Poll 83 - Is Energy Not Conserved?

Poll 83 - "Cosmologist Dr. Sean Carroll says energy is not conserved in general relativity, because as our spacetime universe expands so does the amount of energy. Do you agree with him?"

This poll ended July 13 2011. As you can see here, more people disagreed than agreed, which is really not that surprising: haven't we all been taught that there is a finite amount of energy in the universe? Isn't the Law of Conservation of Energy one that can never be broken? Every time a new "free energy" device is announced, the critics chuckle and say "that's impossible, you can't get something for nothing". So what's Dr. Carroll thinking about here?

I've talked in this blog a number of times about Sean Carroll's writing, and it should be obvious by now that I'm a fan. His blog on the Discover Magazine website is called "Cosmic Variance", and if you go there right now I'm sure you'll find some new entries with some nourishing food for thought. This poll question relates to an entry of his from 2010 called Energy is Not Conserved, and I invite you to follow the link and read the entire piece. Here's a couple of paragraphs to whet your appetite: 

...It’s clear that cosmologists have not done a very good job of spreading the word about something that’s been well-understood since at least the 1920's: energy is not conserved in general relativity.

The point is pretty simple: back when you thought energy was conserved, there was a reason why you thought that, namely time-translation invariance. A fancy way of saying “the background on which particles and forces evolve, as well as the dynamical rules governing their motions, are fixed, not changing with time.” But in general relativity that’s simply no longer true. Einstein tells us that space and time are dynamical, and in particular that they can evolve with time. When the space through which particles move is changing, the total energy of those particles is not conserved.

There's much more to his entry than that, but reading these words is what prompted me to create the poll question we're looking at today. If you are in the camp who disagrees, please read Dr. Carroll's whole entry and see if he changes your mind about this fundamental question on the nature of our reality.

Some of the other entries where I've talked about Sean Carroll's ideas include I'm You from the Future, Flow, How to Time Travel, Temporal Mass, and What's Around the Corner? You might also recognize him from his appearances on the excellent documentary series Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, which if you haven't had a chance to watch I would highly recommend. Next week, we're going to talk about some of the ideas raised in that series with a set of entries that begins with "Imagining the Second Dimension".

Till then, enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: New video - Poll 77 Living in a Simulation

Flow

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgnkjab1pP4

Last entry, in Time and Music, we looked at a brief video clip of the classic Canadian rock band Lighthouse performing live in an experimental setup where different members of the band were in different cities, and the "latency" or time lag introduced by the technology of the time (1996) resulted in them hearing each other as much as 200 milliseconds out of sync with each other. The solution was that they had to somehow re-calibrate their brains, so to speak, so that their impetus to play the notes was way ahead of when they actually wanted the notes to sound. Still, as Paul Hoffert - one of the founding members of Lighthouse who participated in this experiment - remarked in that same blog entry, there are musical instruments and musical situations where musicians regularly have to adjust their playing to compensate for a certain amount of delay, or to play ahead/behind the beat to create a certain feel - musicians use phrases like "playing in the pocket" or "finding the groove" to describe the satisfying feeling of playing with other musicians when it all falls into place, and years of practice create the ability for musicians to play with a seemingly effortless flow.

"Flow" is an interesting word. In my project, I often talk about how for us time seems to flow in only one direction, but that physics places no real restriction on which direction time should happen to occur. In recent entries like The Quantum Solution to Time's Arrow and The Statistical Universe, we looked at some new scientific theories that explore what it can mean if time and causality are not limited to the entropy-driven single direction that we have traditionally believed time to occupy, and my insistence that "time" is just one of the two possible directions in the fourth spatial dimension is very much a part of all this as well.

My use of the word "flow" led a friend of mind from facebook, Jacob Wennerqvist (a talented heavy metal musician from Sweden) to ask me about the word, as he was familiar with it from a different context. Here's what I wrote back to him:

Hi Jacob,

Are you familiar with "flow" in the sense that psychologist Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi uses the term? Here's an article from wikipedia:

"In an interview with Wired magazine, Csíkszentmihályi described flow as 'being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost.'"

Let me pause in my letter to Jacob and expand upon this a bit. First of all, according to wikipedia, Mihaly's last name is pronounced "cheek-sent-me-high-ee". The diagram we're looking at here relates to his seminal work, 'Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience'. It shows how a high challenge level can combine with a high skill level to allow us to enter a state of "flow". To quote further from that same wikipedia article, he states that "people are most happy when they are in a state of flow— a state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity at hand and the situation. The idea of flow is identical to the feeling of being in the zone or in the groove." Now let's continue with what I had said to Jacob:

When I use the word "flow" in my writing, I'm usually using it to describe the mainstream science idea that time can flow in either direction. "Flow", in this sense, means that there are logical connections between what happens in one time-unit and the next, which means that some "next possible state" outcomes in the following time-unit are very likely, some unlikely, and some impossible to get to. That idea, physicists like Sean Carroll and many others have explained, makes just as much sense no matter what direction you are observing those slices of time - forward or backward, there is still a logical progression to the "flow".

