Dark Energy, Linelanders, and the LHC

A direct link for this video blog entry is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHob4jxtwUQ

Over three million unique visitors have now visited the tenth dimension website. Thank you tenth dimension fans around the world!

In science, a physical picture is often more important than the mathematics used to describe it.
- Michio Kaku, in his book Physics of the Impossible

With this quote, Michio Kaku was summing up the work of Michael Faraday (1791 - 1867), who, with very little mathematical or scientific training but a strong visual imagination, came up with a way of describing the waves of electromagnetic energy that underlie our universe, and created the cornerstone for much of the twentieth century's discoveries about the nature of our reality. Since my project is also about a powerful way of visualizing how our reality is constructed, and incorporates the idea of patterns and waves across the dimensions as being key to that process, Dr. Kaku's quote struck quite a chord for me. With that in mind, this time around I'd like to talk a little more about dark energy and dark matter.

In Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Dark Information, we looked at the astonishing fact that 96% of our universe is invisible and undetectable dark energy and dark matter. What a strange situation science is caught in right now! Some have expressed hopes that the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, which is scheduled to go online this summer, may reveal evidence of extra dimensions or the source of dark matter and energy: but the astonishingly huge amounts of data (15 trillion gigabytes per year!) the LHC will be collecting means it will still be a while until that evidence is analyzed and the findings revealed.

We have two poll questions currently running that ask visitors' opinions on what the LHC is going to find, please be sure to cast your vote. In the meantime, let's talk a little more about how the way of visualizing reality that we're playing with here might be used to portray the missing parts of our universe. Coincidentally, the current edition of What is Enlightenment? magazine interviews five prominent physicists about dark matter and dark energy. Here's a couple of quotes from that article:

If you add up all the matter and energy in the universe, it comes to just four percent of all that drives cosmic expansion. So we're clueless... with no idea about what occupies the remaining ninety-six percent of the universe.
- Neil de Grasse Tyson, astrophysicist, author, and director of New York's Hayden Planetarium

I've been interested...whether or not the dark energy could come from extra spatial dimensions...where a kind of vibration in those multidimensional spaces creates this energy that's felt everywhere in the universe.
Now with dark matter, it would be nice if it connected to dark energy in some way, and it wasn't just a completely separate, random piece of information about the universe. It would be nice if it were somehow a different side of the same coin...
- Janna Levin, theoretical cosmologist, author, and professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University

With my way of visualizing how our reality is constructed, we are looking at a way to explain dark energy and dark matter, and how they are both related to the mainstream physics idea that gravity is the only force which exerts itself across the extra dimensions. So let's go back and look at the original Imagining the Tenth Dimension animation in a little more detail.


A direct link to the above video for "Flatlanders On a Line" is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZJ4ZsogUg

How is One Dimension Related to Another?
In Flatlanders On a Line we talked through the logic of this project's visualization tool more deeply, and how the "ray" of the fifth dimensional probability set from any current "now" is (of course) much more complex than the simple line/branch/fold that I'm using to build our image of the extra dimensions. This relates back to the ideas Edwin Abbott was introducing us to with his original "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions": using what we know of the limitations and inter-relationships of the lower dimensions can help us to build a concept of the additional dimensions. Abbott talked about the imaginary worlds of the Linelanders (living on a one-dimensional line), the Flatlanders (living on a two-dimensional plane), and the Spacelanders (which would be three-dimensional creatures like us).

Most people have drawn the conclusion that Abbott's concept of the befuddled 2D Flatlander trying to imagine a fantastically improbable world of three dimensions is useful for us as three dimensional creatures trying to imagine the fourth spatial dimension. The idea that we've arrived at with this project, though, is that it's even more valuable for us to think of the one-way-arrow of time (as one of the two possible directions in the fourth dimension) as being like the limited one-dimensional world of the Linelander.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9_-ZOIES0U

Living On a Line
In What Would a Linelander Really See, we tried to visualize the highly limited viewpoint of a creature living on a one-dimensional line. Now, let's imagine our 3D universe as a sphere, and a one dimensional line passing someplace within that sphere. If you were a point on that line, in what direction would you perceive the 3rd dimension to be? Clearly, it would be all around you, pulling equally on you from every "side". Of course, as a point on a line someplace within that sphere, the source of whatever was pulling on you from that 3D world would be very mysterious indeed, as you wouldn't even have a name for the direction that this mysterious force was coming from.

