Just Geometry

I've been hearing lately from people who say they found The Grand Design, the new book by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, easier to digest because of the advanced concepts I had already eased them into through my writing. Thanks for your kind words, everyone!

At the end of our last blog entry, Extra Dimensional Geometry, we talked about how we could work the hard determinist viewpoint into the idea that we are ultimately each just navigating within extra-dimensional patterns that already exist. In The Grand Design, the authors suggest that free will is an illusion. They say that the system of inevitable cause and effect outcomes leading from the big bang to the creation of life to the evolution of humans to an individual such as you or I right "now" is so incredibly complex, saying that we have "free will" works as an effective interpretation, but is ultimately not the correct one. I think the authors are trying to have their cake and eat it too on this point, but we'll return to that thought in a minute.

The Grand Design is a summary of mainstream cosmologists' thinking about the nature of reality, targeted towards an audience with little knowledge of the subject. Some readers may be frustrated by the book's repeating references to M Theory as being the best candidate for the ultimate Theory of Everything, while spending comparatively little time explaining any more about M Theory other than to say that it combines the five other versions of string theory.

(Here's an amusing Venn Diagram example from flickr)

M Theory, which relies on ten spatial dimensions plus one of time, can be thought of as a Venn Diagram: draw five circles which overlap in various ways, they represent the different versions of string theory, and M Theory provides a framework for showing how these different theories fit together and overlap. Hawking and Mlodinow invoke the interesting concept of "model-dependent realism" in their book, which we can sum up like this: reality can be interpreted in a number of ways, and the frame of reference from which you describe reality can make one theory or another appear to be more relevant while your viewpoint is within that frame. One of the more often-quoted examples from this new book appears in Dwight Garner's New York Times book review:

They write about a city in Italy that, a few years ago, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls. Why? Because it is cruel, the city council argued, to give the fish “a distorted view of reality.” We’re quite similar to those goldfish, the authors suggest. Our perceptions are limited and warped by the kind of lenses we see through, “the interpretive structure of our human brains.” Digging deeply into quantum physics, they argue that our universe “doesn’t have just a single history, but every possible history, each with its own probability.”

Which is where I believe the authors are having their cake and eating it too. In my book and this blog, one of the keys to understanding the multiverse is Feynman's "sum over histories" or "sum over paths" concept. Hawking and Mlodinow also talk about this important idea: the wave/particle duality underlying our reality means that there are many many paths a particle could have traveled to get to its current position. When you add all those paths together, you get the path that is most likely, but that is not the path that was necessarily taken. Hawking and Mlodinow say free will is an illusion because of the existence of this "most likely path" for every particle in the universe, which contradicts Feynman's theories and the evidence provided by numerous double-slit experiments clearly showing that particles do indeed take all paths, not just the most likely one provided by Feynman's sum over histories.

(image from Wikimedia Commons)
This double-slit experiment has shown that when a particle passes through a barricade having either one or two slits, when one slit is opened the resulting pattern shows (as you would expect) that only one path was taken. But when two slits are opened an interference pattern results: a particle is going through both slits simultaneously! Each particle interferes with itself as it passes through the two openings.

Now, the common objection to the relevance of all this is that the quantum world is completely separate from our classical reality. I've taken the opposing view, insisting that this is all part of the same continuum, and there really is no dividing line between the one layer of reality and the other.

Hawking and Mlodinow talk about how the double slit experiment has been successfully demonstrated with "buckyballs": molecules created from 60 carbon atoms. A buckyball passing through two slits simultaneously would already be moving uncomfortably far into our classical world for some people: but no more so than the "spooky action at a distance" entanglement experiments being demonstrated with increasingly large molecules over increasingly large distances that we've talked about in past entries.

I use the phrase "just geometry" in my book a number of times, here's an excerpt from chapter 8:

The idea of the moment you are experiencing at this instant as being “just geometry” means that there are multiple paths which could have caused you to arrive at this particular moment, and the path that you remember as being your personal history is only one of many which could have brought you to this present moment in time (as you will recall from the discussion of Feynman’s “sum over paths” theory which we first looked at in chapter four). The image of the extraordinarily extravagant multiverse that is inferred from this concept is something we discussed in the Introduction, as this ties directly to Everett’s “Many Worlds Theory” and “decoherence”, both of which have been enjoying renewed support in the last few years. And finally, we should always be mindful of the double-edged sword that is implied by the idea of the current instant of time being “just geometry”: while this means that the potential for this instant of time has always existed within the tenth dimension (as have all the potential moments to come and all the ones that could have already occurred), it does not mean that our path is somehow carved in stone and unavoidable. As creatures with free will, we are constantly moving through the fifth dimensional paths that are available to us, selecting one of those paths as our personal timeline. The path that we have been on makes the next possible choice the more likely one (and that would be the one predicted by the sum over paths method), but a life-changing decision or event that breaks old habits and old patterns will certainly direct a person’s life to a new trajectory, making other future paths more likely to be followed from that point on.

I hope that the concept of "model-dependent realism" shows another way that my own approach to visualizing the dimensions can be juxtaposed with other theories of reality: it works as a frame of reference, it has its uses because of that, but it is only one way of many systems for describing how our universe fits into the biggest picture of all. We're going to continue this exploration next time in an entry called "Thinking Biggest".

Till then, enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Polls Archive 29 - Do Electrons Have No Size?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxfyCiieubE
Poll 29 - "An electron is a point-like particle. This means, just like the "point" we start the tenth dimension visualization with, an electron is 'of no size, no dimension'." Poll ended December 16 2008. 41% agreed while 58% disagreed.

This poll question relates to some blog entries that were published around the same time: "We Start With a Point", "A Point Within the Omniverse", and "Elvis and the Electrons".

Here's a link to the wikipedia article on electrons. As it says in the article: "Electrons are believed to be point particles with no apparent substructure. They are identical particles that belong to the first generation of the lepton particle family."