I see that you are an excellent musician, watched a few of your clips. Using the term "flow" as it applies to time and music is very apt - whether you're writing a song or improvising a lead line, there are a great many choices for "what happens next" but the choices are not limitless - if they were then your music would become random white noise.

If you were to take a recording of your music and play it backwards, it would still have logical connections within it that make sense, and if you were to play a solo over top of that backwards recording there would be many options that make sense, that go with the musical "flow" of what's created by moving in time's opposite direction.

Does this help to illuminate what I'm thinking about?

Thanks for the question!

I've talked before about Sean Carroll's approach to the symmetric nature of time and the underlying timelessness of our universe in entries like Time in Either Direction, The Spacetime Tree, Scrambled Eggs, What's Before and After, and The Big Bang is an Illusion. Most recently, in How to Time Travel, I mentioned that Dr. Carroll has a new book coming out this month called From Eternity to Here: the Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, which I'm very much looking forward to reading.

In my book and this blog, one of the central themes has been the nature of time and how our participation in that process creates the dividing line between a sea of indeterminacy and the beautiful world we see around us. The concept of "flow" as a process that allows us with practice to do this better is an important one. It points to a real tension we feel in these modern times: how can I tell when I'm "in the zone" as opposed to "just zoning out"?

My song "Automatic" is about those moments when we stop analyzing what we're doing and just go with the flow. This song also mentions Julian Jaynes, whose challenging book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind proposed that the splitting apart of our minds into a conscious "narrator" and an underlying "just being in the moment" is a recent event, perhaps from only the last few thousand years. The fact that our narrator voice gets in the way and keeps us from doing some of our most difficult activities is also what we're talking about in this song: despite the fact that we've been taught to sometimes ridicule those moments as being a bad thing because it means our conscious minds were wandering, there is really something very useful about this state of mind. That will be just as true when a musician is trying to play 200 milliseconds ahead of the beat as it is for someone trying to hit a golf ball or even someone driving a car - removing distractions and just zeroing in on the flow helps us to do these activities better.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBJnWADnJr4

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: You are the Point

How to Time Travel

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BscaUbwVR0


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SafwXdP7ylc

This is a great video from National Geographic showing serious scientific discussions of how we might some day be able to travel through time the same way that we travel through space now. The physicist featured prominently in this video is Dr. Sean Carroll, who I've talked about a number of times in this blog, in entries such as Wormholes, What Would a Flatlander Really See?, Time in Either Direction, Scrambled Eggs, and The Big Bang is an Illusion.

I've been a big fan of Dr. Carroll's work ever since I came across an article he wrote for Scientific American last year called The Cosmic Origins of Time's Arrow. There are two quotes I've pulled from that article before:

Our universe may be part of a much larger multiverse, which as a whole is time-symmetric. Time may run backward in other universes.

and

The universe began empty and will end up empty--the appearance of stars and galaxies is a temporary deviation from its usual equilibrium condition.

Persons familiar with Imagining the Tenth Dimension will instantly recognize how excited I am to see mainstream physicists finally starting to say the same things I've been saying with my project. Now, I see that Sean Carroll has a book coming out next month, called From Eternity to Here: the Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. Here's a link to a page at his blog telling us a bit more about the book:
http://preposterousuniverse.com/eternitytohere/

And here's another link for you:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/carroll09/carroll09_index.html

This page from edge.org features a 24 minute video of Sean Carroll discussing some of his ideas. The presentation is called "Why Does the Universe Look the Way it Does?". There is a full text transcription of the presentation there as well, very useful for future reference back to these ideas.

From Eternity to Here goes on sale January 10, 2010, I can't wait to read it. You can pre-order it right now from Amazon.com if you're feeling impatient!

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Life is But a Dream

The FIfth Dimension is Spooky

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

Am I referring to this blog entry as "spooky" because it's now October and Hallowe'en is coming up? No. This blog entry is about what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance".

Last blog, in Seeing Time, Feeling Colors, Tasting Light, we touched upon the idea that Albert Einstein had problems with some of the implications of quantum mechanics, and specifically the idea that observing a particle "here" might be able to instantaneously affect the observation of another entangled particle far away, even on the other side of the universe. To show that he thought this sounded more like superstition than science, he called such implications "spooky".

