behind digital physics or Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, ultimate enlightenment, or the Omniverse. And that's what we're visualizing with every single dimension in this project - how can we perceive any dimension from "outside" of itself, from the truest perspective, which is timelessness?

6. One of the surprises for me with this project was how many people from the psychedelics community have embraced this way of visualizing the dimensions: for instance, author and research scientist David Jay Brown, a world-renowned expert on psychedelics, said this about my book: "Imagining the Tenth Dimension is one of the most brilliantly-conceived and mind-stretching books that I've ever encountered." With no psychedelics experience myself, I find this particularly fascinating: in this blog, I've talked about Graham Hancock's amazing book Supernatural, which advances the idea that persons around the world and throughout human history have had experiences and visions when they are in altered states of consciousness (whether those are self-induced trance states, or through the use of psychoactive substances) that show remarkable similarities. Do such experiences "lift the veil" so to speak, and allow people to see actual aspects of the extra dimensions? It's a possibility I find very attractive. In my book and this blog I've explored many other more "out there" concepts that can tie to this: are prescience, deja vu, out of body experiences, lucid dreaming, perhaps even ghosts and spirit voices all examples of how there are patterns of awareness which exist outside of our limited space-time window into reality?

7. Another of the surprises for me with this project was the people who looked at my helix logo and presumed this was all about Kabbalah, because of the similarities to The Tree of Life (pictured at left). Yes, I see the connections, but I don't recall ever seeing the Tree of Life until after my book was published and comments started to come my way about this coincidence. What I find particularly interesting is that there are schools of thought within the Kabbalah which  teach that we can divide our reality into three triads, which can be summed up as the material, the moral, and the intellectual. In the last chapter of my book, I reached a similar conclusion that there are three systems interacting through constructive interference, 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 of grouping, or waveforms. Likewise, it's interesting to relate this to Popperian cosmology: philosopher Karl Popper proposed that there are three worlds: the physical, the mind which observes, and mental patterns of information (I talked about all this in greater detail in my blog entry Three Becomes One). Is this recurring idea that there is a physical world, a world created by observation/participation, and an underlying realm of information another example of how Imagining the Tenth Dimension plugs into some deeper truths about our reality? I believe it is. And constructive interference is an important phrase to keep in mind through all this, as it applies to quantum mechanics, the universe as a hologram, Wheeler's self-excited circuit, and the role of life and consciousness in creating this universe or any other.

8. Let's look at this idea more carefully: "a world created by observation/participation". In Imagining the Eighth Dimension, we mentioned a concept from a paper published by Lee Smolin and others at arxiv.org, which proposes that we can have a deeper understanding of general relativity if we accept that "different observers construct different spacetimes, which are observer-dependent slices of phase space". And with this project, we keep returning to Everett's idea that there is an unchanging "set of all possible states" or "phase space" which exists outside of spacetime, and that quantum mechanics makes the most sense when we understand that this is not a process of collapse we are talking about here, it is only a process of observation. Does that mean then that we, as quantum observers, are each creating our own reality? And if so, how much control do we have?

There's no question that each of us is at the center of the observed universe, and even though that might sound like a return to ancient thinking that the sun revolves around the earth, the cosmological horizon is real, and this fact would be just as true for an observer on the other side of our currently observed universe - they too would find themselves to be at the center of a space-time sphere, with their very own unique version of the cosmological horizon.

So here I am in a unique universe created through my participation as a quantum observer, which is part of a 5D probability space (as we discussed in Imagining the Fifth Dimension). Does that mean I'm a part of Wheeler's self-excited circuit, the universe observing itself? Does that make me part of a universal creative force, or as Einstein referred to it, "the Old One"? In fact, am I an aspect of God, observing some unique aspect of My creation? Or am I part of an underlying life force which creates pockets of negative entropy, pushing against the natural decline of the universe? These are all different ways of thinking about the same idea, use whichever one you're the most comfortable with if you feel so inclined. For me, the most important part of this discussion is not what label you place upon this process, but the fact that this way of visualizing our reality presents a strong argument for free will. Yes, there is ultimately only one underlying form, one underlying geometry, but you and I (and all living things) are within something much more interesting. We are each moving points within a fifth dimensional probability space, observing a shared consensus reality which connects us all together, but also each observing our own unique version of that space.

For persons trapped in negative loops of abuse or addiction, this is particularly important to understand. If free will is an illusion, then how can we hope to break out of these patterns? The fifth dimension shows the way. As I say in my song Addictive Personality:

Every day is a new day
Every day you’re back to one
And today can be the new day
When you say you’re finally done

Not all habits are bad, of course, and it's in our nature to be attracted to things that make us feel good. The addictions we're talking about here are the ones that are the opposite of the universal creative force, the ones that conspire to extinguish that "spark" of life which Schrödinger described. Each of us, with our free will, have to be the one to decide whether we're on the path we want to be on, and to recognize that we have the power to change that path if we choose to do so. Does that mean we're magical creatures, capable of changing anything about our reality? Does it mean a starving child in Africa can become rich and famous simply by thinking better thoughts? No. But it also means that we are not the powerless automatons that the hard determinists would have us believe ourselves to be, and that there is a constantly evolving "best possible version" of ourselves that already exists within our fifth dimensional probability space which we each have the potential to get to with the choices we're able to make.
 
9. One of the 26 songs I attached to this project is called "Automatic". In it, I talk about the powerful idea put forth by Julian Jaynes in his groundbreaking book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". Jaynes proposed that until about 3,000 years ago, humans lived their lives with their conscious and subconscious minds fully integrated. When the subconscious developed a plan or had an intuition, humans heard this as a "voice" inside their heads, which they often interpreted to be the voices of gods or ancestors. Then something happened: the "narrator" voice of the conscious mind assumed dominance, and the subconscious mind's processes became more submerged. Still, there are a great many activities which we perform better when we can quiet our "narrator voice": driving a car, hitting a golf ball, playing a musical instrument or typing on a keyboard all go better when we can get our narrator voice to stop conducting traffic, saying "do this, now do that", and just let things flow. And yet, despite the advantages of this mode of operation, most of us have been taught to be suspicious of those moments when we stop narrating: we're told to stop daydreaming, get our minds back in the game, and so on.