So: all electrons are identical, and all electrons are point particles. Here's the first couple of sentences from the wikipedia article on point particles:

"A point particle (or point-like particle, often spelled pointlike particle) is an idealized object heavily used in physics. Its defining feature is that it lacks spatial extension: being zero-dimensional, it does not take up space."

Thinking of an electron as having no size and being zero-dimensional, then, is the correct approach as far as modern physics is concerned. And yet, conceiving of an electron in those terms is not an easy thing for us to wrap our heads around, as 58% of the people responding to this poll showed us.

"We Start With a Point"
My animation, which has now been seen by millions of people around the world, starts with these five words: "we start with a point". Building one idea upon another, we end up with a way to visualize all aspects of reality as contained within the ten dimensions, a mind-blowing journey that makes people want to watch this animation over and over again. When author David Jay Brown called my book "brilliantly conceived and mind-stretching", he was celebrating the large cloud of ideas that spring from the starting point of this way of visualizing reality. Here in this blog, there are a great many tangents that we've explored, all of them stemming from the point of indeterminate size that the original animation both begins and ends with.

Envisioning that the entire universe really contains only one electron, then (a fanciful idea from celebrated physicist Richard Feynman which we discussed most recently in Poll 27) requires us to stretch our minds even further. And, as we just discussed in Poll 28, stacking on top of that the idea that our perceived reality is being created through the pattern-recognition powers of our minds builds a conceptual tower which some are still not willing to climb!

To those of you who are not ready to embrace the more "out there" notions that this project sometimes gets into, I'm fine with that. At the core of these discussions, though, is what I believe to be an essential truth about the nature of reality, and as each of us come with our pre-conceived notions and our own experiences which frame our worldview, this project is about ways of showing how we are all connected together: in a very real way, we are like Feynman's single electron, existing simultaneously within a reference frame which is completely outside of time, outside of space. Think of this: the spark within each of us that some call consciousness, and some call "soul", or "spirit", is like a point-like particle when perceived within each "frame" of space-time, but it's also part of a much larger wave function which exists across timelessness. As I've said before: "you are the point".

To finish, here's my song "Connections", which ties these ideas together in its own way.

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=J25WhT8WZQ4

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Polls Archive 30 - Do you believe in ghosts?

Polls Archive 27- Only One Electron?

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

Poll 27 - "Feynman was right - there is really only one electron in the universe, whizzing backwards and forwards within timelessness, and the trillions of identical electrons we see at any "now" are just that single electron over and over again."(Poll ended November 16 08. As you can see, the jury was so close on this one that we should probably declare it a tie.)

This poll question was connected to a number of blog entries created around the same time, some of which I will link to at the end of this entry.

When Michio Kaku's book Physics of the Impossible introduced me to Feynman's fascinating idea I felt a strong resonance, because it fits so nicely into the general thrust of this project. What I've been trying to get people to imagine is that there is a way of viewing and understanding reality which is outside of time and space, where everything happens simultaneously and all possible outcomes exist as potential. As mystical as that concept may appear to be, there are sound scientific reasons for supporting such an idea, and if ancient mysticism and modern cosmology happen to agree on something doesn't that only strengthen the argument for this being the truth?

There have also been some news stories lately that ask this question: do you believe in God, or do you believe in the multiverse? Here's a link to one of those stories:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2008/dec/08/religion-philosophy-cosmology-multiverse

Let's look at the opening paragraphs of the above article, which was written by Mark Vernon:

Is there a God or a multiverse? Does modern cosmology force us to choose? Is it the case that the apparent fine-tuning of constants and forces to make the universe just right for life means there is either a need for a "tuner" or else a cosmos in which every possible variation of these constants and forces exists somewhere?

This choice has provoked anxious comment in the pages of this week's New Scientist. It follows an article in Discover magazine, in which science writer Tim Folger quoted cosmologist Bernard Carr: "If you don't want God, you'd better have a multiverse."

Even strongly atheistic physicists seem to believe the choice is unavoidable. Steven Weinberg, the closest physics comes to a Richard Dawkins, told the eminent biologist: "If you discovered a really impressive fine-tuning ... I think you'd really be left with only two explanations: a benevolent designer or a multiverse."

Imagining the Tenth Dimension, of course, fondly embraces the idea of a multiverse, the Many Worlds Interpretation as first proposed by physicist Hugh Everett III, and ultimately a concept known as the "omniverse" which blends together the many varying ways that the term "multiverse" can be used. It also places this quixotic goal for itself - is it really necessary to choose between God and the multiverse? Is there not a way where both can be shown to be different ways of describing the same thing?

Here are some of my past blog entries which explore the idea of everything being connected together, in the same way that Feynman fancifully imagined there being only one electron zooming back and forth within timelessness.

Elvis and the Electrons

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

A Point Within the Omniverse

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

You are Me and We are All Together

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=GbGAPR70tTY

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Polls Archive 28 - Have You Ever Seen an Aura?

We Start With a Point

A direct link to this video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=MPl9Ofv88Yk

One of the most unfair criticisms I hear about this project is that it somehow misuses or misunderstands the term "dimensions". In "What Would a Linelander Really See?", we talked about how the definition of dimensions that this project uses is aligned with the most basic definition of dimensions as found in wikipedia. What I want people to understand is that the extra dimensions physicists are describing are still spatial dimensions (or, as some physicists call them, "space-like dimensions"), and my way of visualizing the dimensions builds from that premise. Here's an easily-related concept from wikipedia: the point-line-plane postulate.

Point-line-plane postulate
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The point-line-plane postulate in geometry is a collective of three assumptions (axioms) that are the basis for Euclidean geometry in three or more dimensions.

1. Unique Line Assumption
There is exactly one line passing through two distinct points.

2. Number Line Assumption
Every line is a set of points which can be put into a one-to-one correspondence with the real numbers. Any point can correspond with 0 (zero) and any other point can correspond with 1 (one).

