Changing Your Brain

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

I hear from people every day who say the tenth dimension animation has "blown their mind", or words to that effect. I also hear from people who say they've watched the video many times, and that it has changed the way they think about the world. Could my unique approach to visualizing the dimensions really be capable of re-wiring people's neurons?

This is not as far-fetched as you might think. In entries like Changing Your Genes and Changing Your Genes - part 2, we've looked at the startling research showing that changes in lifestyle and attitude can affect not just the way your own genes are expressed, but even what genes you pass on to your offspring. This news flies in the face of the standard twentieth century approach which taught us that the genetic hand of cards we'd been dealt was locked in at conception, putting us on a specific train track defined by whatever genes we had inherited from our parents.

In Placebos Becoming More Effective?, we looked at the difficulties the pharmaceutical industry is encountering, as the placebo effect appears to be becoming stronger over the last twenty years, to the point where even successful drugs such as Prozac (approved by the FDA in 1987), would have difficulty getting approval today. As it said in the Wired Magazine article about Placebos:

Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests. In many cases, these are the compounds that, in the late '90s, made Big Pharma more profitable than Big Oil. But if these same drugs were vetted now, the FDA might not approve some of them. Two comprehensive analyses of antidepressant trials have uncovered a dramatic increase in placebo response since the 1980s. One estimated that the so-called effect size (a measure of statistical significance) in placebo groups had nearly doubled over that time.

I've been suggesting that there could be something about these modern times that is re-wiring people's brains in ways to give them a feeling of greater control over their observed reality (see last entry, The Quantum Observer), and hence the enhanced placebo effect. What do you think is causing this shift?

With Changing Your Brain, part of what we're talking about here is the concept of neuroplasticity: the brain is very adaptable, constantly making new connections. There was a BBC article published last year about how singing rewires damaged brains that relates nicely to this discussion. And Science Daily recently published an article about a new study with far-reaching implications. The title of the article really says it all: Mindfulness Meditation Training Changes Brain Structure in Eight Weeks.

With all that in mind, let's return to my new diagram we've been looking at lately and do a little creative meditation on it. As I've said before, if you click on this image it takes you to a higher-resolution version. If you'd like, print the image out and follow along, or just do the following exercise in your mind.

1. In Einstein's view of the universe, gravity is pictured as a bending of the "rubber sheet" of our spacetime. If our "sheet" was a 2D plane, similar to the piece of paper you've printed your image out on, we'd see this bending as being through the 3rd dimension. But since the "rubber sheet" of our spacetime is four-dimensional, my assertion is that this shows us gravity comes from the 5th dimension.

2. In Light Has No Speed, we looked at physicist Peter Russell's persuasive argument for why, from a photon's point of view, it takes no time or distance for light from a distant star to reach our eye. We can help to visualize this by folding our piece of paper horizontally, so that the upper half and lower half of the image are now touching. Now, the vertical line representing "light" in this diagram has converged, so that any point on the line is in direct contact with any other point. From light's point of view, past, present and future are one and the same.

3. Stephen Hawking has said "there's another kind of time, at right angles to real time, in which the universe has no beginning or end". If our paper image represents 4D spacetime, then when we folded it we were folding it through a space which is at "right angles to spacetime": the fifth dimension, which would be where Hawking's "another kind of time" resides. Since, as Peter Russell says, a photon experiences itself traveling no distance in no time, and its birth and death are the same moment, this also leads me to say that "light is at right angles to spacetime".

4. Spread your paper out flat again. Now, fold the paper the other way, vertically, so that all points on the horizontal line are touching. This is the quantum point of view, where any particle can have an instantaneous effect on another, no matter how far apart they are from each other in the universe. But again, because these effects defy the logic of our observed reality, they are usually portrayed as being unimaginably strange. I would say that imagining how these effects come from the additional degree of freedom afforded by the fifth dimension shows how these "spooky" quantum effects occur.

5. So which is it? Which fold represents the fifth dimension? Well, they both do. And if there was a way to fold our paper so that both folds are happening simultaneously, in the same way that Schrödinger's Cat is both alive and dead, then we would be visualizing the fifth dimension: where Kaluza proved to Einstein that the field effects for gravity and light are resolved.