Most of us are comfortable with the idea that there is some kind of duality to our consciousness. The difference between left brain/right brain approaches to processing the data coming in from our senses is well documented. And with this project, we have often talked about the "me" that is attached to the physical body, and the other parts of our awareness that are more connected outside of space and time. Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's book My Stroke of Insight is amazing to me because it blends these two ideas so beautifully - is the right brain more connected to those larger patterns that are outside of our physical reality? Dr. Taylor provides a compelling personal narrative that tells us this is so.

Here again is where we get into those more metaphysical ideas - that what I call "me" is much more than the collection of memories attached to my physical body, and instinct, intuition, inspiration, creativity, and the underlying processes of life itself are part of the gigantic patterns that exist outside of our physical reality. This is a dynamic system we're talking about, with each of us assuming new patterns of awareness, discarding old ones, becoming entrained and entraining others with the wave-like interactions of constructive and destructive interference that are occurring within the extra dimensions to create our observed reality. Is it possible for these patterns to exist completely separate from a physical body? Proponents of out-of-body experiences and lucid dreaming would say yes, and anyone with a sufficiently convincing supernatural story to tell will also be much more likely to accept this possibility.

Anthony Peake's work puts a tighter focus on these ideas - in his 2008 book The Daemon, he offers evidence that each of us have a left brain/physical consciousness called the Eidolon; and we each have a right brain/metaphysical awareness called the Daemon, which has the foreknowledge of what is to come and sometimes "steers" the physical body into better outcomes. In terms of Everett's Many Worlds and my approach to visualizing the dimensions, could this Daemon be an awareness operating from the sixth dimensional phase space of all possible outcomes for our universe, traveling from conception to death with each version of a unique individual as they physically navigate the possible world lines of their fifth dimensional probability space?

10. This project keeps coming back to quantum mechanics: the fact that our reality is divided into quantum "frames" and not continuous, the branching probabilistic outcomes of Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, and the idea that everything is potentially connected within the underlying quantum world is central to this "new way of thinking about time and space". Ultimately, does everything fit together through instantaneous quantum superposition across space, across time, and across all of the different versions of our universe or any other? Is it startling to think that the point of indeterminate size that we start from is also where we end up with this project, and to consider that the nested hyperspheres of each additional dimension can also be encompassed by this point of indeterminate size? No matter where we end up, we need to acknowledge that quantum mechanics is the most successful theory of reality devised so far, so whatever Theory of Everything we're trying to get to, we should keep in mind the truth about the underlying quantum nature of the universe we're in.

So as we think about there being a duality to our awareness (a left brain/physical, and a right brain/metaphysical), it's interesting to think of our physical existence as it's defined by branching paths within the fifth dimensional probability space and the quantum wave function. In a blog entry called Entangled Neurons, we looked at a new scientific study indicating that quantum entanglement is intrinsic to the process of memory creation, and in Entangled Awareness and OBEs, I said this:

...right at this instant, I am part of a cloud of probabilistic "me"s that are all continuing on the same general path, the same branch. That's true at the quantum level, and it's true at the macro level: all of the tiny random occurrences and inconsequential decisions (shall I put my hand here or here when I push that door open?) tend to cancel each other out, to keep us moving in the same trajectory. It's only when our choice, or chance, or the actions of others create an event that really does split us onto a new fifth-dimensional path that a long-term memory is created. 

For years, scientists have been fond of saying that quantum physics has nothing to do with the warm and wet world of living things, but that opinion is now changing. A paper published last year at arxiv.org suggests that DNA is held together using quantum entanglement. In other blog entries like The Quantum Observer and Creativity and the Quantum Universe, we've looked at new evidence that photosynthesis and bird navigation are also utilizing quantum processes. Ideas such as these are the first inklings of a new science called quantum biology, and this all ties very nicely to the idea that life itself is a unique process which is engaged with our space-time in ways that transcend the limits of the "here" and the "now", in the same way that quantum entanglement and superposition seem supremely mysterious until we accept that there is more to the universe than the limited space-time reality we see around us.

Likewise, the new buzz around the evidence that neutrinos have been detected that arrived 60 billionths of a second earlier than the speed of light is very interesting, but I would caution people who says this disproves Einstein's Theory of Relativity: in my opinion, this would only be the case if you don't believe in the existence of extra dimensions. But if these neutrinos somehow took a tiny shortcut outside of spacetime, and essentially "burrowed" through the fifth dimension to arrive a little earlier, that would not violate relativity, and if this effect were proved and confirmed by other experimenters this could well be the first direct evidence of the existence of extra dimensions. How cool would that be??

As I say in song number 1 of the 26 songs I created for this project: Everything Fits Together. I hope that this project has helped to awaken your senses to the possibilities of just how true that phrase really is.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nAS2trDuck


Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: New Video - Is Energy Not Conserved?

Previous:
Imagining the Ninth Dimension
Imagining the Eighth Dimension
Imagining the Seventh Dimension
Imagining the Sixth Dimension
Imagining the Fifth Dimension
Imagining the Fourth Dimension
Imagining the Third Dimension
Imagining the Second Dimension

The Quantum Observer

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgw3Lv7R1w0

When Hugh Everett III first came up with his Many Worlds interpretation in 1957, he made an important distinction: when we observe one outcome or another, we are not really collapsing the quantum wave function, we are merely observing it in a particular state. The other potential states continue to exist, just as real as the one we're observing. Whether we call it "observing" or "collapsing" doesn't change what we see, but it can change the implications of whether there are actually other equally real parallel universe versions of our reality, or whether those parallel universes are just an imaginary outcome of a thought experiment.

Everett's thesis, despite support from John Wheeler (one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century) was met with indifference and in some cases derision from the physics community. So, instead of becoming a physicist upon his graduation, Everett took a job as a defense analyst with the Pentagon. Hugh Everett III has been credited with developing the infamous Cold War policy of Mutual Assured Destruction: the idea that if every nuclear power has enough atomic bombs to destroy the world, then no one should be tempted to start a war. Isn't it interesting to think about this policy, abbreviated appropriately enough as MAD, in the context of the Many Worlds Interpretation?

I've just come across a new book I'm going to order, pictured here, which is about this man's life: The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III: Multiple Universes, Mutual Assured Destruction, and the Meltdown of a Nuclear Family.

So. If each of us is observing the wave function of the universe in a particular state, we are each a unique Quantum Observer. Should that make each of us feel isolated, or connected? Gevin Giorbran called this the Quantum Isolation Problem. With my 2011 entries I've been showing a way of thinking about how our quantum world is connected to the fourth dimension, and our "duration" is in the fifth, but how really both are interchangeable: this means that which label you assign to any particular spatial dimension depends upon your frame of reference established by the previous ones.