3. Dimension Assumption
Given a line in a plane, there exists at least one point in the plane that is not on the line. Given a plane in space, there exists at least one point in space that is not in the plane.

I've added the italics on "three or more dimensions" for emphasis, as that sums up the game we're playing here: using what we know about the first three dimensions, we can continue to stack one dimension upon another using the same logic.

Here's one more idea for you to consider - in You are Me and We are All Together, we talked about renowned physicist Richard Feynman's proposal that the reason all electrons are absolutely identical is because there is really just one electron in the universe, whizzing back and forth within timelessness, and the trillions of electrons we see around us are just multiple copies of that same electron as it completes its journey back and forth from the beginning to the end of time. Why are all electrons identical? If you look up "point particle" you'll see that electrons are described as "point-like particles", which means they actually have no size and no dimension - just like the point with which we start our tenth dimension animation.

So this time around, let's think back to the original animation and review how this way of visualizing the extra dimensions relates to "points" that are moving within the dimensions, and how we can start from our first three dimensions with which we're so familiar to imagine the extra dimensions beyond spacetime.


We Start With a Point

We start with a point at position zero
Then, we can imagine a second point
and create a line segment with these two points at the end
We can imagine a line passing through these two points
extending to infinity in either direction.

Adding all of the possible values together
on either side of the point we started from
creates a perfect symmetry
which adds back up to where we started:
Zero, a point of indeterminate size.

This will be true
no matter where you start
or how many dimensions you're imagining
Because each new dimension adds two more directions
and they will always head towards infinity in either direction.
But what do we mean by infinity?

Infinity is a tricky word. Is there more than one infinity?
Or is it more correct to say that there are many ways to get to infinity?
If I start counting 0,1,2,3... and so on,
there's no end to the numbers that I could count.
If I start counting 0,2,4,6,8... and so on,
there's also no end to the numbers that I could count.
If I start dividing any number in half, and half again, and half again,
there's no end to the number of times I could keep dividing that number in half.
Each is a way to get to infinity.

Are each of the infinities we just imagined a different size?
We should always keep reminding ourselves - Infinity is Not a Number
So even though one infinite set can be a subset of another infinite set
(which means that saying one version of infinity is larger than another
does have a certain usefulness in helping to imagine all this)
ultimately all infinities are the same size,
because all infinities are of indeterminate size
Just like the point we started from.

Let's imagine that first and second point again.
They could have been anywhere, in any dimension
And there would be an infinite number of points
on the line that passes through those 2 points
But even though there are an infinite number of points on that line,
there could still be another point that we could imagine that's not on that line
No matter where we place that additional point, we'll now have to think of not a line
But a plane, and that plane will extend to infinity in both of the new directions we just added

Again, this new point could have been anywhere
As long as it isn't on the line we started from
But no matter where we place it the plane we're creating
is still just a subset of all possible planes
And no matter what plane we imagine, we can still add an additional point
That is not on that plane and requires us to add an additional dimension
Again, with two new directions that extend both ways to infinity

This cycle can be repeated endlessly -
define a system, add a point that isn't within that system
add a dimension for that new point to be within
which adds two new opposing directions that each extend to infinity
in either of those two new directions.

For the first few dimensions, this is easy to imagine with graphs and arrays -
we can imagine a two-dimensional data set, a two-dimensional array (x,y)
with values for two different co-ordinates:
X on one axis, Y on the other, simple to draw on a piece of paper.

But this gets harder to picture as the number of dimensions climb:
So while we can easily define a seven-dimensional array with seven different co-ordinates,
Visualizing the graph that could represent such an array
is not an easy thing for our 3D sensibilities to accomplish.

So...
If we're trying to visualize our reality as coming from extra dimensions
it's helpful for us to keep imagining what new degree of freedom
each new dimension is adding.
The "point-line-plane postulate's" idea of using a current dimension
to define a line,
the next dimension up to define a plane
and the dimension above that to define a space created
by those potential lines and potential planes
Is a way for us to keep visualizing
past what we as 3D creatures
are used to thinking about.


We're going to continue talking about these ideas next time, with an entry called "You are a Point Within the Omniverse". In it, we're going to go back to the idea that the omniverse is an enfolded symmetry state, which we can think of as a perfectly balanced zero. But one of the ideas we haven't talked about much is how that symmetry state is always ready to fall out of balance and create a universe - it's like a pencil balanced on its tip, always ready to fall one way or another and create a new pattern in the information that becomes our reality or any other.

To finish, a song sung for me by Ron Scott, one of the 26 songs attached to this project. This one is about the mysterious spark of life and consciousness, a point moving within the omniverse. The song is called "Burn the Candle Brightly".


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

That's all for now. Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: A Point within the Omniverse

The Big Bang and the Big Pie

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=kiP12-u2GYY

Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, used the large fortune he amassed to institute the Nobel Prizes, and the latest Nobel Laureates were announced a few weeks ago. ...the big bang, dynamite, there's a joke in there somewhere, make one up if you want.

In You are Me and We are All Together, I quoted this fascinating bit of information from Michio Kaku's book The Physics of the Impossible:

...Feynman revealed the true secret of antimatter: it's just ordinary matter going backward in time. This simple observation immediately explained the puzzle that all particles have antiparticle partners: it's because all particles can travel backward in time, and hence masquerade as antimatter. (This interpretation is still the explanation currently accepted today.)

Antimatter, like wormholes, is one of those concepts some of us have learned about through science fiction, which might lead us to believe that it's a fictional concept. Watch out for that wormhole! Activate the antimatter drive! Blast 'em with the antimatter gun! It turns out, though, that the issue of why our universe has so very little antimatter in it is one of the great unsolved mysteries of cosmology.