WHEN Max Planck came up with the notion of the quantum at the turn of the 20th century, he couldn't justify it. Nevertheless, the idea that energy couldn't be split infinitely many times - that there was an indivisible quantum of energy - was the only way he could fit the observed spectrum of radiation from a hot body to a mathematical law. This ruse was, he later said, "an act of despair".

- editorial from January 24 2011 edition of New Scientist Magazine

The predictions of quantum theory have not been contradicted by a single experimental observation, making it the most successful model of the universe ever to have been created. With it, we move from Planck's "act of despair" to a revolutionary understanding of the granular, non-continuous nature of our observed reality. This leads me to conclude that our "Now", despite the apparently smooth and seamless reality we see around us, is really a constantly evolving series of points in the fifth dimension, one planck frame after another.

Does that understanding change our brains? It certainly has changed mine. Next time, we're going to look at how language changes our brains: the entry will be called Language and the Mind.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Dark Flow, Gravity and Love

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

The above video is tied to a previous blog entry from last January of the same name, Dark Flow.

Last time, in Placebos and Biocentrism, we returned to the idea that so much of what we talk about with this project is tied to visualizing our reality from "outside" of spacetime, a perspective that many of the great minds of the last hundred years have also tried to get us to embrace. Here's a quote I just came across from Max Planck that I think is particularly powerful:

As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.

- from the wikiquote page dedicated to Max Planck

It's so easy to look at some of the phrases from this quote and imagine them on some new age site, where mainstream scientists would then smugly dismiss these ideas as hogwash from crackpots. Like me, folks like Dan Winter and Nassim Haramein also sometimes get painted with the crackpot brush, but they are both serious about the ideas they are exploring, and they are not far away from the ideas that Max Planck promoted above, or that I have been pursuing with my project.

On July 1st of this year, I published a well-received blog entry called Love and Gravity. It looked at some new age ideas about wellness and spirituality, and related them to some mainstream science ideas about extra dimensions, timelessness, and the fact that physicists tell us that gravity is the only force which exerts itself across the extra dimensions.

Last week Dan Winter forwarded me a link to a new web page of his which yet again seems to tie into the same viewpoint that I'm promoting: Dan is calling this new page "Gravity is Love". As usual, this page is a sprawling collection of graphics, animations, and articles, most of which are found on a number of Dan's other pages, but there's important new information here as well. Here's a few paragraphs excerpted from the page which will give you the flavor of what Dan is saying about this concept:

Love really IS the nature of gravity!
First we discovered Golden Ratio identifies the change in pressure over time- of the TOUCH that says I LOVE YOU: goldenmean.info/touch
Then we discovered (with Korotkov's help) ... that the moment of peak perception- bliss - enlightenment- was defined by Golden Ratio in brainwaves : goldenmean.info/clinicalintro
Then medicine discovered: the healthy heart is a fractal heart. ( References/ pictures: goldenmean.info/holarchy, and also: goldenmean.info/heartmathmistake
Then - I pioneered the proof that Golden Ratio perfects fractality because being perfect wave interference it is therefore perfect compression. It is my view that all centripetal forces- like gravity, life, consciousness, and black holes, are CAUSED by Golden Ratio in waves of charge.
Nassim Haramein says that although he sees Golden Ratio emerge from his black hole equations repeatedly - he sees it as an effect of black holes/ gravity - not the cause... Clearly - from the logic of waves - I say the black hole / gravity is the effect of golden ratio and not the other way around!
- although some might say that this is a chicken and egg difference - may be just semantics... at least we agree on the profound importance of Golden RATIO.../ fractality...
AND love :
perfect embedding IS perfect fusion IS perfect compression... ah the romance.

Dan Winter is a fascinating fellow, I hope you can spend some time following the links in the above quote. Next time we're going to look at another somewhat related approach to imagining the extra-dimensional patterns that link us all together, in an entry called Biosemiotics: Monkeys, Metallica, and Music.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Gevin Giorbran - Everything is Forever

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTVyPog9-_U

Seven months ago, my good friend Gevin Giorbran, author of "Everything Forever - Learning to See Timelessness", took his own life.