Last time, in Timelike Entanglement, I quoted a paragraph from my book and mentioned that the next paragraph was about The Quantum Observer, a topic that comes up a number of times with this project. Here's that paragraph now:

A particular meme-set, when it is attached to a physical body, is the quantum observer for that person, collapsing the wave of possibilities along the arrow of time and experiencing life as we know it. However, since that set of memes can also be thought of as existing completely separately from a physical body, there are many other ramifications to this.

Some of those ramifications get quite metaphysical, but this time let's look at some new articles that have come out recently to show how the quantum world connects to the fourth dimension, birds as quantum observers, and life as a subset of a quantum wave function.

Here's a link to a paper published at Cornell University Library's arXiv.org demonstrating the math behind Quantum Mechanics in Four Dimensions. Then, check out this new article at New Scientist magazine, "Quantum States Last Longer in Birds' Eyes". It reveals that birds are able to maintain electrons in an entangled state longer at the back of their eyes than any scientist working in a lab under carefully controlled conditions has been able to do so far. The birds, it appears are able to use the information gleaned from these entangled electrons to aid in their navigation abilities.

Finally, Micheal Brooks published a wonderful summation of the many interpretations of what it means to be a quantum observer last week in New Scientist: the article is called "Quantum Reality: The Many Meanings of Life". Here's some paragraphs from that article:

A CENTURY, it seems, is not enough. One hundred years ago this year, the first world physics conference took place in Brussels, Belgium. The topic under discussion was how to deal with the strange new quantum theory and whether it would ever be possible to marry it to our everyday experience, leaving us with one coherent description of the world.

It is a question physicists are still wrestling with today. Quantum particles such as atoms and molecules have an uncanny ability to appear in two places at once, spin clockwise and anticlockwise at the same time, or instantaneously influence each other when they are half a universe apart. The thing is, we are made of atoms and molecules, and we can't do any of that. Why? "At what point does quantum mechanics cease to apply?" asks Harvey Brown, a philosopher of science at the University of Oxford.

Although an answer has yet to emerge, the struggle to come up with one is proving to be its own reward. It has, for instance, given birth to the new field of quantum information that has gained the attention of high-tech industries and government spies. It is giving us a new angle of attack on the problem of finding the ultimate theory of physics, and it might even tell us where the universe came from. Not bad for a pursuit that a quantum cynic - one Albert Einstein - dismissed as a "gentle pillow" that lulls good physicists to sleep.

Unfortunately for Einstein quantum theory has turned out to be a masterpiece. No experiment has ever disagreed with its predictions, and we can be confident that it is a good way to describe how the universe works on the smallest scales. Which leaves us with only one problem: what does it mean?

Physicists try to answer this with "interpretations" - philosophical speculations, fully compliant with experiments, of what lies beneath quantum theory. "There is a zoo of interpretations," says Vlatko Vedral, who divides his time between the University of Oxford and the Centre for Quantum Technologies in Singapore.

No other theory in science has so many different ways of looking at it. How so? And will any one win out over the others?

Take what is now known as the Copenhagen interpretation, for example, introduced by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. It says that any attempt to talk about an electron's location within an atom, for instance, is meaningless without making a measurement of it. Only when we interact with an electron by trying to observe it with a non-quantum, or "classical", device does it take on any attribute that we would call a physical property and therefore become part of reality.

Then there is the "many worlds" interpretation, where quantum strangeness is explained by everything having multiple existences in myriad parallel universes. Or you might prefer the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation, where quantum theory is considered incomplete: we are lacking some hidden properties that, if we knew them, would make sense of everything.

There are plenty more, such as the Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber interpretation, the transactional interpretation (which has particles travelling backwards in time), Roger Penrose's gravity-induced collapse interpretation, the modal interpretation... in the last 100 years, the quantum zoo has become a crowded and noisy place.

I liked this article because it points to a claim I've been making since my project began: that the Many Worlds Interpretation is seeing increasing acceptance from mainstream science. But as we've seen here, it's not the only game in town! Later on in the article, it offers further explanation for the rising popularity of Many Worlds.

Considering the nature of things on the scale of the universe has also provided Copenhagen's critics with ammunition. If the process of measurement by a classical observer is fundamental to creating the reality we observe, what performed the observations that brought the contents of the universe into existence? "You really need to have an observer outside the system to make sense - but there's nothing outside the universe by definition," says Brown.

That's why, Brown says, cosmologists now tend to be more sympathetic to an interpretation created in the late 1950s by Princeton University physicist Hugh Everett. His "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics says that reality is not bound to a concept of measurement.

Instead, the myriad different possibilities inherent in a quantum system each manifest in their own universe. David Deutsch, a physicist at the University of Oxford and the person who drew up the blueprint for the first quantum computer, says he can now only think of the computer's operation in terms of these multiple universes. To him, no other interpretation makes sense.

He and Brown both claim that many worlds is already gaining traction among cosmologists. Arguments from string theory, cosmology and observational astronomy have led some cosmologists to suggest we live in one of many universes. Last year, Anthony Aguirre of the University of California, Santa Cruz, Max Tegmark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and David Layzer of Harvard University laid out a scheme that ties together ideas from cosmology and many worlds (New Scientist, 28 August 2010, p 6).

I know it looks like I've quoted a lot here, but there's still much more to the full article and I invite you to follow the link and read the whole thing.

So, if we're each moving through a probability space of possible universes, are we causing reality to occur, or is reality simply happening to us as we helplessly observe one outcome after another? We'll return to this ongoing discussion of how much control do we really have as we navigate through the information that becomes reality, with an entry next week called Changing Your Brain. But right before that, let's look at this question: "What Is Reality?".

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

The Flexi-laws of Physics

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emv4zQK3XTg

One of the ideas that relates very strongly to our recent discussions here at Imagining the Tenth Dimension is the experimentally observed proof of what is known as "Wheeler's Delayed Choice Experiment". Amazingly, this proof confirms one of the ideas we've talked about a lot with this project - that the branching possibilities that we as quantum observers make can select not only different paths within the future, but retroactively change things in the past as well!

While there have been a number of different experiments conducted to demonstrate Wheeler's concept since he first proposed it back in 1978, it wasn't until 2007 that the first "clean" experimental test was performed in France by the team of Alain Aspect, Philippe Grangier, and Jean-François Roch.