North has its South, Time has its Anti-Time
In entries like Scrambled Eggs and Time in Either Direction, we've talked about the mainstream science concept that there could be other universes where time flows in the opposite direction to what we're experiencing. Think about what Feynman is telling us, then: if a conscious observer were traveling within our own universe in time's opposite direction, they would be faced with a universe which is made up of an unexplainably large number of antiparticles and antimatter, and almost no matter! From their perspective, the fact that our universe is so asymmetrical would be an equally unsolved mystery.

In a few weeks, the 2008 Nobel Prize recipients will travel to Oslo and Stockholm to receive their awards. You can click on this link to read about the Physics prize, or you can click here to download an 8 page pdf with some nicely presented background information. This year the Physics prize is being awarded in pieces - half went to Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago, IL, USA,

"for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics"

and the other half was awarded jointly to Japan's Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa

"for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature"

Our universe is a temporary deviation from symmetry
To sum up their discoveries very briefly, these scientists have demonstrated that there is an underlying symmetry that our universe comes from (a concept I have talked about many times here), and because of that underlying symmetry, at the origin of our universe there should have been an equal number of matter and antimatter particles. The fact that our universe has so many fewer antimatter particles, then, must be because there were more particles than antiparticles back then - so, while most of the opposing particles and antiparticles obliterated each other, there were (according to these scientists) about one extra particle of matter for every ten billion particles of antimatter, and that one out of ten billion particles are the ones that remain to create the astonishingly huge universe we find ourselves to be in right now. Another mind boggling concept to wrap our heads around!

Thinking about Timelessness
Now let's add one more even more mind-boggling concept on top of all that. If it's the accepted definition of antimatter that it's just matter that is traveling backwards in time, how are there any naturally occurring antimatter particles at all in our universe right now? If those particles were created within the big bang, they're going in the wrong direction to be part of our universe. How can this be? It's because the big bang is an illusion. In "The Past is an Illusion", we quoted this famous phrase:

This separation between past, present and future is only an illusion…
- Albert Einstein

... and this is where it takes us. Richard Feynman showed us that antimatter particles are coming from the future and heading towards the past. So, if we're talking about symmetry being broken to create our universe, we're not just talking about an event that happened 13.7 billion years ago: we're talking about a broken symmetry which occurred to simultaneously create our universe and all of it possible timelines, right from the big bang to the final moment of our universe, in a place that is "outside of time". In this project, that place is a "point" within the seventh dimension and above. That "point" is a selection pattern, which chooses our universe and its basic physical laws from out of an enfolded background state where all possible universes and their possible timelines exist simultaneously. Gevin Giorbran called that underlying state "Timelessness", and in my project I call that the indeterminacy of the tenth dimension in its unobserved state.

The Big Bang and the Big Pie
Saying "the big bang is an illusion" is a way of saying that the big bang's effects are only one way of looking at the information that becomes our reality. In the biggest picture of all, the big bang--just like time itself--becomes irrelevant, because we are talking about the place where everything happens all at the same time. Our "now" that we are observing at this instant, then, as amazing and beautiful and complex as it might be, is still only the tiniest of slices of that much larger pie that represents every possible state for every possible universe, and every possible way of organizing the information that could potentially create any of that.

So: enjoy the journey on your tiny slice of pie!


To close, here's one of the videos for my song which includes the lyric "the big bang is just an illusion": the song is called "The Unseen Eye".


A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK29fTLXEf0

Rob

Next: Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs, November Report

You are Me and We are All Together

A direct link for the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbGAPR70tTY

A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty... We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.
- Albert Einstein

In David Jay Brown and Psychedelics, we talked about the possibility that psychedelic experiences might actually be used in the treatment of addictions and mental illness, when given in properly supervised circumstances. Though I have no personal experience with psychedelics I'm fascinated when I read about the experiences of others who have gone out to the edges of perception and brought us back some jewels for us all to admire.

Last blog was entitled "I Know You, You Know Me": a phrase from a Beatles song. This time we're using another phrase, this one which John Lennon tells us was based upon an insight that came to him while he was taking an acid trip. (The song this is taken from, "I Am the Walrus", is also quite famously known as a song John Lennon concocted after learning that schoolteachers were incorporating Beatles music into their lectures, and Lennon took great delight in creating a song which would be so deliberately obscure no one would be able to interpret it. Nonetheless, the opening phrase of the song is reported to be a serious effort by Lennon to explain an insight he perceived while under the influence of LSD:

I am he as you are he as you are me
and we are all together

Last blog we talked about the feeling of connectedness that a growing number of people are sharing right now around the world. It's so easy to be cynical about ideas like this, and yet books by serious scientists like Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, whose "My Stroke of Insight" I have talked about a number of times before, are showing us that there is more than just naive wishful thinking to such an idea: it appears that it is part of our basic human awareness, the underlying seeds of consciousness that make us who we are, that is naturally driven to find the connections of the one to the many.

I don't usually talk about my dreams in this blog, but I had a doozy a few weeks ago which, if you will indulge me, I would like to share.

Have you ever had a dream that seemed to cover an impossibly long span of time? In this dream, I started from my current life, interacted with people in ways that were sometimes wonderful, sometimes frustrating or infuriating, and eventually I died. After a brief break I started another life, this time still laden with the memories of what had ticked me off and what I had enjoyed in my previous life, and this definitely had an influence on my new life and the decisions I made. Again and again I repeated the process, and eventually I started to recognize myself in other bodies, often acting from a certain belief system which was flawed by misunderstandings and bad luck that had come before, and eventually I had lived every life that there was to have lived in the history of the world. I awoke with a feeling that if only we could all have such an experience, we would all be able to understand why so many of us can appear to act with unreasoning negativity - we are all interacting without truly understanding what makes the other person do and say the things they do.