On the day he died, he had packed up his computer and shipped it to me. When it arrived here at my studio I found on the hard drive all of his research, the master files for the four books he had written during his lifetime, and hundreds of other files with various essays and other snippets of writing that he had authored. I was completely mystified. I sent Gevin multiple emails that day asking if this was a present to thank me for helping to promote his book, but received no response.

The day after the mysterious arrival of the computer, I received a letter from Gevin, asking that I take over managing his website and book because he would no longer be able to do so. Needless to say, I was devastated by the news of his passing: but in the weeks that followed, once I had accepted that he was truly gone it fell to me to begin keeping his website up and running and handling various aspects of his company and projects.

Gevin's stated wish in his letter was that I be given full rights to his work. So, in order to be able to honor the wishes of my departed friend, and with the co-operation of Gevin's family, a legal transfer of ownership has been completed and Gevin’s body of work is now my responsibility. “Everything Forever – Learning to See Timelessness” can now be bought directly through the Tenth Dimension store in hard cover, soft cover, or as a downloadable pdf. It also continues to be available through Amazon, Amazon UK, and various other online booksellers.

Why did Gevin honor me with this? His letter is very clear: "If you don't keep it going no one else will". Regular readers of this blog will know that I have been recommending this book since I first discovered it in the spring of 2007, and that I feel Gevin's work is an invaluable companion piece to my own project. When Gevin felt he could no longer carry on, he passed an important responsibility on to me, and the preservation and advancement of Gevin's ideas is a privilege that I respectfully embrace.

Prior to 1998, Gevin Giorbran authored three books in which he described in detail how our universe eventually ends, as space expands perfectly flat and time reaches absolute zero. In 1998, when astrophysicists discovered the expansion of the universe is in fact accelerating towards absolute zero, it became apparent to Gevin that he needed to refine and polish the presentation of his ideas in order to better communicate them to the scientific mainstream and the general public. Everything Forever is Gevin's masterwork, in which he finally accomplished that goal. I believe the value of his insights was only just beginning to be recognized: go to Amazon.com and you will see that "Everything Forever" has received very high praise from discerning reviewers:

A Brilliant Jewel
By P.J Young

Gevin Giorbran, in his book Everything Forever, premises much of his insight on the idea that what is "real" are not only the states the universe empirically occupies but also the states the universe can potentially occupy. These potential states are not mere abstractions or conceptual titillations; rather these implicit states are of immense ontological relevance when we consider the full landscape of the universe throughout time. Indeed, as time is concerned, Giorbran notes that it is more than temporal horizontal movement; time also has a vertical dimension where potential states of the universe are playing out within the "adjacent possible" - a term he openly borrows from Stuart Kauffman. Giorbran's universe is much like a brilliant jewel that shines in many different ways depending on one's pathway through it, but ultimately, the jewel, or the universe when considered as a whole, is unchanging and unchangeable.


Moving toward symmetry
By David J. Kreiter, author of Quantum Reality: A New Philosophical Perspective.

In this exhaustive masterpiece Gevin Giorbran gives us a unique and original "hypothesis of everything". From the big bang, or Alpha state, to the final Omega state, the universe is not winding down as the traditional explanation of the second law of thermodynamics is currently understood. Rather, the universe is going from one type of order, "grouping order" to another type, "symmetry order".

Time, energy, the forces of nature, and meaning are all a result of the universe moving toward its most probable future, a future of perfect balance.

According to Giorbran, energy is a product of imbalance, and time is simply the transformation of matter into the fullness of space symmetry.

Gravity can be understood as pockets of "time in reverse". Gravity represents our past pulling time backwards. The electromagnetic force represents the arrow of time moving toward the future. The opposite charges of the electron and proton are simply the tendency of these particles to seek balance. "Forces are simply the shapes of probability waves, and those shapes bond particles together, in groups, in lattices, in symmetries."

The past and the future are quantum potentials, and conscious beings are continually creating the most likely futures and the most likely, consistent pasts. Meaning arises as a result of the decoherence of these potential states.

"Everything Forever" is the most significant book concerning the nature of reality I've read in years. I highly recommend this book for those looking for a simple and elegant hypothesis of the infinite, meaningful universe.