The diagram at left shows a version of Wheeler's delayed choice experiment. In a nutshell, it is based upon the classic experiments with photons passing through either one slit or two, and the confounding but well-known result of those demonstrations is that photons can be shown to be a particle or a wave, depending upon whether they pass through one slit or two. Wheeler's proposed experiment, then, was based upon not selecting the one slit or two slit path until after the photon had passed by, and Wheeler's seemingly counter-intuitive result he was proposing is that the photons will still demonstrate the properly corresponding wave or particle pattern by the time they then arrive at the final detector screen: it's as if the photons go back in space-time and "choose" to behave in the correct manner, as if the one slit or two slit pattern had in fact been there when it wasn't!

The explanatory diagram we're looking at here was attached to a New Scientist article published two years ago, written by physicist Paul Davies. This much-discussed article was called "The Flexi-laws of Physics": here's some quotes from that article.

SCIENCE WORKS because the universe is ordered in an intelligible way. The most refined manifestation of this order is found in the laws of physics, the fundamental mathematical rules that govern all natural phenomena. One of the biggest questions of existence is the origin of those laws: where do they come from, and why do they have the form that they do?

Until recently this problem was considered off-limits to scientists. Their job was to discover the laws and apply them, not inquire into their form or origin. Now the mood has changed. One reason for this stems from the growing realisation that the laws of physics possess a weird and surprising property: collectively they give the universe the ability to generate life and conscious beings, such as ourselves, who can ponder the big questions.

If the universe came with any old rag-bag of laws, life would almost certainly be ruled out. Indeed, changing the existing laws by even a scintilla could have lethal consequences. For example, if protons were 0.1 per cent heavier than neutrons, rather than the other way about, all the protons coughed out of the big bang would soon have decayed into neutrons. Without protons and their crucial electric charge, atoms could not exist and chemistry would be impossible.

Physicists and cosmologists know many such examples of uncanny bio-friendly "coincidences" and fortuitous fine-tuned properties in the laws of physics. Like Baby Bear's porridge in the story of Goldilocks, our universe seems "just right" for life. It looks, to use astronomer Fred Hoyle's dramatic description, as if "a super-intellect has been monkeying with physics". So what is going on?

A popular way to explain the Goldilocks factor is the multiverse theory. This says that a god's-eye-view of the cosmos would reveal a patchwork quilt of universes, of which ours is but an infinitesimal fragment. Crucially, each patch, or "universe", comes with its own distinctive set of local by-laws. Maybe the by-laws are assigned randomly, as in a vast cosmic lottery. It is then no surprise that we find ourselves living in a patch so well suited to life, for we could hardly inhabit a bio-hostile patch. Our universe has simply hit the cosmic jackpot. Those universes that can't support life - the vast majority in fact - go unobserved.

Keeping in mind that this article was published two years ago, one of the things that has changed since then is there are many more mainstream physicists willing to accept the idea of this "multiverse of universes", each universe having its own unique set of basic physical laws, and all of those universes just as real as our own. We talked about this change, for instance, in "Does the Multiverse Really Exist?". Later in the article Dr. Davies says this:

Four hundred years on, physicists still cling to this model of physical law, even though they have no idea what the external source of the laws might be. So long as science appeals to something outside the universe, we must abandon any hope of ultimately understanding why the universe is as it is. A large element of mystery will lie forever beyond our reach.

There is, however, another possibility: relinquish the notion of immutable, transcendent laws and try to explain the observed behaviour entirely in terms of processes occurring within the universe. As it happens, there is a growing minority of scientists whose concept of physical law departs radically from the orthodox view and whose ideas offer an ideal model for developing this picture. The burgeoning field of computer science has shifted our view of the physical world from that of a collection of interacting material particles to one of a seething network of information. In this way of looking at nature, the laws of physics are a form of software, or algorithm, while the material world - the hardware - plays the role of a gigantic computer.

Does this sound familiar? Regular readers of this blog will recognize this constantly recurring refrain: "information equals reality". The article then goes on to state ideas very similar to what we've been talking about lately with discussions of the Biocentric Universe theory - that the ability for observations now to change certain things in the past could be extended all the way to the idea that the emergence of life actually fine-tuned things about our universe, changing those "flexi-laws" of the indeterminate beginnings of our universe into more "locked in" laws - but the actual "locking in" doesn't happen when life begins. Rather, through the process of retro-causality it occurs back near the beginning of our universe! Again, these are ideas we've talked about from a number of perspectives in my book and this blog, but it's always nice to see mainstream physicists showing that these ideas are not as crazy as critics of my project have been claiming. Paul Davies then goes on to explain how the verified proof of Wheeler's Delayed Choice experiment confirms that it is possible for observations made "now" to affect the past, and ends with this concluding paragraph:

In the orthodox view, the laws of physics are floating in an explanatory void. Ironically, the essence of the scientific method is rationality and logic: we suppose that things are the way they are for a reason. Yet when it comes to the laws of physics themselves, well, we are asked to accept that they exist "reasonlessly". If that were correct, then the entire edifice of science would ultimately be founded on absurdity. By bringing the laws of physics within the compass of science, and fusing nature and its laws into a mutually self-consistent explanation, we have some hope of understanding why the laws are what they are. In addition, we can begin to glimpse how we, the observers of this remarkable universe, fit into the great cosmic scheme.

Paul Davies is director of Beyond, a scientific think tank at Arizona State University, Tempe. His latest book is The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the universe just right for life? In the US it is called Cosmic Jackpot.

Next blog, we're going to continue this discussion of where the basic laws of our universe come from, as we look at an article written by cosmologist and astrophysicist Martin Rees.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Other blogs where we've talked about retro-causality and causal chains extending both forward and back from our "now":
The Long Undulating Snake
The Big Bang is an Illusion
The Biocentric Universe Part 2
John Wheeler and Digital Physics


Next: Alien Mathematics

The Biocentric Universe

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4S9hAkGbyY


(Edit - I talk about this more a couple of months later in The Biocentric Universe Part 2)

above image is from the Discover article "The Biocentric Universe", credited to NASA/ESA/A. Schaller (for STScI)

Two blogs ago, we talked about "Evolution's Fast Lane". Last blog we discussed "Does the Multiverse Really Exist?". This time let's tie those ideas together.