Okay, it was just a dream, everyone has strange dreams from time to time. But since this project has me obsessed with finding connections, I saw an eerie echo of my dream a few days later when I read this passage from Michio Kaku's "The Physics of the Impossible". He is talking about Richard Feynman, whose "sum over histories" method is one of the concepts I have used many times in my book and this blog:

...Feynman revealed the true secret of antimatter: it's just ordinary matter going backward in time. This simple observation immediately explained the puzzle that all particles have antiparticle partners: it's because all particles can travel backward in time, and hence masquerade as antimatter. (This interpretation is still the explanation currently accepted today.)

With his thesis advisor, John Wheeler, Feynman then speculated that perhaps the entire universe consisted of just one electron, zigzagging back and and forth in time. Imagine that out of the chaos of the original big bang only a single electron was created. Trillions of years later, this single electron would eventually encounter the cataclysm of Doomsday, where it would make a U-turn and go backward in time, releasing a gamma ray in the process. Then it would go back to the original big bang, and then perform another U-turn. The electron would then make repeated zigzag journeys back and forth, from the big bang to Doomsday. Our universe in the twenty-first century is just a time slice of this electron's journey, in which we see trillions of electrons and antielectrons, that is, the visible universe. As strange as this theory may appear, it explains a curious fact from the quantum theory: why all electrons are the same. ...Maybe the reason is that the entire universe consists of the same electron, just bouncing back and forth in time.

Feynman's crazy notion about one single electron, and antimatter particles traveling backwards in time grew into his theory of quantum electrodynamics, which has been experimentally verified to one part in 10 billion, making it one of the most accurate theories of all time. Feynman and his colleagues were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1965 for this discovery. If you click here you can read his Nobel acceptance speech from that year, which is an entertaining and insightful exploration of the creative mind.

Could our universe really have only one electron, whizzing back and forth within timelessness to create the trillions of electrons we see at any particular "now" for our universe? Could consciousness be the same, only one consciousness traveling back and forth across time, experiencing the endless complexity of our universe from a unique perspective each time, but ultimately seeing itself complete the same journey over and over again? Perhaps John Lennon and Richard Feynman were thinking about ideas that were more similar than either of them could ever have realized.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

PS - Since we've been talking about Beatles music, let's finish this entry with what I would consider to be the most Beatles-esque of the 26 songs I've written for this project, and it even begins with a mention of Paul McCartney, who reports that the first time he smoked marijuana he had the insight that there are seven levels to our reality. A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7r2NJop0cs


Next: Scrambled Eggs

The Past is an Illusion

A direct link to the above video is at http://revver.com/video/1210768/the-past-is-an-illusion/

This separation between past, present and future is only an illusion…
- Albert Einstein

Physicists and philosophers often say it: "time is an illusion". But things change, things move, and it takes “time” for those processes to occur. What are we supposed to be imagining if the distinction between past, present and future is really only a persistent illusion? What we’re talking about here is that our experience of “time” from instant to instant is really just a very narrow view of a much larger picture.

Back in a blog entry called "What Would a Flatlander Really See?", we talked about how a 2D Flatlander's vision would be even more limited than most of us can imagine. One of my sons recently sent me a link to a fun little flash game that asks you to deduce the shapes of objects and letters as they pass through a plane: click here to play that game. This challenging puzzle game is actually giving you a taste of what you would be able to see if you were an imaginary Flatlander living within a 2D plane.

Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation says that we as quantum observers don't "collapse" the wave function of our quantum reality, we merely "observe" it in a particular state at each particular instant. This time around, we're going to talk about the illusions that we fall into as we observe those waves of possibility that are represented within the "now" that is our universe at this very instant, and how this can cause us to miss the potential that those waves really represent. So... here's a question that is often asked: is it possible for a person to predict the future? If so, doesn't that mean the future already exists and our free will is an illusion?

The "hard determinist" viewpoint, which says everything from the big bang to the end of the universe was inevitable and our free will is an illusion, would seem to be supported by the idea that there has been only one path from the big bang to now, so why should there be more than one path from this moment forward?

Likewise, if I pass a 3D object like a rock through a 2D plane, it does indeed appear that what is going to pass through has already been predetermined. Imagining that rock is really 4D since it exists not just within space but within time doesn't seem to make much difference, because a rock is still most likely going to be the same rock with the same shape five minutes, five months, or even five years from now.

We need the 4th dimension for change in the 3rd dimension to occur
But what about passing through a 4D human, capable of moving, dancing around, bending over and touching their toes, and doing all the other things their free will allows them to do? As that 4D person passes through the 2D plane, their shape will be unpredictable, and every time they pass through the plane there will be different 2D cross-sections visible within the second dimension.

Again, if a 2D flatlander were to somehow record the shape changes that had happened for one particular pass through by that free will human, then the flatlander would have a recording that in their minds was a "history" which, once it happened, would not change again, so a 2D flatlander could convince themselves that what had happened was inevitable if that was their chosen mindset. The flash game we started this entry off with, then, is only able to be played because there is no free will movement in the shapes being presented, and the same 2D pattern is presented over and over until you guess correctly.

Many Worlds, Many Branches, Many Histories
The quantum physics answer, promoted by respected experts like John Wheeler and Richard Feynman, is that the past has a certain amount of flexibility just as the future does, and that there are many ways we could have gotten to our current "now". Feynman called it the "sum over paths" or "sum over histories" concept, and Wheeler called it the "self-excited circuit" of quantum observation. This was an idea I talked about in my blog "Boredom and Consciousness Part One", in which I discussed the serious proposition from quantum physicists Lawrence Krauss and James Dent that our 1998 observation of the accelerating expansion of the universe has hastened its end!

This doesn't mean, by the way, that I'm claiming that simply through the act of observing we can make impossible things happen: this was the subject we explored in my blog entry "The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic". But it does mean that if there are certain things about our history that were not completely locked in, that had elements that were indeterminate, then those things are part of a cloud of possible paths that we could have traveled upon to get to our current "now". Physicists Krauss and Dent are talking about extremely large ideas from cosmology, but this idea also works at a personal level: for each of us, there are many ways that the past could have affected us, and until we irreversibly lock in one path or another, that past can effectively be changed (this idea relates strongly to the surprising scientific proof we've talked about before that we are capable of Changing Our Genes). As I've said before, for persons trapped in repeating patterns of negative behavior this idea can offer a way out: because quantum mechanics tells us there are many paths we could have traveled to get to our current "now", this means the past has a certain amount of flexibility which we can take advantage of.