Now what if your one-dimensional line was really a part of a 2D plane, and there were a large object nearby on that plane? Two things would happen - from the point of view of the first dimension the gravity of that object would tend to be more localized, and would tend to bunch things together rather than pull things apart. In fact, because the object was only one dimension away, it would be almost like there was an invisible gravitational material or an invisible force pulling together on a part of your one-dimensional line.

Do you see where I'm going with this? Now let's go back to us as "4D Linelanders". Cosmologists are now mapping dark matter throughout the universe, and finding evidence of higher and lower concentrations of this invisible matter based upon its gravitational signature. Imagining the fifth dimension as being like the 2D plane our 1D Linelander was being influenced by shows us how dark matter really could be in the fifth dimension, with higher and lower concentrations that are part of the neighboring bits of the multiverse that are "just around the corner", at that additional right angle that the fifth dimension would be to the fourth: creating areas of higher gravity that, by virtue of their existence in the fifth dimension, have become part of the dark matter that has kept our universe from flying apart as quickly as cosmologists would have expected it to.

And what about the mysterious force of dark energy, which now drives our universe apart, uniformly in every direction? If you're following along here, I hope you can see the logic of my conclusion: dark energy has to be from above the sixth dimension, and is much like the "pulling in every direction" that a 1D Linelander would experience as the 3D sphere of our universe pulled him from directions that he's incapable of perceiving, or even conceiving of.

My song "The Unseen Eye" talked about Dark Matter as well:

And the missing dark matter that binds the universe
The mysterious mass that science cannot find
Is in the many worlds of possibility
That are just around the corner in time

So let's look at one of the videos for that song.

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qShK3FKYWts

Will the LHC find evidence of extra dimensions? Will, as I have predicted with this project, Kaluza's fifth dimension be proven to be the source of dark matter, a gravitational force from Everett's parallel universes that are nearby to our fourth-dimensional line? And will, as I've also predicted, dark energy be shown to be gravitational attraction from the sixth dimension and above, where we can find the "pulling apart" to other completely different expressions of matter and energy that are found within the surrounding regions of the omniverse? These are exciting times for thinking about the nature of reality, and I can't wait to see what we discover in the upcoming few years.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton


Related blog entries:

How the extra dimensions are "compactified" from our perspective:

• The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic
• The Flipbook Universe

How our 4D line of time is really being defined at the fifth dimension:

• The Fifth Dimension Is a Dangerous Idea
• Time is a Direction

How one dimension is related to another:

• You Can't Get There From Here
• What Would a Flatlander Really See?
• What Would a Linelander Really See?

How our reality is created by shadows of higher dimensional patterns:

• Time in Either Direction
• Hypercubes and Plato's Cave
• God 2.0
• The Omniverse

How the waves that Faraday discovered might be connected to life and consciousness:

• Magnets and Souls
• Changing Your Genes
• Crossing Your Arms to Change Your Trajectory
• Making New Connections

Next: The Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs, July Report

The Spacetime Tree

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L-BfvDYYWg

Last blog we looked at the annotated version of the Imagining the Tenth Dimension video, which provides a running commentary introducing ideas from the website and the book to people who are already familiar with the original animation. This time, let's continue with a discussion of some of the basic ideas that stem from this way of visualizing reality.

The "spacetime tree" is a phrase that was first introduced to me by visitors to the Imagining the Tenth Dimension forum. I like this phrase because it immediately evokes a useful image of what the Many Worlds Interpretation tells us about our reality - that from this particular "now" there is not just one line of time. Rather, there is a bush-like branching structure of possible outcomes, and this has been confirmed by Anton Zeilinger and his team in Vienna as being more than just thought experiment: amazingly, this means that Schrödinger's cat really is simultaneously alive and dead until one state or the other is observed. The fact that the David Deutsch team at Oxford published a proof equating this at both the quantum and macro levels does indeed seem to put Everett's idea of a wave function that exists outside of time and space, and which we are merely "observing" rather than "collapsing" on a very solid footing.