My friend Chuck Salyers has been encouraging me to learn more about Dr. Bruce Lipton, so I'm now waiting for my order to arrive from Amazon: an audio book called Spontaneous Evolution: Our Positive Future and How to Get There From Here. Bruce Lipton's body of work, including his popular book The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter, & Miracles seems to be saying many of the same things I have about our role as quantum observers, the new science of epigenetics, and understanding that we have much more control over our reality than we've been led to believe: which is not to say that I can use my free will to make my skin dark and not have to worry about sunburns, but it is to say that there is not just one inevitable path that each of us and the entire universe are moving upon.

Here's what Dr. Lipton's website says about his work:

The new sciences quantum physics and epigenetics are revolutionizing our understanding of the link between mind and matter, challenging established scientific theories and prompting a complete re-evaluation of life as we have known it.

One of the shining lights to emerge from these new sciences is cellular biologist and best selling author, Bruce Lipton PhD, whose book, The Biology of Belief, was awarded 2006’s Best Science Book of the Year.

Lipton maintains that pivotal to this shift in thinking within the scientific community has been groundbreaking insight into the function of genes.

But wait, you might be thinking, isn't epigenetics only about how an individual can better manage the genetic hand of cards they've been dealt? What does that have to do with evolution? Here's the answer, found in an article published last week in Science News, which talks about the concept of epigenetic inheritance. Not only can modifying your lifestyle change how your own genes are expressed, this can also change what genes you pass on to your offspring!

Where does all this lead us? There was an article published in Discover Magazine this month that takes the question of "how much control do we have over our reality" to a fantastic conclusion: here's a link to the article called "The Biocentric Universe Theory: How Life Creates Time, Space, and the Cosmos." Let me quote from the article, which was written by Robert Lanza and Bob Berman:

Biocentrism holds that the universe is created by life and not the other way around. This is an explanation for and extension of the participatory anthropic principle described by the physicist John Wheeler, a disciple of Einstein’s who coined the terms wormhole and black hole.

Even the most fundamental elements of physical reality, space and time, strongly support a biocentric basis for the cosmos.

According to biocentrism, time does not exist independently of the life that notices it. The reality of time has long been questioned by an odd alliance of philosophers and physicists. The former argue that the past exists only as ideas in the mind, which themselves are neuroelectrical events occurring strictly in the present moment. Physicists, for their part, note that all of their working models, from Isaac Newton’s laws through quantum mechanics, do not actually describe the nature of time. The real point is that no actual entity of time is needed, nor does it play a role in any of their equations. When they speak of time, they inevitably describe it in terms of change. But change is not the same thing as time.

I've talked about similar ideas with my project, with entries like The Flipbook Universe, The Past is an Illusion, Google and the Group Mind, and The Big Bang and the Big Pie: if we are to accept the idea of "reverse fine-tuning" of past conditions (and many quantum physicists do), this requires us to adopt a timeless perspective, which means that as we visualize the multiverse we are "outside" of space-time, in a place where "the distinction between past, present and future is meaningless" (one of Einstein's often-quoted phrases). Biocentrism takes these ideas to an extreme, but if physicists like Seth Lloyd and Anton Zeilinger are correct when they say that Information Equals Reality, then what are we really talking about here? Each of us is navigating through a data set that already exists, as we just discussed in "Does the Multiverse Really Exist?". In entries like Your Fifth-Dimensional Self and in my book, I've talked about how this means there is already a "best possible you" that exists within the multiverse, and recognizing how you are already connected to that version of you is a way to help yourself get there. This will also be the subject of my next entry, "Now vs. the Future".

One of my most popular videos over at YouTube shows another way of visualizing the data that we're moving through, one planck length at a time as we select from our fifth dimensional probability space. As Brian Greene says in the New Scientist article we discussed last time, How to Map the Multiverse, ultimately what we are talking about is like a landscape of different universes that are all just as real as the one we find ourselves to be in. Here's that YouTube video, it's called "Imagining the Omniverse".

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6D3CgF8_qk

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Top Ten Blogs, May '09 Report

Imagining the Omniverse

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=V6D3CgF8_qk

Frank Wilczek, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics, has just published a new book on the latest thinking in physics and cosmology called "Lightness of Being". To quote from the recent review of this book in New Scientist Magazine:

...if the Higgs boson is not responsible for most of the mass around us, what is? The answer, Wilczek tells us, is empty space.

Still, the idea that all familiar mass - our desks, chairs, bodies - comes from energy crystallized out of nothing is rather mind-bending. And it leads Wilczek to wonder...is space and time themselves a condensate that similarly crystallized from nothingness in the earliest moments of the big bang?

Again and again, new revelations come from the scientific community that confirm the basic ideas I've been putting forth - that there is a place where everything fits together, where every state exists simultaneously outside of our 4D spacetime, an enfolded zero or "nothing", and that is where our universe or any other comes from. As Wilczek suggests, and I have been saying as well, this is also where the missing 96% of our universe, the dark matter and dark energy which pervade our reality, comes from as well.

So this time around, I'd like to continue with ideas introduced in my previous blog, "Dreaming of Electric Sheep".


Here we are, out in timelessness, the underlying fabric that is "outside the system": the place where past, present and future have no meaning. This is the perfectly balanced symmetry state that physicists talk about as being where our universe comes from - and the phrase they commonly use is that our universe came about as a result of the breaking of that symmetry. As we mentioned in "The Big Bang and the Big Pie", the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics is about to be awarded to scientists who described the mechanism for how our universe spontaneously arose from this broken symmetry. Symmetry-breaking is often used to explain why our universe is composed mainly of matter rather than antimatter, and the fact that our universe is so far out of balance in this way is often described as being one of the major unexplained mysteries of modern science.

What does symmetry mean, exactly? It means that things are balanced. Every possibility has an opposite possibility. Every plus has a minus. What may not be immediately evident about symmetry, though, is that when you take all of those positives and negatives contained within perfect symmetry and add them together, you end up with a big, beautiful number - zero.

Zero, then, is not empty, it's full - full of every other possibility, perfectly balanced and assembled in that underlying symmetry that our universe or any other universe comes from - zero is where it all starts, and zero is where it all ends. Because it's the source of everything else, that zero has many names in many different ways of thinking - but right now, let's call that zero the "omniverse".