The "Now" is Real, Everything Else is Probabilistic
In my blog entry "Local Realism Bites the Dust" we talked about the Anton Zeilinger team's experiments in Vienna that demonstrate these ideas as well. Is the past really an illusion? Not completely, and Feynman's sum over histories concept demonstrates the same idea: there are many paths we could have traveled to get to the absolutely real "now" that we are observing from instant to instant. I believe that it's time's arrow and the fourth dimension that convinces us that the past is less than it really is. And with my project, I believe the answer to all of this is in the fifth dimension rather than the fourth: that gives us an easily imagined explanation that allows for the straight and unwavering 4D line of time that supports the hard determinists' view, and lets us imagine within the fifth dimension the more probabilistic future (and past!) that quantum mechanics asks us to visualize for the underlying structures of our reality.

My blog entry "What Would a Linelander Really See" offers further explanations of this way of thinking about time and free will. And all of this is part of thinking about the biggest picture of timelessness where, as Gevin Giorbran so eloquently described it, "Everything is Forever".


To close, here's a video created by Ron Scott for one of the 26 songs from my project, and this is about some of those events in the past that can create irreversible changes in the "now" that each of us is currently witnessing. The song is called "Senseless Violence". A direct link to this video can be found at http://revver.com/video/384964/senseless-violence/


Enjoy the journey,

Rob

Next: According to the Omniverse Almanac

God 2.0

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-Y4xseftgQ


Last entry we talked about the "daily parrying" that would cause some people to look at a blog titled "God 2.0" and automatically assume that what is going to be talked about will be non-scientific meandering about the world of the spiritual and the metaphysical. If you're familiar with my blog or my book, you will already know that I am more interested in the middle ground - a place where philosophy and physics, spirituality and science can find ways to agree that they are really thinking about the same things.

The Skeptic
Michael Shermer is the well-known publisher of Skeptic Magazine, and Michael's goal has been to poke holes in the questionable claims of fringe science, the paranormal, and a wide range of other areas that he has targeted with his razor-sharp debunking skills. This is why I found it quite marvelous when I picked up the July issue of Scientific American, and found that Mr. Shermer's regular column this issue is entitled "Sacred Science: can emergence break the spell of reductionism and put spirituality back into nature?".

Reinventing the Sacred
Mr. Shermer's article is about a fellow who comes from my neighboring province of Alberta, Canada: Stuart Kauffman, founding director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary, who has written a book called "Reinventing the Sacred". To quote from Michael Shermer's article about the book:

Kauffman reverses the reductionist's causal arrow with a comprehensive theory of emergence and self-organization that he says 'breaks no laws of physics' and yet cannot be explained by them. God 'is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere and human cultures,' Kauffman declares.

I have spent time with Stu Kauffman... he is one of the most spiritual scientists I know, a man of inestimable warmth and ecumenical tolerance, and his God 2.0 is a deity worthy of worship. But I am skeptical that it will displace God 1.0, Yahweh, whose Bronze Age program has been running for 6,000 years on the software of our brains and culture.

Creativity and the "now"
I've talked many times here about the role of creativity in our universe, and how ideas from quantum physicist John Wheeler and professor of cognitive science Douglas Hofstadter can be tied together to show us how a self-excited loop can create not just a universe but life and consciousness as well. In my book I used physicist Richard Feynman's sum over paths idea to show how the past is just as probabilistic as we know the future to be. Now that Anton Zeilinger is publishing the results of experiments he and his team in Vienna have conducted that prove that we are operating in a probabilistic cloud where the only thing that is truly real for us is the constantly moving "now" of our observed reality, the ideas I proposed are being confirmed: and as John Wheeler suggested, this means that there are some indeterminate elements of the past that can be changed by our current observation. As I've been saying here, this means we can all select new trajectories from our current "now" at any time that launch us off on a new path, and accepting the indeterminate nature of the past is key to understanding how much power we are talking about here. As I discussed in Changing Your Genes, the scientific study that shows we are able to switch off and on various genes simply through changes in lifestyle and changes in attitude gives us a glimpse of how the past is not as carved in stone as we've been led to believe: because quantum physics is proving that our currently observed reality is derived from a multiverse of possible choices that exist in both the future and the past for our universe at any particular "now".

Enfolded Symmetry
Scientists like Sean Carroll, David Deutsch, and (of course) Richard Dawkins are atheists. I reference their work regularly with this project. I believe the Dawkins concept of genes as a "River Out of Eden" and memes as ideas that can be transmitted or shared without loss across time and space are both very useful and enlightened ways of imagining the underlying timelessness of our reality. My way of imagining how our reality is constructed agrees with Dr. Carroll's ideas about an equilibrium state which is "outside the system". My project also agrees with the Deutsch team's proof that the parallel worlds resulting from chance and choice are directly equivalent to the probabilistic results of quantum mechanics. Now, here's something new: the June 14 2008 issue of New Scientist Magazine has an article about the award-winning work of mathematicians John Thompson and Jacques Tits, who have offered some mind-expanding proofs about how our amazing universe is derived from symmetries in the higher dimensions. This idea is related to Garrett Lisi's eight-dimensional E8 symmetry group, which I've referred to a number of times in this blog, and which I believe ties back into my project as well: by the time you have imagined an Omniverse which expresses all possible patterns of mass and energy, there is an equilibrium state where all of those possible patterns enfold back into a balance, where everything fits together into a perfect symmetry, which is the natural underlying state. Our universe is defined by higher dimensional patterns which give it its unique laws of physics and its breathtaking intricacy, right from the quarks and neutrinos up to the universe as a whole and all of its possible "spacetime tree" of expressions. In that sense, our cosmos is just a temporary deviation which has been set in motion by the breaking of that symmetry, and our line of time is a return to that perfectly balanced zero which existed before our universe began and which we'll return to after our universe has run its course.