On the same subject, in my book I talked about the entanglement experiments of physicist Nicolas Gisin and his team at the University of Geneva:

Entanglement is easily explained within the dimensional concepts we are now exploring. We can imagine that these atoms are still directly connected or somehow directly adjacent to each other in a higher spatial dimension, even though they may be, for example, 11 kilometres away from each other in the third dimension (as they were in the entanglement experiment conducted by Nicolas Gisin and his team at the University of Geneva in 1997). With entanglement, it seems possible that we are seeing direct evidence of actions in higher-dimensional geometry that show how time is just another spatial dimension rather than a separate concept. And from our new perspective, we have another way to show that Einstein’s concepts regarding “no faster-than-light motion” are not being violated.

In 46 - Is the Big Bang an Illusion?, and 47 - Are Pictures More Important in Science?, we returned to an idea from Stephen Hawking that there is an important part of our reality which is at "right angles" to our spacetime. While he used the term "imaginary time" to refer to this, I've tried to show that what he is really talking about is the fifth spatial dimension, and this fits into so many other ways that science is talking about where our reality comes from that I am continually amazed that I appear to be the only one talking about how this concept makes these ideas fit together. With entanglement, two particles can be widely separated, and observing one of those particles causes the other entangled particle to instantly be affected by the first observation. If those particles were ten light years away from each other, we are not talking about how that second particle would be affected ten years from now once the information from the first particle traveled to the second one - we are talking about that information transfer happening right "now" at both positions. What made people like Einstein skeptical about this implication is that it implied that a faster-than-light connection of some kind was occurring. What I want people to understand is that "faster than light" has no meaning once you are in the fifth dimension, because any fourth dimensional point can be connected to any other using the additional degree of freedom that the fifth dimension affords, with no violation of the limits of spacetime.

Nicholas Gisin and has team have continued to refine their experiments since I published my book. Here's a few paragraphs from a recent article in Science Now written by Phil Berardelli which talks about Nicholas Gisin's more recent work. The name of the article is "Quantum Physics Gets 'Spooky' ":

This might be a rare case about which Einstein was wrong. More than 60 years ago, the great physicist scoffed at the idea that anything could travel faster than light, even though quantum mechanics had suggested such a condition. Now four Swiss researchers have brought the possibility closer to reality. Testing a concept called "spooky action at a distance"--a phrase used by Einstein in criticizing the phenomenon--they have shown that two subatomic particles can communicate nearly instantaneously, even if they are separated by cosmic distances.

Physicist Nicolas Gisin and colleagues at the University of Geneva in Switzerland split off pairs of quantum-entangled photons and sent them from the university's campus through two fiber-optic cables to two Swiss villages located 18 kilometers apart. Thinking of the photons like traffic lights, each passed through specially designed detectors that determined what "color" they were when entering the cable and what color they appeared to be when they reached the terminus. The experiments revealed two things: First, the physical properties of the photons changed identically during their journey, just as predicted by quantum theory--when one turned "red," so did the other. Second, there was no detectable time difference between when those changes occurred in the photons, as though an imaginary traffic controller had signaled them both.

The result, the team reports in tomorrow's issue of Nature, is that whatever was affecting the photons seems to have happened nearly instantaneously and that according to their calculations, the phenomenon influencing the particles had to be traveling at least 10,000 times faster than light. Given Einstein's standard speed limit on light traveling within conventional spacetime, the experiments show that entanglement might be controlled by something existing beyond it. Gisin says that once the scientific community "accepts that nature has this ability, we should try to create models that explain it."

Okay, that's heady stuff. But there are some additional sentences in this article that I'd like to take one at a time because they're very important.

Although the research doesn't demonstrate spooky action at a distance directly, it does provide "a lower boundary for the speed" necessary for the phenomenon, says theoretical physicist Martin Bojowald of Pennsylvania State University in State College.

In other words, even though the Nicholas Gisin team's experiment only showed that the connection was at least 10,000 times the speed of light, the limitations of their experiment could not prove that the connection was instantaneous. I feel certain that no matter how this experiment is improved in the future, we are always going to see indications that these connections really are instantaneous, and in fact that it's harder for us to imagine how such effects could be occurring at all if they're not the result of a higher dimensional "folding" of spacetime as per the kinds of concepts we're always talking about with Imagining the Tenth Dimension.

Cosmologist Sean Carroll of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena says that it's "yet another experiment that tells us quantum mechanics is right" and that there "really is an intrinsic connection between entangled particles, not that some signal passes quickly between them when an observation is performed."

I've quoted Dr. Carroll a number of times in blogs like Time in Either Direction, Scrambled Eggs, The Spacetime Tree, Unlikely Events and Timelessness, and What's Before and After?. It seems that the more I read about his viewpoints, the more I would love to sit down and have a coffee with him some time, as there seem to be so many connections between the intuitive leaps I have made with my project and the science that Dr. Carroll is pursuing.