The Universe is NOT winding down.
By "Jerry"

"Everything Forever" articulates Einstein better than I have ever read before. I had to read page 25 to my electrical engineering students. Gevin Giobran uses concepts of other great physicist and folds them into his own concepts of time and the Universe. Reading is laborious at times but the book demonstrates that in order to explain "what is" one must consider all possibilities of what could have been but is not. This then places a boundary, or shape on our thoughts.


GENIUS
By Dr. Lee Price

Giorbran's latest book is pure genius. Well thought out, rewarding and thought provoking. He takes the concepts of time, anti-time and timelessness and makes them easy to grasp. I particularly enjoyed the section on how the future helps arrange the present. I wish I could be around in a 100 years to see how current theories were altered by his contributions. You will read this book more than once.


Exploring Time
By J. S. Parker (Portland, OR USA)

Understanding time is key to understanding cosmology. Despite its ubiquitous presence in our daily lives, however, time is an elusive subject. Giorbran has done a marvellous job of pulling together all the various aspects and understandings of time into a readable and, more importantly, understandable framework.

His reviews of various theoreticians in the history of the subject are excellent. He has a unique ability to take complicated concepts and explain them simply, but comprehensively. It is the best summary of Boltzmann's work leading to the second law of thermodynamics that I have found. The relativistic concepts of Einstein and even Stephen Hawking's "imaginary time" are explained in a surprisingly graspable manner.

However, it is not simply another summary of past and current thought. He develops his own ideas on the nature of order (what he calls "grouping" and "symmetry" orders) that provides the basis for his conclusions on the nature of time as we experience it and timelessness as can be experienced--the subtitle of the book is "Learning to See Timelessness". And it is in these concepts of order and timelessness that he lays his foundation for re-establishing meaning and purpose in the evolution of the universe.

The book is solidly based in current scientific understanding of cosmology. But he integrates these understandings in a new and exciting framework. Whether one agrees with his ideas or not, the book will open many avenues for thought and exploration. The quotations and references that are interspersed throughout the chapters provide additional viewpoints as well as providing an attractive format. There are multiple illustrations, pictures and charts which enhance and clarify the text.

The book is clearly the result of a long and thoughtful exploration by the author. It is one that will enrich any reader.

Through our respective projects, Gevin and I had each come up with useful ways of visualizing the timeless background that our universe or any other universe springs from, and I am proud of the fact that Gevin devoted several pages of his book to an explanation of why my Imagining the Tenth Dimension project is as worthy of serious consideration as Gevin's concepts from Everything Forever have proven to be. In the year prior to his death, he and I had many fascinating and challenging discussions about the ramifications of the huge cloud of ideas surrounding our projects: we both shared a feeling that it is just a matter of time before our ideas will become integrated into mainstream science, and we shared our frustration that that time is not here yet.


If Everything is Forever, where is Gevin now? Life is full of mysteries. As Max Planck said: “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.” Regardless of where you think Gevin is right now, he, like all of us, is part of the information that becomes our reality--a pattern within timelessness--and that will always be true.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: The Foreword to Gevin Giorbran's Acclaimed Book

PS - to close, here is the last video interview I conducted with Gevin Giorbran, as it turns out this is just a few months before his death.

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SI5MgGnP1g

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 16 to 20

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 21 to 25.
Click here for the archive of polls 26 to 30.


Poll #16 - Zero plus zero equals zero. What does infinity plus infinity equal?
(poll ended June 16 08)

5% said "zero", 70% said "infinity", 15% said "two infinities", and 8% said "none of the above".

This poll is a continuation of similar questions asked in the preceding couple of polls, where you will find some useful discussion about the "many roads to infinity" concept that can make questions like the one in this current poll seem contradictory. The first answer, "zero", for instance, would make sense in the following context: if I start with a line, and place a point on the line, all of the values heading in one direction on that line would be heading towards infinity. Meanwhile, all of those values in the opposite direction would also be heading towards infinity. Is there such a thing as "positive infinity" and "negative infinity" when we look at things in this way? If there were, then adding those two values (or concepts) together should cancel each other out and leave us with zero as the answer. My preference with this project is to say that because infinity is not a number, the infinity that you head towards in either direction on any particular line in any particular direction is ultimately heading towards the same thing: infinity. But keeping in mind the idea of a perfectly balanced equilibrium state which in this project is the tenth dimension in its unobserved state, an idea which also ties to the work of Dr. Sean Carroll which we've been talking about in this blog, does give us a way to think of how a point of indeterminate size, a perfectly balanced equilibrium, and "zero" all are interconnected ideas.