In a blog entry called Time in Either Direction, I talked about Sean Carroll's ideas of an equilibrium state that exists outside of time and space, and how the entropy-derived line of branching choices that create what we experience as "time" is only one of the possible directions for a universe to be viewed. Thinking of the trunk, limbs, branches, and twigs of a spacetime tree gives us another way to visualize this - and also shows us how the move from the highly ordered "base" of the tree trunk to the many branches is equivalent to the universe we live in, where eggs do not unscramble themselves and broken mirrors do not reassemble: once you have moved out to a branch, you are no longer on the trunk, and so on. Here is a freaky-looking video blog of "Time in Either Direction":

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0j8oYNFFbw

The spacetime tree is also a useful phrase because it immediately puts one in the mindset of thinking in a more timeless mode, where all possibilities exist simultaneously. In a blog entry called Anime, Gaming, and Cusps I used the metaphor of the branching scenarios of video games as a starting point for imagining the many branches of our spacetime tree, which we would be able to see if we could somehow move our observation out to this timeless perspective. Here is a video blog entry of that discussion:

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4b7MqbpYTM

Finally, one of the assumptions that I make in this project is that the fourth dimension has (as Sean Carroll also says) two directions, one of which is time as we know it, and the other which would be the time-reversal version of that fourth dimension. If our spacetime tree was one single trunk from beginning to end that would be the end of the story, but since we now have scientific evidence that the branches do exist, the fifth dimension is where I place the spacetime tree for our particular universe as it exists in our current "now", and the sixth dimension is where I place the other spacetime trees which are logically/probabilistically incompatible with our current "now". In both cases I am using the moral/probabilistic branches created by chance and choice as ways to describe the extra dimensions, and some will insist that because of this I'm not talking about spatial dimensions, I'm talking about temporal dimensions. In Hypercubes and Plato's Cave, I made what I believe to be a convincing argument for why our experience of the extra spatial dimensions can be incorporated into a temporal model, because ultimately we are 3D creatures moving on a 4D line, and because of that our ability to perceive any of the extra dimensions requires us to acknowledge the spatial nature of time: without time, we 3D creatures are stuck in one single frame of our universe with no way to witness or experience the fourth dimension and above. Here is a video blog of that discussion:

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uP_d14zi8jk

The spacetime tree for our particular universe, then, at this particular moment, is in the fifth dimension. The spacetime tree for some other version of our universe, then, like the one where it's 2008 and gas is free, is inaccessible to our spacetime tree unless we move through the sixth dimension to get there. The logic of such reasoning is consistent with the general idea of dimensions - each dimension that we add gives us a way to get to states that were unavailable from the dimension we were in, and that is consistent with the most basic definition of the word "dimensions" that is commonly used.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Related Links:
The Annotated Tenth Dimension Video
What Would a Linelander Really See?
Wormholes
How to Make a Universe
The Omniverse

Next: Dark Energy, Linelanders, and the LHC

What Would a Linelander Really See?

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9_-ZOIES0U

In mathematics, no definition of dimension adequately captures the concept in all situations where we would like to make use of it. Consequently, mathematicians have devised numerous definitions of dimension for different types of spaces. All, however, are ultimately based on the concept of the dimension of Euclidean n-space E ⁿ. The point E ⁰ is 0-dimensional. The line E ¹ is 1-dimensional. The plane E ² is 2-dimensional. In general, E ⁿ is n-dimensional.
- from the wikipedia article on dimensions

Because there are so many different ways to define the word "dimensions", some people with their own narrow definition of the word have claimed that my use of the word is not correct. The definition above, from wikipedia, works very well for the way of imagining the dimensions that we've been playing with here: each additional dimension adds an additional "degree of freedom" that was unavailable from the previous one. If the ten dimensions that physicists are talking about are truly spatial dimensions (or as some prefer to say "space-like dimensions"), then a seven dimensional space must have seven co-ordinates that would define the position of a unique point within that seven-dimensional system, and so on: the space E ⁷ is 7-dimensional, and that is the kind of dimensions we are talking about in Imagining the Tenth Dimension.

When the website for this project first went live two years ago, a number of people had questions about the animation, since parts of it didn't just parrot what the mainstream had been saying about how our reality is constructed. Two years later, I'm pleased that a number of new theories have come forward from respected physicists which can be easily connected to the supposedly "out there" ideas that were in this original video and its accompanying book, but there are still many more ideas attached to this project that will eventually be proved or disproved in the months and years to come.

One of the most important basic assumptions about this project is that if physicists are really saying that these ten dimensions are spatial, then we should be able to use what we know about the first three or four dimensions to deduce some things about the additional degrees of freedom that these extra spatial dimensions would add. Saying "you can't imagine the fifth dimension and above because they're totally unlike the dimensions of spacetime" is, I think, taking the easy way out*: are we saying these additional dimensions are spatial or not? Of course it becomes harder to harder to imagine each additional dimension beyond the spacetime we're familiar with, but that doesn't mean it's impossible!