And physicist Lorenza Viola of Dartmouth College says there's much more to be determined. "I am sure we are not finished unveiling what the quantum [effects] due to entanglement really are and how powerful they can be."

(EDIT: as a lovely coincidence, Sean Carroll posted a new blog entry a couple of weeks after I posted this entry, his entry is called Spooky Signals From the Future Telling Us to Cancel the LHC.)

For me, this concept relates to the powerful idea of how right "now" we are each navigating through a fifth-dimensional probability space, one planck length at a time, and that Einstein's "spooky" entanglement shows us that each succeeding "now" is actually a point in the fifth dimension rather than the fourth. This makes sense whether you're thinking about the wave function of possible universes as per Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation, or how the fifth dimension and above from our perspective appear to be "curled up at the planck length" even though they're really not, or the idea that our universe is created holographically at the fifth dimension by interference patterns created by this planck length granularity of spacetime. Understanding how much everything within our "now" is connected to things that are outside of our spacetime is the key, and the fact that ancient spirituality and modern science are pointing at the same concept doesn't mean one is right and the other is wrong.

Everything fits together in probability space. Think about that one for a moment, and enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

PS, Here's some other blogs where we've talked about Einstein's "spooky" feelings about quantum mechanics:
The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic
Wormholes as Dimensional Foldings?
The Long Undulating Snake
Norway's Reverse Deja Vu

Next: Tenth Dimension Audio Book

The Big Bang is an Illusion

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tcsu0rwoeAQ


Here's a series of images you might remember from a blog I published a year ago called "What Would a Flatlander Really See?". The image on the left shows what an imaginary 2D flatlander (in this case, our "one-eyed Jack") looks like to us as we 3D creatures look down from "above": above is a word that would make no sense to a flatlander, since his world has only length and width. As we move right through the above images, we are imagining rotating our point of view down into the "plane" that the flatlander exists within, and although there are five images here we should understand there is a sixth image which would be a line with no depth, something that we could never see with our 3D eyes. The point, here, is that the flatlander (who we're going to assume has a visual apparatus that is somehow able to deal with these lines) would live in a world where everything appears to him as nothing but lines all in the same plane.


A direct link to the above movie is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xN4DxdiFrs
In Hypercubes and Plato's Cave, we looked at an animation of a tesseract, a four-dimensional cube, and discussed how what we see here is really just a representation of a three-dimensional shadow of that 4D object. A still image of a tesseract (or "hypercube") is much less useful in helping us to imagine it - we have to click "play" on the animation for what is unique about this shape to become apparent. The ways that it appears to change shape as we view it using the fourth dimensional direction of "time" defy reason for a three dimensional object, in exactly the same way that the lines a flatlander would see as a 3D object passes through his plane would appear and disappear in ways that would seem very strange indeed to the flatlander.

In "The Past is an Illusion", I talked about a fun little flash game called Z-Rox, which you should try if you would like to spend further time considering how a flatlander might be able to puzzle out the 3D shape of an object as he watched it pass through his plane, but this would be much harder to do with an object like a human who was moving around than it would be with a simple object like a balloon.

Where I am going with all this? Here's the point - something that may be a simple or symmetrical shape when viewed in one spatial dimension will appear to behave very strangely when viewed from a dimension "below" that one. Which takes us to the big bang. Here's what I said in my book about the big bang:

If we can agree that our conception of time as a one-way “arrow” is an illusion created by our unique point of view, then ultimately we can come to the viewpoint that the big bang is also an illusion, as it is just a side effect of collapsing the tenth dimension with the very first yes/no. The point at which we enter the tenth dimensional system becomes the big bang (that is to say, the beginning) for the dimensions below. The currently accepted version of the big bang is known as “inflationary cosmology”, in which it is proposed that the size of the universe increased by a factor greater than a million trillion trillion in less than a millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. Does this mind-boggling amount of sudden inflation not sound more like the flipping of a gigantic yes/no toggle switch?

When I originally wrote those words, I had not heard of a branch of science called Digital Physics and I had not read anything by quantum computing expert Seth Lloyd. As it turns out, though, the point of view I expressed back then is very similar to their schools of thought, and can be summed up with 3 words I've used many times now: "information equals reality". This gives us a very useful way of imagining what the big bang really represents: it tells us that within the extra dimensions there is a comparatively simple pattern representing the wave function of all possible outcomes for our universe which, just like the flatlander images at the start of this blog, or the animation of the rotating tesseract, appears to do something impossible when it's perceived within the dimensions below. Before it "slid into view", time did not exist, and when the universe ends time will not exist again: and as we've discussed in entries like Time in Either Direction and Scrambled Eggs, this reflects the viewpoint of physicist Sean Carroll who says that "before" and "after" the universe is the same thing, a perfectly balanced symmetry state, and our universe from its beginning to it end is just a temporary deviation from that state.