Other blog entries discussing infinity, timelessness, and Dr. Sean Carroll:
Unlikely Events and Timelessness
The Spacetime Tree
The Annotated Tenth Dimension Video
What Would a Flatlander Really See?
Wormholes
God 2.0
Daily Parrying
Time in Either Direction

Poll #17 - Max Planck said: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
(Poll ended June 30 08)
70 % agreed while the rest disagreed.

Another more succinct version of this quote is "science progresses by funerals".

As a person with an unusual approach to thinking about how our reality is derived, which some people embrace and some people reject as bunk, I of course take some comfort from Max Planck's idea presented in this quote. Will my dimensional hierarchy's connections to mainstream science ever be embraced by the mainstream or will this remain nothing more than an intellectual curiosity? Only time will tell. History is full of naysayers and established experts who ridiculed new ideas: there are many famous quotes that have been gathered in various places around the net. Michio Kaku, in his new book Physics of the Impossible, starts each chapter with quotes from famous historical figures and their comments on new ideas. This one, from a respected physicist just over a century ago, is typical of the kind of thinking that Max Planck is referring to:

"Radio has no future. Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. X-rays will prove to be a hoax." - Physicist Lord Kelvin, 1899

Poll #18 - Max Planck said: “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”
Poll ended July 14 2008
70% agreed while the remainder disagreed.

This relates to so many ideas we have looked at with this project, but most notably Godel's incompleteness theorum, which says it is impossible for us to get "outside the system" we are part of and describe the system in its entirety. The equilibrium state of the underlying quantum fields in their unobserved state is equivalent to how I am describing the tenth dimension - and, as I have always said, attempting to observe any part of the tenth dimension immediately collapses you into some part of the other dimensions. Tying this concept to string theory ("if no strings are vibrating in the tenth dimension, no reality is created in the dimensions below") is one of the interesting connections I see between my way of visualizing how our reality is constructed and mainstream scientific theory.

Poll # 19 - The LHC is going to be successful in proving the existence of extra dimensions.
Poll ended July 28 2008. 71% agreed while the rest disagreed.

Poll # 20 - The LHC will reveal the source of dark matter and/or dark energy.
Poll ended August 8 2008. 63% disagreed while the rest agreed.

Very interesting! While neither of the questions had a resounding victory, this blog's readership are leaning towards the LHC finding proof of extra dimensions, but more readers also believe the LHC will not find the source of dark matter and dark energy. What can we make of this?

These two poll questions relate to discussions in my blog from a couple of weeks ago: Dark Energy, Linelanders, and the LHC, as well as Randomness and the Missing 96 per cent. There are many articles out there about the Large Hadron Collider, which is scheduled to go online this month, and what it may or may not find. Will it reveal the Higgs Boson, called by some the "God Particle"? Will it reveal evidence of extra dimensions, or the source of dark energy? Naturally, I am rooting for the extra dimensions discovery, as the whole discussion of extra dimensions in an environment where some mainstream physicists are claiming their existnce is unprovable conjecture would be finally laid to rest. My biggest fear for the LHC is that it will only reveal another forest of tinier and tinier particles, leaving science with the task of coming up with an even larger and more powerful particle collider for further experiments in the decades to come.

The July 21st edition of New Scientist magazine had an interesting article related to all this, here are some quotes:

Awaiting a messenger from the multiverse

by Stephen Battersby

AT THE most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the twin colliding beams of protons have been switched off for a few hours. All seems quiet, but both the giant machine and the foundations of physics are about to be shaken by a tiny time bomb. Hiding within a copper plate deep inside one of the accelerator's massive detectors is a peculiar interloper: a particle that is waiting to explode, and with its incandescent fragments write a message from beyond our universe.

If this particle does appear at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, it could change the nature of physics. Physicists might have to abandon their goal of explaining the fundamental basis of our reality and just accept that the properties of matter and energy in our universe arose at random. It could mean not only that we live on a small planet in an insignificant solar system in one of a trillion galaxies in the universe, but our own universe is just one insignificant slice of an unimaginably vast and diverse multiverse.