God 2.0
So, while some would object to calling Stuart Kauffman's patterns of emergence that feed back on themselves to create our beautiful and complex universe "God", perhaps "God 2.0" is a useful way to reset our thinking about all this: all we are really talking about here is how higher dimensional patterns could be responsible for the universe we find ourselves in to be selected from the multiverse of all other possible universes, which ultimately, are all part of the Omniverse, where information equals reality. And that is a beautiful thing, worthy of our praise and our wonder.

Here is a song about that very idea: "Thankful".


A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvROwf2KeOg

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Related Entries:
How to Make a Universe
Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains
The Omniverse
Is God in the Seventh Dimension?

Next: Wormholes

Local Realism Bites the Dust

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

I've quoted Vienna physicist Anton Zeilinger before in this blog: he is one of the leading proponents of the concept of information and reality being equivalent, which is a central idea to what we're talking about here. Now, the June 2008 issue of Seed magazine has an article about the leading edge experiments he and his team at IQOQI have been doing which have been designed to answer one of the most basic questions about our reality. To quote from Joshua Roebke's article:

Quantum mechanics fundamentally concerns the way in which we observers connect to the universe we observe. The theory implies that when we measure particles and atoms, at least one of two long-held physical principles is untenable:
- distant events do not affect one another
- properties we wish to observe exist before our measurements.
One of these, locality or realism, must be fundamentally incorrect.

... or both might be incorrect, the article goes on to remind us!

Regular readers of my blog or my book will see this as related to the basic ideas I've been exploring with this project. For me, the question becomes this: is the future fluid, undetermined until we observe it? Plus, I believe time-reversal symmetry requires us to ask the same question in the other direction: is the past just as fluid as the future? In other words, is there only one single path that we could have traveled to get to our current "now", or are there many? I have quoted Feynman's "sum over paths" concept many times as evidence that this multiple-pasts-and-futures concept is true at the quantum level, and I have pointed to the David Deutsch team's proof published in September 2007 that the quantum and macro worlds are equivalent: Feynman and Deutsch are telling us something important when we combine those two ideas. In other words, I believe that branching parallel universes exist both before and after the current "now" that each of us is observing. So, while we might doggedly insist that the reality we observe exists before and after our observation, we have to accept that it exists only as a part of a probabilistic "ray", and not as a single concrete (that is to say, deterministic) structure.

Distant effects do affect one another
The evidence for nonlocality is already proven in science labs with demonstrations of entanglement at increasingly great distances, and not with just subatomic particles but with molecules. I would say it is proven in our daily lives with intuition and empathy, with the connections of selfish memes and selfish genes, and with the way music communicates emotions across time and space. All of the possible expressions of the universe before and after the "now" of our observation are part of a probabilistic cloud of potential states, which I've talked about in entries like "The Omniverse". Still, you might be surprised to learn that the Zeilinger team's experiments showed realism to be violated by "80 orders of magnitude", meaning that they have proved that we do actually create the classical world that we perceive just through the act of observation.

Last year, a piece in Nature magazine about these same experiments entitled "Physicists Bid Farewell to Reality" quoted Dr. Zeilinger as follows:

"We do this all the time in daily life... for example, imagining what would have happened if you had tried to cross the road when a truck was coming. If the world around us behaved in the same way as a quantum system, then it would be meaningless even to imagine that alternative situation, because there would be no way of defining what you mean by the road, the truck, or even you."

In my blog entry "Time in Either Direction" I talked about Dr. Sean Carroll's leading-edge theories on the asymmetry of time, and how nicely they tie into this way of imagining how our reality is constructed as well. As I discussed in "The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic", the key to all of this is finding a way to accept that the branching timelines of other realities exist as potential, even if they are not within the version of reality that we end up witnessing. My song "The Anthropic Viewpoint" sums it up like this:

All those other possibilities
Are just as real but they don't have me

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfe_3bEH-jE

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Making New Connections

Living in the Fifth Dimension

We live in the fifth dimension. Kaluza proved it way back in 1919, and Einstein eventually agreed: the field equations proposed by Einstein and Maxwell for gravity and light can be united if they are calculated in the fifth dimension. But what does that mean to us? And why do most of us continue to believe that our universe exists within four rather than five dimensions?

Quantum mechanics tells us that the building blocks that create our reality are wavefunctions being observed in certain states. At the quantum level, these particles can exist simultaneously in multiple states, but by the time we view our physical reality we are only witnessing one state or another. What causes the dividing line between the strange world of quantum physics and our observed physical reality? This has been one of the great mysteries of the past one hundred years.

As Richard Feynman demonstrated, at any moment in time there is always a probability space that shows what the most likely paths are for how a subatomic particle got to its current position, and where it is most likely headed from here.

What happens if we imagine that the probability space of the quantum world exists within the fifth dimension? If we believe that those other possible states for all of the particles in our universe do actually exist, then we can see how the act of observation collapses the indeterminate state of those particles within the fifth dimension into the specific fourth dimensional line that we perceive ourselves to be on. And if we believe, as many physicists have proposed, that time really is an illusion, then we have a way to imagine how the line of time that we are moving on right now is really just a cross-section out of a multiverse of possible quantum states which continue to exist, but which are decoherent and therefore inaccessible to our own physical reality.

But quantum mechanics goes even further than that. In his book “Programming the Universe”, quantum computer scientist Seth Lloyd shows us how reality and information are interchangeable at the quantum level, and that the big bang can be thought of as the very first binary yes/no of the quantum computer that is our universe and the multiverse it is within. So now let’s take that idea and superimpose it on our fifth-dimensional probability space.