In my blog entry "How to Make a Universe" I worked through my description of the ten spatial dimensions in reverse order, as a way of visualizing how this process of our universe "sliding into view from a higher dimensional pattern" can be equated to moving through the multiverse landscape to other different-initial-conditions "starting points" within the extra dimensions. This is a process that could create our own universe, or it could create other universes very different from our own.

Is the big bang an illusion? Viewed from the place where the distinction between past, present, and future is meaningless, that would be true. This is why I prefer the digital physics viewpoint - that the big bang really starts with the first binary yes/no that begins to choose a universe from out of all other possible universes (and after publishing my book, it was great to come across quantum computing expert Seth Lloyd expressing this same idea in his book Programming the Universe). What do we call the selection pattern that chose our universe from out of the omniverse? Whatever name you give it, that selection pattern exists.

Here's that list again, working through the hierarchy of dimensions as I've portrayed them, but this time moving from the "top" down:

10. The timeless omniverse/the enfolded and perfectly balanced symmetry state/unobserved indeterminacy
9. Big-picture memes, ways of organizing/grouping/subdividing the "information" that becomes reality, including those which cannot be expressed as physical realities
8. Ways of expressing mass/energy that encompass multiple oscillating or changing basic physical laws
7. Ways of expressing mass/energy that encompass a single sliding constant (this would be the seventh dimension as a line). Since certain physicists believe they have evidence that the speed of light for our own universe may have varied slightly since the very distant past this "line" may be a way of describing our universe. A single unmoving "point" within the seventh dimension would be a way of expressing mass/energy where the fine structure constant and all basic physical laws are locked in from beginning to end, and our universe has generally been believed to be one where this "locked in" quality is the case. The fact that string theory says our universe is created by the interaction of a seven dimensional brane interacting with a three dimensional brane within a Calabi-Yau manifold seems to be an interesting tie-in to my concept of our universe being "locked in" at the seventh dimension.
6. All possible timelines for the universe we have created, including ones that will never actually be observed but which remain as potential.
5. All branching timelines both forward and backward from the particular point that we call "now" (the idea that our 4D universe comes from the fifth dimension comes up again and again with this project!). Thinking back to how we created our universe, the branches from the very first "point", then, would be the same in both the fifth and sixth dimension, but for every other quantum frame the fifth dimension would not be able to include every possible expression contained within the sixth because of the limitations introduced by choices and outcomes that had already occurred within our spacetime tree.
4. One very specific set of frames, from the big bang to "now", or in the biggest picture of all, one very specific timeline out of all of the possible timelines from the beginning to the end of the universe we created.
3. A specific expression of the 3D space that is a quantum frame as per our description above.
2. A specific expression of one of the 2D planes that can be contained within the quantum frame we're examining.
1. A specific expression of one of the 1D lines that can be contained within the quantum frame we're examining.
0. Not a dimension, but a point of indeterminate size, which could be infinitely small as in geometry, or could be infinitely large, encompassing in the most extreme case all of the dimensions. Some people like to think of the "zero" as time, some like to call it the quantum observer, some people like to think of it as being nothing more than the way that you move to a specific subset of the dimensions below the tenth. All of these, I believe, are different ways of expressing the same important idea about the underlying enfolded, fractal, recursive nature of our reality or any other.

Last blog was called "Suffering in the Multiverse". In it we took a mind boggling journey guided by philosopher David Pearce through the moral implications of the set of all possible states which we are talking about here. Next blog we're going to narrow back down to the idea of there being a selection pattern which is choosing our universe from out of all possible universes: an idea we touched upon recently in The Biocentric Universe. In fact, our next blog will be called "The Biocentric Universe part two".

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Polls Archive 31-What's Before and After?

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

"Physicist Sean Carroll says our universe is a temporary deviation from symmetry. This means that "before" the beginning and "after" the end of our universe, then, is really the exact same state: enfolded symmetry." Poll ended January 13 2009. 70% agreed, while the rest disagreed.

I've talked many times about Gevin Giorbran's amazing book, Everything Forever - Learning to See Timelessness. The fact that Gevin is no longer with us but asked me to take over the promotion of his book since his death has nothing to do with my mentioning it here: as I've been saying since I first came across Gevin's work a couple of years ago, his is a groundbreaking text about the nature of the multiverse, and he provides us with remarkable insights into understanding the underlying enfolded symmetry state that our universe both comes from and is headed towards.