What happens within this omniverse, this zero, when things become out of balance? Most of the time, the results are quite inconsequential, and balance is soon restored. Down at the quantum level, physicist John Wheeler described how there's a constantly bubbling chaos, a random noise of particles and energy that continually pop in and out of existence - a "quantum foam", as he called it, and this quantum foam continues to be part of the background for our universe or any other.

But as we travel around within all the different variations contained within this zero--this underlying set of all possible states where past, present and future all exist simultaneously--occasionally we'll come across a surprisingly large deviation, where the information that is contained within this zero is pushed in a very interesting way in one direction or another, creating a large move away from the perfect balance of where we started. Here's something amazing then: from this perspective, out here within the timeless background of the omniverse, when we look at one of these interesting deviations we're looking at the entire life of a universe as one simultaneous shape. This could be a universe where nothing much ever happens, or it could be a universe that quickly flies apart into maximum entropy. It could be our universe, with its unique values for gravity and the speed of light; or it could be some other universe with a completely different value for its fine structure constant. It could even just be an interesting pattern of information, an idea, that doesn't actually coalesce into a universe at all! Still, no matter what we're looking at, it's something that defines a shape that represents a break from symmetry at one extreme, and a return to symmetry at the other.

Now let's think about this in terms of our own universe. That break from symmetry, from down here in spacetime, looks in one direction to be our highly ordered big bang, and in the other direction looks to be the end of the universe. Right at this very instant, we're someplace within that shape, and all of the other possible positions within that shape represent all of the possible timelines that could have or will have occurred for our universe right from one edge of its existence, right from one edge of this shape, to the other.

(And what's "before" the big bang, and "after" the end of our universe"? Thinking about timelessness, we can see that both are the same thing - in either case, we're talking about being back within that beautiful enfolded "zero", that perfectly balanced symmetry, the omniverse.)

But still, what does all this have to do with something as complex as our own universe? What would cause a larger, more complex deviation to occur? There needs to be some sort of logical pattern, an ordered causality that moves from one state to another, creating steps that allow us to move further and further away from the balancing point. For our own universe, that logical causality happens because our universe is constrained by a set of locked-in physical laws that allow these different states to be stacked upon each other, moving us far away from that underlying perfectly balanced symmetry state, all the way out to that very first yes/no selection pattern that quantum computing expert Seth Lloyd invites us to think of as the beginning of our universe.

Here's a way to think about that: let's dive right into that forest of all possible states for all possible universes contained within the omniverse. No matter where we begin, the most likely result is that the place we start to observe will appear to be random information, and we won't be able to see very far at all. But as we move around and look at this data from different angles and starting positions, every now and then we'll see places where the "trees" within our forest happen to align, and we'll be able to see further, or we'll see coherent patterns. For something as complex as our own universe, we're talking about an exceedingly unlikely set of alignments to take place within the data: but because we're talking about underlying selection patterns that exist outside of time and space, the word "unlikely" ceases to have much meaning. No matter how unlikely a pattern might be, if it's a pattern that could possibly exist at all, then that pattern already exists within the timeless background of the omniverse.

Let's go back to that perfectly balanced zero that we started from. We can think of this as a vast plain representing every possible expression of matter, energy, and information. That "quantum foam" we talked about, then, is really the quantum equivalent of a series of coin tosses: tiny little deviations one way or the other, particles and antiparticles, waveforms that are pushing towards the positive or the negative. Baby universes that quickly pop in and out of existence, then, would be (on a much larger scale, or course) like those areas of grouping and symmetry order that we would see within 100 tosses of a coin.

Traveling around within this omniverse of all possibilities, we'll occasionally find coherent structures that represent a potential universe, and if we then look more closely at the dimensions below, we'll find the wave function for that particular universe and all of the possible states for that particular universe, and each universe will have unique characteristics as defined by its position within the omniverse.

Our own universe, then, is constrained by its basic physical laws, which appear to not have changed over the life of our universe. Physicists talk about the big bang as being the "most ordered state" for our universe, and how everything from there on has been a move from more order to more entropy. Now, we've just been looking at a way to see how our universe is the result of a push towards a large amount of grouping order, and the arrow of time that we are experiencing now is the result of a return to symmetry order - but here's the hardest part to wrap our minds around: where this is all occurring is outside of time and space, and it all occurs simultaneously.

A number of the great minds of the twentieth century tried to get us all to visualize this place where, as Einstein liked to say, "the distinction between past, present and future is meaningless". As we're imagining the omniverse, what we're thinking about is the timeless place where our universe, and all of the possible parallel universes resulting from chance and choice for our universe, and all of the other possible universes and their own wave function of possible expressions all enfold together - into a beautifully balanced zero which is not empty, but full, of all the other possibilities.

To finish, here's a video for one of the 26 songs I've attached to this project: this is me sitting at my old piano in my living room, singing a song about the extra dimensional patterns that create our reality, and how sometimes we might be able catch a glimpse of those patterns in our day-to-day life. The song is called "From the Corner of My Eye".


A direct link to this video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=2f8IBDXv_xI

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Edit: A few months later another related blog was published: Imagining the Omniverse - Addendum

Next: New stuff at the store

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 21 to 25

Click here for the archive of polls 1 to 10.
Click here for the archive of polls 11 to 15.
Click here for the archive of polls 16 to 20.
Click here for the archive of polls 26 to 30.


POLL 21

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

Poll 21 - "This project uses lines, branches, and folds as a way to visualize the relationship between dimensions. A "wormhole" can be thought of as a dimensional folding." Poll ended August 22, 2008.

The image below is from the wikipedia article on "wormholes", and it appears to visually confirm what most visitors to this blog are willing to agree with - 97% agreed that a wormhole can be thought of as a dimensional folding.

It's interesting how some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century - Einstein, Wheeler, Feynman, Hawking, etc. - tried to get everyone to perceive that in the big picture the distinctions between past, present and future are meaningless, because ultimately there is an underlying fabric in which all of those states exist simultaneously. The concept of wormholes, then, which is not just from science fiction but which has been seriously explored by modern physicists such as Kip Thorne and Stephen Hawking, shows us what might happen when that fabric is "folded".

My own project also asks people to use "folding" as one of the ways to visualize the dimensions, and in fact when any dimension is folded it must be folded through the dimension above. This is easy to picture with a flat piece of paper - if that paper were two-dimensional we could fold it through the third dimension to allow instantaneous transportation from one position to another.