To many physicists, that is anathema; but not to Savas Dimopoulos of Stanford University in California or his colleague Nima Arkani-Hamed at Harvard University. In 2002, they first began to wonder what a multiverse might mean for particle physics.

This was at a time when the multiverse was being discussed, albeit reluctantly, as a solution to a cosmic problem. Astronomers had discovered a repulsive force pushing the galaxies apart, caused by an inherent energy present in space. Often called the cosmological constant, no one knows what is generating this force.

On the face of it, physics has a ready-made explanation. According to quantum theory, the vacuum, or the space between particles, is not totally empty. It is home to short-lived "virtual" particles that flicker in and out, created by the fundamental quantum fuzziness of the world. Although that might be a hard concept to swallow, it is an enormously successful idea. The calculations of quantum field theory show that these virtual particles cluster around the ordinary, solid, long-lived particles of matter, changing their properties in ways that accurately match many experimental observations.

It is relatively easy to devise a model of particle physics in which virtual particles with positive and negative energies cancel out exactly to zero, but why they should almost cancel each other out, leaving us with a tiny residual energy, is much harder to see.

One physicist had already predicted this, however. In the 1980s, Steven Weinberg at the University of Texas in Austin adopted a controversial line of argument called the anthropic principle, which roughly states that the universe has to possess properties that make it hospitable to life, otherwise we wouldn't be here to see it.

He started by pointing out that if our cosmological constant were only 100 times as big as observed, we would be in trouble. Its repulsive force would have stretched out the thin gas of the early universe, preventing it from ever collapsing into stars and planets. But if you have a lot of universes, each with a random value of the cosmological constant, there's going to be at least one with an energy density of roughly a few joules per cubic kilometre. That would enable the existence of planet-dwelling life forms who would then be in a position to observe this value of cosmological constant.

Such a range of universes might sound like wild speculation, but some respected cosmological models imply that there could indeed be many universes, perhaps even an infinite number. In the theory of eternal inflation, for example, our own universe is just one offshoot of an endlessly growing "tree" of universes.

Those of you familiar with my project will recognize many common themes in this article that relate to this ideas I have been promoting with Imagining the Tenth Dimension. Here are some related blog entries:
The Spacetime Tree
Unlikely Events and Timelessness
The Omniverse
Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains

So: will the LHC find proof of extra dimensions, but not the source of dark matter and dark energy, as this blog's participants have predicted? The idea I have promoted with this project (in my book and in blog entries like Dark Energy, Linelanders, and the LHC) is that dark matter and dark energy come from the combined gravitational effects of the neighboring parallel universes in the fifth dimension (for dark matter), and the combined "pull" from other expressions of matter and energy in the sixth dimension and beyond (for dark energy). Will the LHC push us further towards such an understanding? Only time will tell.

Thanks to everyone who participated in those polls, lots more to come. And by all means, if you have a suggestion for a poll question don't be afraid to post it here in the comments.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: The Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs, August Report

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 18

Click here for the archive of polls 1 to 10.
Click here for the archive of polls 11 to 15.

Poll #18 - Max Planck said: “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”
Poll ended July 14 2008
70% agreed while the remainder disagreed.

This relates to so many ideas we have looked at with this project, but most notably Godel's incompleteness theorum, which says it is impossible for us to get "outside the system" we are part of and describe the system in its entirety. The equilibrium state of the underlying quantum fields in their unobserved state is equivalent to how I am describing the tenth dimension - and, as I have always said, attempting to observe any part of the tenth dimension immediately collapses you into some part of the other dimensions. Tying this concept to string theory ("if no strings are vibrating in the tenth dimension, no reality is created in the dimensions below") is one of the interesting connections I see between my way of visualizing how our reality is constructed and mainstream scientific theory.

Next - Poll Questions 19 and 20 - Will the LHC prove the existence of extra dimensions? Will it reveal the source of dark energy/dark matter?

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 17

Click here for the archive of polls 1 to 10.
Click here for the archive of polls 11 to 15.

Poll #17 - Max Planck said: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
(Poll ended June 30 08)
70 % agreed while the rest disagreed.

Another more succinct version of this quote is "science progresses by funerals".