Gevin's work dovetailed very nicely with the logical way of visualizing the ten spatial dimensions I've shown to the world with my project, and Gevin was even so kind as to devote a few pages of his book towards describing how well he thought our two approaches fit together. In the almost three years since my book was published, I have been using this blog and the tenth dimension forum to catalog the many advances that have happened in the work of theoretical physicists that appear to be moving us towards the same understanding that Gevin and I had been talking about when we wrote our books. In fact, I've been doing this not just with science, but with a great many other subjects, including ancient spirituality, mysticism, and philosophy, and it's been remarkable to see how many of these threads can be pulled together.

On the science front there are many theories out there as to the mysteries of dark matter, dark energy, gravity, the multiverse, extra dimensions, and so on. When I see a viewpoint that has resonances with what Gevin and I pointed towards, I promote it. Does that mean that I'm picking and choosing, and when I come across a new theory that might oppose the direction Gevin and I were heading in, I generally don't report it? Of course! In the same way, a scientist who is adamantly convinced that there are no extra dimensions is more likely to pursue theories which exist only within the four dimensions of spacetime.

Which brings us to physicist Sean Carroll, whose work I paid tribute to in a blog entry called "Time in Either Direction":

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

I also talked about Sean's ideas in my entry "Scrambled Eggs"...

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFZVd_Ez23g

...and in my blog entry "The Big Bang and the Big Pie".

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

Our poll question we're looking at here is about a theory which Scientific American attributed to Sean Carroll, but his theories are easily connected to an idea that has been promoted by myself, and by Gevin Giorbran. I would sum the idea up like this: there is a way of thinking about the fabric of reality which is outside of spacetime, in a place where the wave function of all outcomes for our universe happens simultaneously (as we mentioned last blog entry, physicist Tim Palmer has just published a paper where he calls this idea "the invariant set"). Once you have that image in your mind, it becomes possible to visualize how our universe is a temporary deviation from an underlying symmetry state, which exists both "before" and "after" our universe, in a state that is "outside" of space-time.

Here's a link to a powerpoint presentation from Dr. Carroll in which he talks about the nature of time and space and how a universe as unlikely as our own could spring from the multiverse: http://preposterousuniverse.com/talks/time-colloq-07/. Sean Carroll is also a regular contributor to the science blog Cosmic Variance, a good place for lively discussions, check it out.

Notice how Sean calls his site "preposterousuniverse.com"? Let's finish with a song of mine about our highly unlikely universe: "The Anthropic Viewpoint":

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfe_3bEH-jE
Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Polls Archive 32 - Is Time a Direction?

Scrambled Eggs

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=CFZVd_Ez23g

I suppose you could say this is a continuation of the "Beatles" theme we started with last week's entries "I Know You, You Know Me", and "You are Me and We Are All Together"... since Paul McCartney tells us when he first came up with the melody for his classic hit "Yesterday", the phrase he would sing to himself is "scrambled eggs".

Isn't it funny how we each have our own perspective, and find it so very hard to imagine some other perspective different from our own?

With my project, I've been trying to get people to understand that "time" is just a direction, not a full dimension, and like any other direction there is an opposite direction to "time" that makes just as much sense (north has its south, up has its down, and time has its "anti-time"). This idea is central to the way of visualizing reality that my book and this project is based upon: look up "time reversal symmetry" if you'd like to know more about how this concept of time having two possible directions is an accepted idea from mainstream science. In my blog entry "Time in Either Direction", I talked about physicist Sean M. Carroll's proposition put forth in a recent article in Scientific American, that there could be other universes that operate in the opposite "direction" of time to ours, which means in those universes it would be like eggs could unscramble and go back into their unbroken shell.

For most of us, that thought is unfathomable. What would it be like to live in a universe where every choice, every random occurrence results not in a bush-like branching structure of more possible outcomes, but less?

Even the idea that there are more copies of our universe created through chance and choice takes some getting used to: but the Deutsch team's 2007 proof confirms Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, which tells us there is a wave function of possible futures at both the quantum and macro level. Quantum mechanics is one of the most proven theories of reality known today, so a proof that shows there is a direct continuum from the quantum to the macro world is an important breakthrough: this is why New Scientist Magazine called the Deutsch team's proof one of the most significant science stories of 2007. But the upshot of the Many Worlds theory is that right now, if I break an egg, there are other versions of our universe where I didn't break the egg, and still others where I broke more than one egg, and others where I did lots of other things involving much more than just eggs. Each of those other universes exist, but at any particular instant I can only observe one of them.

Clearly, in our universe, eggs can be broken, eggs can become scrambled, and once that has happened they can't be unscrambled. There are an increasing number of possible paths forward, just as there are many ways to break an egg, but none of those possible paths will reduce the options back to a universe where a broken egg can once again become unbroken.

Now, let's look at this idea from the opposite perspective.