So, as Gevin Giorbran so ably demonstated, "timelessness" is another way of describing that simultaneous underlying fabric that Einstein and those that came after him were trying to get us to imagine. I've been waving a large flag to point out that Einstein eventually agreed with Kaluza that the field equations for gravity and light are resolved in the fifth dimension, and if we are imagining that our 4D spacetime is being bent or folded, what is it being folded through? The fifth dimension. For some reason, that's an idea whose time has not come yet, but when it does I believe many of the mysteries of quantum entanglement, "spooky action at a distance" and other more metaphysical questions will have an answer - it's because our 4D reality comes from a fifth dimensional probability space.

In my blog entry "Wormholes", I played with this idea further - since my way of visualizing the dimensions assigns unique characteristics to each dimension, then that would mean that wormholes through one dimension or another would have different effects. To close, here's the video for that blog entry.



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


POLL 22

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

Poll 22 - "Why stop at ten? There are really an infinite number of dimensions." Poll ended September 6, 2008. Votes were split right down the middle, half agreed while half disagreed.

This is one of those polls that could probably have used an "I Don't Know" option - until confirmed evidence comes forward to prove that anything more than the third or fourth dimension is real, how can any of us say for sure?

"After that, it's turtles all the way down"
No matter how many dimensions we care to imagine, I believe there needs to be an ultimate state that, in the same sense that Godel's Incompleteness Theorem uses the phrase, is "outside the system". Otherwise you're stuck in endless repetitions, because no matter where you stop, someone can then ask "but where did that come from". The phrase "turtles all the way down", then, comes from a story demonstrating this concept of "infinite regression", which is one of the ways of thinking about infinity.

Ah, infinity. This is one of the questions that comes up sometimes after people watch my animation about visualizing the dimensions: "infinity" is one of those words, like "universe", that seems to have a contradiction built into its definition. How can there be more than one universe when the word was intended to define all that there is? Likewise, how can there be more than one infinity? How can there be infinite divisions between zero and one, an infinite set of numbers from the sequence starting one, two three, and yet another infinite set of numbers from the sequence starting two, four, six? I've come to love the phrase "there are many roads to infinity".

Directions within the Omniverse
In my blog entry "Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains" I talked about the idea my friend Michel from Norway reminded me about: parallel lines meet at infinity. This is more than just a useful device for drawing pictures in proper perspective! This is what really happens. Two parallel lines meet at infinity... and not just once but in either direction.

And this is where I have pointed to the work of physicist Sean Carroll, who a few months ago in Scientific American advanced a very similar idea - time makes sense in either direction, and once you get "outside" time you are in the same enfolded symmetry state that some call the "omniverse", which would be the same both "before" the big bang and "after" the end of the universe.

Infinite in All Directions
So, what it comes down to is that with the way of visualizing the dimensions we're talking about here, every single dimension extends to infinity within its own set of possibilities. The first dimensional line... travels to infinity in both directions. The second dimensional plane... infinite in four directions. And so on, all the way up.

As with "turtles all the way down", some people argue that you could keep adding dimensions forever, until you reach an infinite number of dimensions, at which point you've reached the same idea that I'm talking about - those infinite dimensions, viewed as a whole, would be the thing that just "is", the thing that is "outside the system".

Each piece is connected to the whole
We've talked in my book and in this blog before about physicist Juan Maldacena's theory that our universe is really a hologram. I believe this concept is easily imagined within the construct - because every single dimension already extends to infinity, the idea that each "point" you observe contains/is connected to the whole is already in there. Here's what it comes down to for me: whether you believe there are three dimensions, four, seven, ten, twenty-six, or even an infinite number of dimensions, at the place you stop you need to be able to say "now I have defined the background state from which everything else is derived". For me, my way of visualizing the dimensions achieves this at the tenth dimension. But regardless of what you prefer to call it, what we are talking about here is the underlying, unobserved fabric from which we can generate all other possible expressions of matter, energy, and information: Gevin Giorbran called it timelessness.

Here's the Point
The "point" of indeterminate size, then, becomes an amazingly powerful idea because no matter where you place that point, and no matter what dimension you place that point within, it is at the center of infinity! Here's a way to think about that idea: no matter where you place a point on an infinite line, there are values extending to infinity and "negative infinity" in either direction which cancel each other out... in other words all of those possible values on either side of the point always add up to zero.

Everything Fits Together
Which gets back to the dangerous idea of "zero". When you add every possibility for reality together, what does it add up to? Zero. All states enfold together, and our universe doesn't spring from "nothing", it springs from "everything". As Gevin Giorbran liked to say, the zero (the enfolded symmetry state that is outside the system) is the pie, and our universe is a tiny slice of that pie.

And that's a powerful idea.

Related blog entries:
What Does Infinity Plus Infinity Equal?
Positive Infinity and Negative Infinity
Forward to Giorbran's Acclaimed Book
Everything Fits Together in the Zero at the End
Why Do We Need More Than 3 Dimensions?
The Omniverse


POLL 23

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVxaYk3CBJk

Poll 23 - "Why is it impossible to exceed the speed of light? Because our universe is being created one planck length at a time, at the speed of light." Poll ended September 20th, 2008. 66% agreed while the rest disagreed.

I wonder if some people disagreed with the above statement because of my choice of the word "created": terms like this can be confusing when the universe we're imagining is really just being observed one planck length after another from out of a wave function of probably outcomes. As Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation has it, and as this project also has it, the other possible universes continue to exist out there within timelessness, they're just not the version that we're observing at this "now" within spacetime. In quantum mechanics, then, references to "collapsing" the wavefunction through observation are really just talking about "observing" the wavefunction: according to this way of thinking, whether you use one term or another, you are really talking about the same process.

The Speed of Light Cannot Be Exceeded within Spacetime
In my book I talk about the speed of light being an independent constant: no matter how fast you travel, no matter how close to the speed of light you get, light continues to travel at the speed of light away from you. In my book I suggested that this is because of our reality is really being created (or observed) by quanta, "slices" of the universe that each exist one planck unit of spacetime away from the next. I also described how this effect would be the same not only with your speed but your direction in time: and in a fanciful mental exercise, we imagined some "reverse time aliens" constructed from the chemical processes that make just as much sense in time's opposite direction. Those reverse-time creatures, then, would also experience the speed of light as an independent constant, and even if they were to travel at close to the speed of light in time's opposite direction, they too would find that the speed of light didn't change and it would continue to move away from them at the same speed.