"Don't say Higher, say Extra"
Here's a brief side note: you may have noticed that the term "extra dimensions" is often used rather than "higher dimensions" when talking about the dimensions beyond spacetime: I think this is a useful distinction, because saying "higher" somehow sets the idea up in our minds that we should be gazing skyward as we think about these additional dimensions. A more valid way of thinking about each new dimensions is that it is somehow "outside" the current dimension, and that there is no way for us to get to the states that are within that additional dimension if we stay within the current one. For instance, with three-dimensional space we need to add the fourth dimension or there is no way for us to get from 3D space in one state to 3D space in another state: the directions of time and "anti-time" are the two new directions that we are able to reach by adding the fourth dimension into the equation. Saying that each new dimension is at "right angles" to the one below is another way of thinking about that same idea.

The "Linelander"
Last blog, we talked about the viewpoint of a Flatlander, an imaginary two-dimensional creature. Now, let's try this as a thought experiment: imagine yourself on a one-dimensional line. If that were your world, anything other than "forward on the line" and backward on the line" would be unfathomable. Imagining some kind of a wormhole that "folded" your line to allow instantaneous jumping from one position to another might possibly be something you could wrap your head around, and that would give you a way to imagine the second dimension, but dimensions beyond that would be so completely outside your experience that you would probably be inclined to say that the extra dimensions beyond the second dimension were theoretical constructs only, with no way for one-dimensional people to be able to imagine such an outlandish geometry.

For a one-dimensional Linelander, a second dimension at right angles to the dimension he lived in would possibly be imaginable, but something that was at an additional right angle that was somehow different from the first right angle already considered (to create a three-dimensional space) might well seem beyond the ability for our poor Linelander to imagine: the difficultly is particularly compounded for the Linelander, since he can easily imagine only one way of extending out to an additional dimension, so visualizing each additional dimension would require him to imagine a repetitive "right angles" operation over and over again. The advantage we have over a Linelander is that we are intimately familiar with a space of three dimensions, so for us, to imagine three unique right angles that together could help to form a cube is much easier - and this is why using "line/branch/fold" works so well for us as a visualization tool, because it gives us an ordered way of imagining how three different dimensions are at right angles to each other.

"Bend Me, Fold Me, Any Way You Want..."
So here we are, imagining ourselves as a Linelander on a one-dimensional line, trying to imagine how our 1D world might be able to be bend or fold to allow instantaneous teleportation to other points on our line. Einstein suggested that we should think of gravity as a "bending" of spacetime. Whether we're talking about folding, branching, twisting, bending or any other spatial manipulation word you care to think of, all of these are ways to start thinking about the next dimension up, the dimension that is moving at right angles to the one currently being examined. To be clear, then, the point/line/branch/fold concepts that this project starts from are really just interchangeable spatial manipulation terms that repeatedly find different ways to describe the same idea of moving to the next dimension, which is why this concept can work no matter where you start. A second dimensional plane can be thought of as a thick line joining two other lines, or it can be thought of as a branch off of a line, or it can be thought of as being created by the folding of a line: these are all ways of thinking how the one dimension we are looking at is at right angles to the other.

Like our Linelander, right angles are relatively easy for us to imagine for the dimensions we live in -- which in our case as 3D "Spacelanders" would be the first three or four dimensions. But for us, saying that "the sixth dimension is at right angles to the fifth dimension" doesn't create a particularly useful mental image. This is why the line, branch, fold metaphor is so powerful - it lets us visualize something that is easier to hold in our minds than if we were to just imagine line/line/line etc, branch/branch/branch etc., or fold/fold/fold.

Time is at Right Angles
So. Each of these terms is a different way of thinking about that same "this is how a dimension is at right angles to the one below" concept. This is also why I say "time" is in the next dimension up no matter dimension you're examining, because "time" is another way of moving at right angles to the dimension below, and this is why "time" for a 2D flatlander would be a direction in the third dimension.