Believe it or not, we live in a universe right now where each choice taken, and every random outcome at both the quantum and macro level, results in less and less choices. As we flip our minds into this opposite viewpoint, it's quite easy to see: by observing one possible outcome, there are a huge number of other logical outcomes that are no longer available. If I get out of bed at seven this morning, I am no longer going to be able to get to the versions of our universe where I got out of bed at six. If I go out my front door this morning and turn right, I am no longer going to be able to get to the versions of our universe where I went out my front door this morning and turned left. With each branching universe observed, a huge number of other universes became inaccessible, because they are no longer part of the fifth-dimensional probability set for our universe in it current state.

In one of the more poetic paragraphs from my book, I talked about the "angels of possibility that swirl around a toddler's head"). Isn't it clear that this is why so many cultures regard their children as a sacred trust? A child has a huge set of possible paths branching out into the future before them: but with each choice taken and every random action, some of those potential futures are pared away. From this other perspective, then, it's like we're living right now in a world where eggs unscramble themselves and go back into their shells!

Ultimately, what we're talking about here is timelessness. Some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century - Einstein, Wheeler, Feynman, Hawking, etc. - have tried to get us to visualize that the distinction between past, present, and future is really immaterial. Quantum physicists like Seth Lloyd and Anton Zeilinger often use a phrase that this project also embraces: in the biggest picture of all, information equals reality. So, whether we're talking about Everett's Many Worlds, or just our own universe moving through time, we should really be thinking about how the other possible states already exist, and have always existed, within timelessness.

(diagram from "Everything Forever". Gevin Giorbrans's caption for this graphic reads:
"The order of one type is the disorder of the other.")

When we're thinking about timelessness, all branches exist simultaneously. As we move down our line of time, each new instant takes away a set of possible branches that are no longer accessible, and adds another set of branches that are now part of the spacetime tree for our universe. This double-edged sword that we're thinking about here is the magic of the two kinds of order, grouping order and symmetry order pushing against each other to create the "now" that we are currently observing: and Gevin Giorbran's wonderful and uplifting book Everything Forever - Learning to See Timelessness gives us a powerful and intuitive way to imagine that process. Click here if you would like to watch the last interview I did with Gevin before his untimely death.

Here, to close, is one of my personal favorites from the 26 songs I've attached to this project: it's about picturing our universe as just one of many possible universes that exist within timelessness. This video was created by Ryan Hill, and the song is called "The Anthropic Viewpoint".


A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=du86lNCvOdA

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs, October Report

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 16

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.

Next poll question - Does science progress by funerals?

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

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

Unlikely Events and Timelessness

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hpf3y_EdHco

One of the stumbling blocks for mainstream science's willingness to embrace my way of visualizing how our reality is constructed is rooted in the difficulty in adopting a truly timeless perspective. In chapter 3 of my book I said this:

As we have been careful to note, our concept of time being a full spatial dimension is often not the accepted notion within the world of physics. Interestingly, science has a bit of a split personality when it comes to discussions of time. So, while Einstein’s theories (and the theories that follow from his concepts) seem to indicate that “space-time” is a tangible fabric which can be bent and stretched, there are many other examples where science treats time as being a completely separate entity: in other words, time becomes a quality which gets overlaid on top of the other spatial dimensions, rather than being just another dimension which is woven together with the ones above and below it.

In the wikipedia article on "time", we find this famous quote: "Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once". According to wikipedia, this quote has been attributed variously to John Archibald Wheeler, Woody Allen, and Albert Einstein. Einstein has many quotes that express similar concepts: for instance, "The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion". What are we talking about here? Timelessness: because that timeless perspective that some of the best minds of the past century have encouraged us to adopt is essential to understanding how this project portrays the underlying structures of reality.


A direct link to this video blog for The Spacetime Tree is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L-BfvDYYWg

Quantum Weirdness
In blog entries like The Spacetime Tree, we have talked about ways of visualizing that "timeless" perspective. In entries like "The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic" and "The Annotated Tenth Dimension Video", we quoted experts like Brian Greene and Michio Kaku, who talk about the strange quantum physics facts that seem unexplainable from our limited fourth dimensional perspective: how could entangled particles instantaneously affect each other, effectively at faster than the speed of light, even across huge distances? How can the wave function of a person include the highly unlikely possibility that they pop out of existence here and reappear on the moon? For me, these are examples of the strong indications that the timeless perspective has to allow for higher dimensional connections - just like imagining a Flatlander on a mobius strip, twisting and turning in the dimension above, our fourth dimensional line has connections, twists and turns that occur in the fifth dimension. We remain unaware of those twists and turns as we travel down our fourth dimensional line. Entanglement violates no laws of physics if it occurs as a result of fifth-dimensional connections, and a wave function that allows for unlikely possibilities is much easier to visualize if we place those "so unlikely they would take longer than the life of the universe to occur" possibilities in the sixth dimension.