The October issue of Scientific American has an article on Loop Quantum Gravity, which talks about a concept called "atoms of spacetime". While atoms is an unfortunately confusing term to use in this discussion, it is the same idea that my way of visualizing the dimensions uses: our reality, and our experience of time and space, appears to be continuous, but in fact it is created by a mesh of quanta, or "atoms" of spacetime that are each one planck length away from the next: my entry "The Flipbook Universe" is one of a number of blog entries that talk about this idea.

Plus or Minus
According to Michio Kaku in his thought-provoking "Physics of the Impossible", Einstein's most famous equation is not accurately represented: rather than E = mc squared, the more correct representation is E = ±mc squared. In "You Are Me and We Are All Together" I also talked about the idea that physicists generally agree that antimatter is just matter traveling in time's reverse direction. All of these ideas tie together into a deeper understanding that our experience of time's arrow is really not the full picture of reality, and this is something I've discussed in blog entries like "Time is a Direction" and "Time in Either Direction".

One of my most popularly viewed blog entries in the last couple of months here has been "Moving Dimensions and Synchromysticism", in which I talk about the mind-bending work of Jake Kotze, and the mind-bending Moving Dimensions Theory (MDT) of Dr. Elliott McGucken, the brief summation of which I will quote again here:

The only way to stay stationary in the fourth dimension is to move at the speed of light. Ergo the fourth dimension is expanding at the rate of "c" relative to the three spatial dimensions.

This idea is easily related to my way of visualizing the dimension, I believe, and gives us an intuitive way to understand the quandary of why the speed of light doesn't change, no matter what direction in space you travel, and no matter whether you're traveling forward or back in time. Bravo, Elliot McGucken!

To close, here's the video blog for another entry which talks about Moving Dimensions Theory. A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzlRuygMGHY




POLL 24

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfDBW1Smu58

Poll 24 - "The Deutsch team at Oxford have proved that parallel universes resulting from chance and choice really exist. In a number of those, each of us have already died." Poll ended October 4, 2008. 79% agreed, while the remainder disagreed.

The critique of many worlds is shifting from 'it makes no sense and I hate it' to simply 'I hate it'.
- Cosmologist Max Tegmark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

If you're familiar with Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, then I'm hoping that you recognized that concept when I used it in my original Imagining the Tenth Dimension animation. The idea that there are many possible outcomes from any particular "now" is easy to understand, everyone deals with that idea every minute of their life. What if I had stepped out in front of that car? What if I had won that lottery? What if I had talked to that person I recognized rather than pretending I didn't see them? Our lives are continually about a mix of choice, chance, and the actions of others.

What Everett's theory proposed is that each of those other possible branches really do exist out there within the quantum wave function, and that we are merely observing one reality out of the many that continue to exist: the important part of this idea is that those other universes continue to exist, they're just not within the part of the wave function that we're currently observing. Everett presented this concept way back in 1957, and although great minds like Everett's thesis advisor John Wheeler liked the idea, many others within the scientific mainstream ridiculed it and the theory ending up languishing for many decades. Within the last few years though, Everett's Many Worlds theory has received much more attention, and (as I've said many times now in this blog) the Deutsch team's 2007 proof confirms that my use of the Many Worlds idea in my animation and my book is now more solidly based in science than it was when my project was first introduced to the world.

The quote above comes from the September 21 2007 article in New Scientist Magazine about this proof: written by Zeeya Merali, the article is entitled "Parallel Universes Make Quantum Sense". Click here for that article. You will see that that article talks a lot about Everett's Many Worlds, and the article takes the new Oxford team's proof very seriously. So seriously, in fact that a few months later when New Scientist was doing a roundup of the most important science stories of 2007, this proof ended up in the list, and you can click here for that article.

As you'll see in this second article, thinking about branching parallel universes that make sense for our universe can be fun. I've often given examples like "the version of our universe where it's 2008 and Elvis is still alive" or "and dinosaurs still walk the earth". But this idea also has a serious side: if the Everett interpretation and the Deutsch team's proof are to be believed, then the conclusion proposed in this poll question must be true - there must be versions of the universe where it's 2008 and I, or you, dear reader, are already dead. In my blog entry "We're Already Dead (But That's Okay)", we talked more about what that could mean to each of us as the "non-dead" versions of ourselves within the many possible parallel universes that exist for our universe.

In Randomness and the Missing 96%, and Unlikely Events and Timelessness, we also talked about the amazing set of unlikely circumstances that have resulted in the world you or I are witness to right now. This is the conclusion I reached at the end of chapter one of my book as well:

In any dimension lower than ten, all that can be viewed of reality is cross sections. But that is what makes our existence so interesting: not the infinite “white noise” of possibilities; but that out of all those possibilities that could be, we are in this very specific one, right here, and right now.

As the quote from Max Tegmark indicated at the start of this entry, the Many Worlds Interpretation elicits a strong and sometimes visceral response: even when there is evidence that Everett's Interpretation actually reflects how our reality comes into being, there are some people who react strongly against this idea. One of my most popular blog entries over the last couple of months has been "Daily Parrying" which talks about why negative reactions like this can happen.


POLL 25

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ddj360e4sZk

Poll 25 - "The placebo effect is real - people who think they are getting medicine are more likely to get better. This demonstrates that we have more control over our health than we realize." Poll ended October 18, 2008

This has been one of the central ideas behind the Imagining the Tenth Dimension project. If I were more interested in marketing this project and less interested in being true to these ideas, I would be telling everyone that my book shows people a secret way of understanding reality, and all they have to do is visualize the Ten Dimensions and all of their deepest wishes will be realized.

This project is not about easy answers, though,because what we're talking about is a complicated interaction between choice, chance and circumstance. Nonetheless, with blog entries like Crossing You Arms to Change Your Trajectory, Changing Your Genes, Changing Your Genes 2, Magnets and Souls, Everyone Has a Story, and The Placebo Effect we've talked about the surprising scientific evidence that we each have much more control over our own well-being than we have traditionally been led to believe.

Is there a certain power in understanding why things are the way they are, and understanding that change from our current trajectory is easier than we might realize within a many-worlds universe of branching options? Unquestionably. And since so many visitors to this blog were willing to agree with the idea that we have more control over our individual health than we've traditionally been led to believe, it sounds like this idea is not that big a stretch for people to wrap their minds around.


Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next - Poll 26 - Are we moving not from order to entropy, but from grouping to symmetry?