Let’s start with the indeterminate sea of quantum information which exists prior to (or more correctly, "outside of") the big bang – all possible states for all possible particles existing simultaneously within timelessness. Even though this fabric contains the potential for every possible universe within it, Seth Lloyd points out that it would take zero bits to describe. Now, let’s imagine the big bang – the longest lowest wavefunction that joins the beginning of our universe to the end of our universe across the probability space within timelessness. What appears to be a multi-dimensional field of vibrations, though, can also be seen as a binary push/pull, with our fifth-dimensional node always being the dividing point between what is currently possible and what is inaccessible from within our specific observed universe. In this way, we can see how the dimensions above the fifth are unavailable to us because they are part of the binary push away from our reality, while the dimensions below are part of the push back towards the beginning, which from our vantage point appears to be the big bang.

Finally, consider this. If we bend the fabric of a particular dimension, it takes on aspects of the dimension above. Bend a one-dimensional line and it takes on a two-dimensional aspect. Bend a two dimensional plane and it takes on a three-dimensional aspect. What happens if we are imagining Einstein's image of gravity causing a bending of fourth-dimensional spacetime? Aren't we imagining that our fourth-dimensional spacetime is taking on a fifth-dimensional aspect through that bending? Since Kaluza, Einstein, and later Kaluza-Klein all agreed on our existence within the fifth dimension, I would propose that is exactly what Einstein was trying to get us to imagine. I would also propose that the fifth dimension is where the probability space of the quantum wavefunction comes from, since it gives us a way to see how multiple simultaneous branches (or quantum wavestates) could be accessible from our fourth dimensional spacetime.

We live in the fifth dimension.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

The Multiverse and Dark Matter

A half dozen years ago, when I first read in a Stephen Hawkings book about the multiverse, I was immediately struck by how it fit with my unusual way of imagining reality.

Critics of the multiverse concept like to point to this as an unprovable, undetectable fantasy masquerading as a scientific theory, something created by physicists with overactive imaginations, and embraced by nuts like me. How could we prove the existence of parallel universes? Whether you are imagining other universes that spring from other separate sets of initial conditions--other universes that have different basic forces--or whether you are imagining the extreme Many Worlds version of the multiverse that I have come to believe in, which is that every possible branch from any moment in time for every possible universe actually exists... in either case, the easy-to-ask question remains the same: if those other universes exist, why can't we see any evidence of their existence?

One of the more extraordinary claims I have made with this project is that dark matter offers us proof that the parallel universes of the multiverse do exist; and that the source of dark matter is gravitational attraction from those nearby parallel universes of the multiverse which we are constantly branching to (and from!). I believe that dark matter proves that there is more out there than just the single observed universe of hard determinism that we see around us from moment to moment.

Energy and mass are directly related, two sides of the same coin, as Einstein demonstrated. But according to modern science, only four per cent of the universe is accounted for. 73% of the universe is dark energy (the unexplained force which is now causing our universe to accelerate apart from itself), and 23% is the "missing matter" whose gravitational attraction has kept the universe from flying apart as quickly as we would have expected it to, based upon the gravitational attraction of that visible four per cent. So, as I have discussed before, we find ourselves to be living in a “lucky” universe, where the initial big bang conditions created just the right balance between mass and the value of the gravitational force to create a universe which did not immediately collapse in upon itself, or did not immediately fly apart without allowing any significant matter to coalesce.

In a previous blog, I mentioned that experts such as Kaku, Greene, and Randall have told us that of the four basic forces (from weakest to strongest those are gravity, electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force), gravity is the only one that travels across the dimensions. In other words, those other three forces are rooted to the structure of matter within our fourth-dimensional spacetime, while gravity is part of the more basic underlying fabric from which spacetime is constructed. A reader of that previous blog commented that they disagree with this idea because the energy of thought and spirit can also travel across the dimensions, something that I happen to agree with, but here we are talking about what hard science believes about forces and dimensions.

Here's what I say in my book about this idea:

If gravity exists in the fourth dimension and above (which is the current belief of string theorists), doesn’t that mean our new way of viewing the ten dimensions offers a much simpler explanation of dark matter? If all other possible timelines do really exist, then isn’t it conceivable that there will be a certain amount of gravitational pull from the fifth dimensional paths that are most adjacent to our current point in time, with the amount of “gravitational leakage” diminishing as we travel further away on a different fifth-dimensional path from our own fourth-dimensional line?

At any moment in the history of the universe, the number of future paths available to be chosen out of the quantum waves of indeterminacy will be the same. This is not to say that some paths won’t take on substantially more significance for us as a species or for each of us as individuals, but rather that the sum of all available choices that are available will always be the same, which is why the “dark matter” gravitational pull our universe experiences does not constantly fluctuate up and down.

Plus, as we’ve already discussed, Feynman’s “sum over paths” concept tells us that there are an equally large number of paths which could have been taken to arrive at the current moment, even though each of us are aware of only one of those paths. This means that the picture we’re now imagining has an equally large amount of “gravitational leakage” that would be coming from those paths as well. This concept helps us to imagine how the gravitational pull from those other dimensions is not just pulling us forward in time towards the many branches we could be about to take, but is also coming from all of the paths which could have been taken to get us to any particular moment on our fourth-dimensional line.

In my personal opinion, this is the most exciting confirmation that the ten dimensions as we are imagining them here could truly be connected to the structure of reality–in this context, dark matter has a simple explanation. All we have to do is accept that time is a spatial dimension rather than a quality that we overlay on the other dimensions.

One of the verses of my song "The Unseen Eye" talks about this same concept:

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

Here is a link to a previous blog which prints all the lyrics to that song. And here, for fun, is a video of that song:



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK29fTLXEf0

Coming up: "Ghosts and Intuition"

Enjoy the journey,

Rob