As a person with an unusual approach to thinking about how our reality is derived, which some people embrace and some people reject as bunk, I of course take some comfort from Max Planck's idea presented in this quote. Will my dimensional hierarchy's connections to mainstream science ever be embraced by the mainstream or will this remain nothing more than an intellectual curiosity? Only time will tell. History is full of naysayers and established experts who ridiculed new ideas: there are many famous quotes that have been gathered in various places around the net. Michio Kaku, in his new book Physics of the Impossible, starts each chapter with quotes from famous historical figures and their comments on new ideas. This one, from a respected physicist just over a century ago, is typical of the kind of thinking that Max Planck is referring to:

"Radio has no future. Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. X-rays will prove to be a hoax." - Physicist Lord Kelvin, 1899

Next Poll Question - is it impossible to completely know a mystery that we're part of?

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?

Daily Parrying

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5HyTz9xaBc

I'm nearing the end of the quotes I'm going to be making from Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse, I hope all these references have sold a few books for David Jay Brown. But one of the interviews that I thought was particularly eloquent was with Dr. John E. Mack, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Harvard Professor of psychiatry:

The word "God" has become the shortcut term for what has historically been applied to the overarching or the ultimate creative principle in the universe, that is sometimes experienced in humanlike terms--because I think that our psyche can grasp things if we anthropomorphize them--but, in its essence, is mysterious, luminous, numinous, and overwhelming in its sense of presence when one is open to it. The problem is it's all concept now, mostly, because the actual experience of the divine has been pretty well eradicated from the Western psyche by what Rilke called "daily parrying" so that, as he put it, the senses by which we can know the spirit world have atrophied. So you can only know it experientially, and people that know it experientially are not very good at describing it in a way that's going to create the experience for somebody else. Therefore, somebody who hasn't had the experience, or whose senses aren't open will say, well, you haven't convinced me, because I haven't had the experience. So that's usually where the conversation ends... God as a separate entity, a theistic notion of a being that is separate from us--no, I don't have any sense of that. I have a sense of being part of some infinite spirit wisdom, or spirit intelligence, that is sometimes present, real, and alive to me. But I'm indwelling in it, and it in me.

"Daily parrying" - what a great phrase for what happens in science and culture, where people are trained by tiny little hints every day to be suspicious of anything that hints at something greater than us, or that might plug us into a larger sense of our shared connectedness. In "Animals and Kids" I suggested this might be how kids are taught to be suspicious of the moments when they turn off their narrative voice and just "be". In "Spirituality, Connections and the Ten Dimensions" and "Is God in the Seventh Dimension" I quoted a section from my book that expresses similar sentiments to what Dr. Mack is saying above: the way of visualizing reality that we're exploring here does suggest there are organizing patterns from higher dimensions, and whether you call those patterns "God" or something more clinical doesn't change what we're talking about. However, if by "God" you believe we're talking about an entity who judges and punishes, or who makes your football team win and the other team lose because that's what you prayed for, then we need to be clear that that's not what we're talking about here. Is there something that chose our universe from out of the multiverse, a pattern that unites us, a creative process that causes life in all its complexity and diversity to spring forth from simple chemical reactions, and an enfolded whole that we can return to when we die? That's what we're talking about here.

Quoting Max Planck
This also relates to the currently running poll question, quoting good old Max Planck, whose work is central to this way of imagining how our reality is constructed. The poll question asks if you agree or disagree with the following statement from Dr. Planck: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it". While I certainly don't want to appear to be so presumptuous as to be claiming that my intuitive way of imagining how our reality is constructed should be equated with the rigorous scientific proofs offered by experts in their field like Max Planck, I do take comfort in the possibility that my ideas are simply ahead of their time: already in the two years since my book was published, major advancements have come from physicists David Deutsch, Sean Carroll, and Anton Zeilinger which confirm key predictions about the nature of reality that I made in my own book. I've talked before about books by respected experts such as Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor and Douglas Hofstadter which agree in many ways with my depiction of the shared, multi-layered nature of what is commonly called the soul, and Jill Taylor's viewpoint strongly aligns with my own ideas about the importance of finding ways to quiet that constantly nattering "narrator voice" we carry within us. Clearly, these ideas speak to philosopher Ekhart Tolle's bestselling books as well: it's all about being in the "now". How many more of the supposedly "fringe science" conclusions I've drawn about how our reality is constructed will eventually be confirmed by mainstream science?