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

Recently I posted a blog entry about wormholes, extending a discussion that's in the tenth dimension faq: the question in the faq is "can you really fold a dimension?". And my answer is yes, you can fold a dimension and science calls that a wormhole. But with the logic of what we're examining here, different wormholes would have different effects depending upon the dimension being folded, and ultimately this gives us ways of thinking how the solid reality we are seeing at this very instant could be nothing more than shadows of higher dimensional shapes and patterns, connecting our reality together in ways that are beyond our ability to directly witness from down here in spacetime.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

Related entries:
Time is a Direction
The Flipbook Universe
You Can't Get There From Here
How to Make a Universe
What Would a Flatlander Really See?
Hypercubes and Plato's Cave

* P. S. - for anyone who is unfamiliar with my project, please read blog entries like The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic to see how the idea that the extra dimensions are "compactified" is easily dealt with in the visualization we're using in Imagining the Tenth Dimension.

Next: The Annotated Tenth Dimension Video

What Would a Flatlander Really See?

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73IGTygl_Q4

One of the questions that sometimes comes up about the original Imagining the Tenth Dimension animation is that it doesn't really show what a Flatlander's world would look like to a Flatlander. The concept of 2D creatures living in a flat, two-dimensional world was first introduced to us by Edwin A. Abbott in his 1884 novel "Flatland: a Romance of Many Dimensions".

In the original animation, we started out by imagining our flatlander as being the "one-eyed Jack on an impossibly flat playing card":



This is the original image Jason Orban of OH!Media drew for me as a representation of what I'm describing here. But why did we say "impossibly flat" in the narration? Because no matter what kind of paper we can imagine this Flatlander to be drawn upon, that paper has length and width and some small amount of depth, represented by the thickness of that paper. For us to really imagine a flatlander we need to be thinking about him in a plane that has length and width only, and no depth whatsoever. This is not an easy thing for we 3D observers to imagine, and some people will insist that there must be at least some depth for this flatlander to exist. It's important to realize what we're talking about here: in the same way that a one dimensional line must have length only, no width or depth, for it to truly be one-dimensional, a 2D flatlander must have length and width only, and no depth, or he is not really two-dimensional.

................................................................................

Each additional dimension adds an additional degree of freedom. If you lived as a point on a one-dimensional line, the only thing you would be able to see would be the two points that are nearest you on your line. Everything else would be hidden from view, and because you existed within a single dimension, there would be no way for you to see or travel "around" those points to become aware of what lies beyond. In fact, the concept of going "around" would be completely unimaginable to you, and you would just take it for granted that your point of view was the only point of view possible.

Adding a second dimension gives our flatlander a little more room to move and see "around" other objects, but the possibilities for this creature, living within a flat 2D plane, are still very limited when you compare them to our world: as we watch the flatlander from above, we are able to see things with much more freedom that what his perspective would really allow. Let's look a little closer at that one-eyed-Jack as he was shown in the animation:



Here's a question we can ask ourselves then: are we seeing the flatlander's left eye or right eye in this picture? From our 3D perspective, we look down upon the flatlander as pictured here and presume that his eye is to the right of his nose. But really, because he is completely flat, this flatlander's eye is "behind" his nose, which means the only thing this poor fellow would be able to see is the inside of his own head! We would need to move his eye to the outside edge of his face if we really wanted to let him see the world around him, like so:

Again, from our imaginary flatlander's perspective, having to have your eyes on the "outside edge" would seem completely normal, and the idea of an eye "within" a head would be completely foreign. But what would his 2D eye really be able to see? We still haven't properly imagined his perspective. As we try to do that, let's think about what we really see as 3D creatures.

Most of us have two eyes. Let's start by covering one eye, so that we're more like the flatlander we're looking at here. If you sit motionless with one eye covered and look in front of you, how many dimensions are you seeing? Most of us would automatically say three (or even four if we consider the direction of time), but really we are only seeing two: we are seeing a flat 2D representation of the world in front of us, projected onto the retina at the back of our eye. If we keep our other eye covered and move our heads around a bit, we'll see changing relationships within that 2D image that give us clues as to what is nearer and what is further away from us, but that is information that our brains are deducing from watching a series of 2D images our eye is delivering to the brain, one after the other. Johnny Lee has a lovely YouTube video showing a "heads up" display he created using Nintendo Wii technology that allows a flat image on a screen to appear as if it has a very realistic 3D depth, and his invention relies upon exactly what we're talking about here: our brains are able to look at a flat 2D image and infer the 3D nature of that image by what happens as we move our heads around.

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw

The great thing about the Johnny Lee demo is it clearly shows how our brains can deduce 3D even with only one eye, as long as we can move our heads around. If you add a second eye to our 2d flatlander, or to us as 3D creatures, you give the brain even more information to work with - now there are differences between what one eye and the other sees, and the differences get greater the closer any objects are to us, which allows the brain to infer even more about the 3D nature of the world it's witnessing... but our brains do so, still, by taking in two slightly different 2D images projected on the back of our eyeballs. This convinces us that we are able to see in 3D, but the truth is still that our perception of 3D is happening within our brains, and the information that is coming into each eye is still really only a series of changing 2D images.