One of the Greatest News Stories of 2007
New Scientist magazine named the David Deutsch team at Oxford's proof that parallel universes exist one of the greatest news stories of 2007. Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation is closely tied to this proof. Despite last year's proof, there are still many scientists who reject any Many Worlds type of portrayal as being too extravagant: this interpretation means that with every branching choice or random outcome, another copy of our universe is created. How can there possibly be room for all those universe? There certainly doesn't seem to be room for them in the fourth dimension, which already contains the unimaginably huge vista of seventy sextillion stars that we call our observable universe of spacetime.

The intuitive leap I am arguing for here is that trying to keep the wave function of a branching set of parallel universes that occur at both the quantum and macro level in a logical hierarchy becomes much simpler if we use a model that moves those branching possibilities into the fifth dimension, which is where Kaluza proved and Einstein eventually agreed our reality is defined. But doing so requires us to accept that time really is one of the two possible directions in the fourth spatial dimension, an idea also advanced by Sean Carroll in the June issue of Scientific American.

Scientific American on Timelessness...
In editor John Rennie's introduction to this issue, he talks about popular literature's various explorations of the fourth dimension. He mentions Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five", a wonderful book I have read and enjoyed several times, which includes as a plot element a science fiction race of aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. The Tralfamadorians, it turns out, really do have the timeless perspective we are talking about here; and they view the past, present, and future much as you and I would view a mountain range spreading out across the horizon. Why bring up science fiction as an introduction to an article by a serious physicist about the nature of time? Because that perspective of timelessness that Vonnegut attributed to his Tralfamadorians really is necessary to understanding the underlying nature of reality.

... and on Randomness
Last blog, we talked about randomness and the missing 96% our universe. In his Scientific American article, Sean Carroll also talks about randomness and the likelihood of events to occur:

Imagine that you pour milk into your coffee. There are a great many ways to distribute the molecules so that the milk and coffee are completely mixed together but relatively few ways to arrange them so that the milk is segregated from the surrounding coffee... if you waited for it to happen of its own accord as molecules randomly reshuffled, you would typically have to wait much longer than the current age of the observable universe.

But even Sean Carroll, who along with Jennifer Chen of the University of Chicago proposed the symmetrical-time multiverse scenario he is talking about in his article, occasionally seems to fall into the language traps that come from not completely embracing the timeless perspective. For instance, later in the article as he describes he and Jennifer Chen's theory, he says:

On ultralarge scales, such a multiverse would look statistically symmetric with respect to time--both the past and the future would feature new universes fluctuating into life and proliferating without bound. Each of them would experience an arrow of time, but half would have an arrow that was reversed with respect to that in the others.
The idea of a universe with a backward arrow of time might seem alarming. If we met someone from such a universe, would they remember the future? Happily, there is no danger of such a rendezvous. In the scenario we are describing, the only places where time seems to run backward are enormously far back in our past--long before our big bang.

A direct link to the video blog for Time in Either Direction is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0j8oYNFFbw

The Big Bang, Maximum Entropy, and Timelessness
As we said in a previous blog entry about Sean Carroll's article, "Time in Either Direction", the scenario he is describing is that our universe (or any other universe) is just a temporary deviation away from an underlying background equilibrium state, and I am proposing that the background state he is referring to is very easy to align with the indeterminate tenth dimension as I've portrayed it in my visualization of the dimensions. I would propose, then, that Dr. Carroll saying "long before our big bang" is not really adopting the timeless perspective. It would be more correct to say that those other time-reversal-symmetry universes exist not before, not after, but just "elsewhere" within the multiverse. Once you go "before" the big bang for our universe, and once you go "after" the final maximum entropy state for our universe, you are back into an underlying state where time has no meaning, because everything happens at once within that underlying fabric which we have also come to refer to as the Omniverse.

Likewise, when expert physicists like Greene and Kaku talk about events which have some likelihood of occurring, but they are so unlikely that they would take longer than the life of the universe, shouldn't the same thinking apply? "Longer than the life of the universe" means outside of spacetime, and into the vision of timelessness that we are peering into here. Saying, then, that a wave function event is possible but so unlikely that it occurs outside of spacetime, would, in my way of visualizing reality, mean that it occurs in the sixth dimensional version of our reality - the parallel universes which still exist as potential for the particular different-initial-conditions universe we are part of, but which are inaccessible from our current "now" within spacetime.

While we're talking about unlikely events, let's finish with a song about unlikely events which exist as potential but which we haven't witnessed yet: the song is called "The End of the World".

A direct link to this video for "The End of the World" is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2Y9m34iJVY

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Moving Dimensions and Synchromysticism