Daily Parrying
This all takes us back to a question asked here before - how much of this "daily parrying" is the result of a deliberate effort to keep the general public from becoming aware of the possibilities that are out there (ideas that are explored in entries like "The Fifth Dimension is a Dangerous Idea", "The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic", and "Flatlanders on a Line"), and how much is the result of random events? One of the most popular videos from this project, "Secret Societies", takes the extreme position that everything is a conspiracy. This idea is also explored in "The Anthropic Viewpoint" which makes the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that we live in The Great Hydrogen Conspiracy, since hydrogen is the most abundant element! The point we're trying to arrive at here is that if our universe was selected from a larger multiverse, then there must be events and processes we can point to that caused that to happen. I believe that whether you call those selecting patterns randomness, conspiracy, a natural outcome, or God, has more to do with your point of view than what we're describing, and that this subtle "daily parrying" we are subjected to throughout our lives has a lot to with the point of view any one of us now has.


A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Br3lpVmids
Another of the songs associated with this project that deals with the idea of subtle influences forming our worldview is Insidious Trends.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: God 2.0

The Flipbook Universe

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

The "flipbook universe" analogy says that our spacetime universe is being created one planck frame at a time. Without this change from frame to frame, I would say we revert back to the information side of the information equals reality equation (type "information equals reality" into google for more about this idea, which also relates to the field of "digital physics" we discussed last time). Modern theories of cosmology like loop quantum gravity are based upon this same idea: what we experience as "time", even though it feels continuous to us, is actually granular, or quantized in nature.

The additional layer that I have added to this idea is that our 4D spacetime is actually being created from probability sets that exist within the fifth dimension, which is where Kaluza proved and Einstein eventually agreed that the field equations for gravity and light for our universe can be united. The string theory concept of the fifth dimension being "curled up at the planck length" from our 4D perspective can then also be easily incorporated into this way of visualizing reality: it only appears that way because our physical "window" into the fifth dimension is just one planck frame at a time.

Here's a phrase I coined years ago which I have used in my book, the tenth dimension forum, and this blog: "that which ceases to change ceases to exist". If something is in "this" set of pages from our flipbook universe, then stops being in the probabilistic set of upcoming pages, it has ceased to change, ceases being part of our observed timeline: it ceases to exist. That's true whether you're talking about a rock, a planet, a person...

... or a gene or a meme.

And by the time you start to imagine genes and memes within the context of the omniverse, you are thinking about something very big indeed. Last blog, we reviewed some of physicist John Wheeler's ideas about how living creatures or quantum observers might actually have fine-tuned indeterminate parts of the initial conditions of the universe through a reverse causal effect: a challenging idea that takes some getting used to. Dr. Wheeler passed away just a few days ago, but as a respected and visionary leader of the physics community, his ideas will live on for years to come. There are three ideas from Imagining the Tenth Dimension that I would like to touch on right now:

1. As per Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation, multiple timelines exist from this moment forward. Those timelines are not random, they are based upon probabilistic wavefunctions, but our free will is part of what creates which timeline each of us ends up traveling upon.

2. As per Feynman's "sum over histories" or "sum over paths", there are also probabilistic branches that we could have travelled upon to get to this moment in time: and while "sum over paths" tells us there is one path that is the most likely, that may not be the path that was actually taken. Since the Oxford team under the direction of Dr. David Deutsch have proved this "branching parallel universes" concept is just as true at the macro level as it is at the quantum level, this should mean there is more than one way any one of us might have been able to get to this moment in time.

3. John Wheeler encouraged us to think of the two above ideas in the really big picture - not only are we creating our future, but we might also be able to fine tune our past. This is not to say that my free will can allow me to jump to the parallel universe where it's the end of April 2008 and John Wheeler is still alive, but is to imply that there might be other subtle ways that we each can change our trajectories as we twist and turn in the fifth dimension, creating our flipbook universe one planck length at a time: and a particular future might become more probabilistically likely if we were to fine-tune our past through the quantum observer processes John Wheeler was suggesting.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

P.S.: Another blog entry that talks about the Flipbook Universe concept is Tens, Google, and the Expanding Universe