So: our 3D eyes are seeing 2D images, and we take it for granted that we can't see what's on the other side of a wall without getting up and moving there. An imaginary one-dimensional creature would only be able to see the Zero-D "points" that are nearest them on their 1D line, and to them the idea of seeing or moving "around" things would be inconceivable, because of the extremely limited freedom of movement their dimension gives them.

In each case, what each creature sees from its current dimension is the dimension below. Now we're ready to go back to our original question: what would a flatlander really see?

Try to imagine yourself now as a 2D flatlander. In our representation of him, we're seeing his world from above - we're able to see "around" things that the flatlander would not. In fact, until we repositioned his eyeball he would not even have been able to see "around" the outline of his own face. What we need to do now is imagine ourselves rotating down out of our nice round 3D world, and becoming part of the flat 2D plane the flatlander exists within. To do that, we need to rotate down into his perspective. This series of pictures shows us going most of the way:
This sequence shows what happens as you get closer and closer to the perspective of the flat 2D plane our flatlander is living within. You would get a similar effect by picking up a piece of paper, bringing it up to eye level and rotating it so that you're only seeing one edge. The closer you get to seeing just that edge, the closer you are to seeing what the flatlander would see - but it's still important to keep in mind that the edge of a piece of a piece of paper in our 3D world is still a whole dimension thicker than the forest of lines, some nearer, some further away, some hidden behind other lines that would be the perceived 2D world of the flatlander.

The original eleven-minute animation for Imagining the Tenth Dimension introduces viewers to the ideas from chapter one of the book of the same name. In the book I say this:

To a Flatlander, we 3D beings would be able to pop in and out of their two-dimensional world as if by magic, and our texture and form would be quite inexplicable. In the same way, we humans would find the 2D information that a Flatlander sees to be a useless and confusing jumble of lines all in the same plane.

If you go back and watch the original animation now, keep in mind that what we're seeing in the section about flatlanders is all from our perspective, looking down on the flatlander's world from "above", which is a direction the flatlander wouldn't even be able to conceive of. Most books introducing people to the idea of flatlanders choose to use this vantage point, and for good reason: because what a flatlander would really see is even stranger than what we showed in our brief introduction to thinking about the dimensions.

Finally, please kind in mind that what we're talking about here with Imagining the Tenth Dimension is a visualization tool, not a scientific proof. But as a visualization, it does gives us ways to imagine lots of things that physicists say about our reality, for instance:

• how our experience of the fifth dimension is curled up at the planck length (because time is a direction in the fourth spatial dimension and the fifth dimension's probabilistic outcomes are being observed one planck length after another)
• the string theory idea that our 3D universe is "locked in" at the seventh dimension by a 3D and 7D brane
• the idea that by the time you get to the tenth dimension you are visualizing the equilibrium state that exists "outside the system" as Godel liked to describe it. Physicist Sean Carroll talks about this "equilibrium state" that exists before and after our observed universe in the June 2008 issue of Scientific American. Other people refer to this state as the "omniverse".
  
• Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, which says there are branching parallel universes being created through choice and chance (this idea was confirmed by a proof offered in September 2007 by a team of scientists at Oxford under the direction of physicist David Deutsch), and
• the idea that the future exists only as part of probabilistic waves, as proven by experiments conducted by a team of scientists in Vienna under the direction of physicist Anton Zeilinger.

What's unique about this new way of thinking about time and space is that it makes no distinction between the first four dimensions that we know from spacetime, and the extra dimensions that physicists are talking about: this project proposes that since all of the ten dimensions are spatial dimensions, each new dimension adds an additional degree of freedom, and we can use what we know about the dimensions below to help us visualize the dimensions beyond the four that we live in.

There are lots of other discussions from physics and philosophy that can stem from this way of visualizing how our reality is constructed and what that means to us, I do hope you enjoy the journey as we explore those ideas.

From Imagining the Tenth Dimension,

Rob Bryanton

Related blog entries:
Flatlanders on a Line
Time is a Direction
The Omniverse
Hypercubes and Plato's Cave
Time in Either Direction
Anime, Gaming and Cusps

Next: What Would a Linelander Really See?