Is Reality an Illusion?

Is reality an illusion? This is not just a philosophical question. Here's a link to an article about a new scientific experiment, and the title says it all: "Fermilab is Building a Holometer to Determine Once and for All Whether Reality is Just an Illusion".


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCJLRrFTX3Q

The above video is for Changing Reality, recently put up on youtube but accompanying a blog entry from six months ago. The Big Question is, how much are we each creating the reality we see around us, and by extension how inevitable is it? Can we change our reality by changing our attitude? Epigenetics and the increasingly effective Placebo Effect are some of the signposts I've been using to say that leading edge science supports this idea, but a century of training to the contrary still makes a number of educated people reject such ideas immediately. "The only thing that matters is matter", they say, and "people can't change reality with their thoughts".

In Just Geometry we looked at an idea from The Grand Design: Model Dependent Realism. Some are lamenting that this represents Stephen Hawking giving up on the possibility of there ever being one TOE, one Theory of Everything, because each unique frame of reference changes the rules, so to speak. Model Dependent Realism proposes that the fabric of reality contains many possibilities, and no one theory or formula is going to be able to encompass them all.

So if reality is an illusion and different frames of reference allow the possibility of different rules, are you willing to accept the implications of the following video my facebook friend Frank Samaritano recently sent to me? Or are you going to say the man in this video is a charlatan? Is it really possible for a person to set paper on fire using only the energy from their body? A century of training to the contrary will lead some people to assume that this couldn't possibly be real, but see what you think.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3F3ovb2kZ9Q

Next time we'll return to the Three Becomes One concept, with an entry called Threes. Till then, enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Poll 69 - Bees and Tangential Thinking

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9a26ej-H7aU


Last time, in Psychedelics and Spacetime, we discussed the aspects of our reality that come from extra dimensions, and whether it's possible for us to perceive those additional spatial dimensions which, by definition, are at additional sets of "right angles" to our 4D spacetime. In the next few entries we'll look at some poll questions that have explored concepts related to "tangential thinking".

Poll 69
Poll 69: "Are bees more sixth-dimensional"? Poll ended August 9 2010. 40.5% said yes, while 59.5% said no.

For somebody reading this poll by itself, I realize this must have seemed like a very strange question indeed! My blog entry "Are Bees More Sixth Dimensional" should make the reason for this question more clear. In that entry, we looked at an article about a fascinating theory proposed by Barbara Shipman, a mathematician at the University of Rochester. Dr. Shipman analyzed the complex dance patterns bees use to indicate the position of new sources of food to each other. She discovered that the geometric patterns the bees use in the dance made sense if they were analyzed using a "sixth dimensional flag manifold", an analysis method also useful in solving some of the mathematical problems that arise in dealing with quarks. Please read the entire article, it presents some amazing insights.

In Psychedelics and Spacetime, we looked at Terence McKenna's passionate proposals that primitive creatures were by nature more aware of the extra patterns that are "outside" of our spacetime, and that as organisms like us evolved to become more complex, there was an evolutionary advantage afforded by narrowing our focus down to just the "here" and "now" of our current position within spacetime. Being connected to the cosmic "all" could well be a distraction when what you really need to do right now is focus on the hungry predator hiding just beyond those bushes!

If bees really are using sixth-dimensional geometry to communicate with each other, could this be an example of a creature who found a way to utilize a part of this extra-dimensional awareness that McKenna suggests was actually the more natural mode of existence for living creatures? Could the numerous scientific studies coming out recently indicating that the cells within our bodies seem to be having "conversations" with each other be examples of how the simpler components of a living creature are still more plugged into these extra-dimensional patterns? And might the nearly instantaneous neuronal patterns related to the formation of memory which we looked at in Entangled Neurons also be an indication that we still use extra-dimensional patterns within our brains even if we're not conscious of those actions?

We've talked before about Stephen Hawking's famous quote:

I still believe the universe has a beginning in real time at the big bang. But there's another kind of time, "imaginary time", at right angles to real time, in which the universe has no beginning or end.

What is Hawking's "imaginary time"? I would say that if it's at right angles to our 4D spacetime, then it must be the fifth dimension. While I understand his use of "time" and "imaginary time" to convey these fourth- and fifth-dimensional ideas to the public, they do create some confusion. Calling the fourth dimension "duration" rather than time, and the fifth dimension our "probability space" has been my suggestion for making these concepts more clear, something that we explored in more detail in "Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?".

So perhaps Stephen Hawking is more fifth dimensional, but bees do him one better by being more sixth dimensional? An interesting thought!

Next: Poll 70 - Are Tangents Bad?

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

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

Polls Archive 47 - Pictures More Important in Science?

"Physicist Michio Kaku says 'In science, a physical picture is often more important than the mathematics used to describe it.' Do you agree with him?" Poll ended Sept 4 2009. 80.6% said "yes", while 19.4% said "no".

Last blog, in Is the Big Bang an Illusion?, we quoted an essay by Gevin Giorbran, which showed a way of thinking about time as being a direction in space. There were no equations, and no pictures to speak of, but essentially what Gevin was describing was a way of visualizing the underlying forms of our reality.

Gevin, like me, also quoted from a number of the experts who do deal in those heady equations to arrive at the ideas we discuss here, and I think that's important to do only to the extent that it shows that the ways of visualizing reality we're discussing here are not just flights of fancy, but connected to (or at very least extrapolated from) mainstream science. For instance, when Stephen Hawking talks about there being another kind of time that is at right angles to our own time, that idea connects very strongly to my insistence that our reality comes from the fifth dimension, which is the dimension which is at "right angles" to spacetime. Calling the fourth dimension "time" and the fifth dimension "imaginary time" (as Hawking does) does manage to fit these ideas into a vocabulary that is accessible to more people, but it also confuses things somewhat, since the fifth dimension that physicists talk about is not a temporal dimension, but rather a spatial one.

I've talked before about how each new spatial dimension is at "right angles" to the previous one, but if we're talking about pictures being more important than equations here I don't have an easy way to draw you a picture showing what fifth dimensional space looks like. What I can do is use the point-line-plane postulate to draw you pictures to show how if the third dimension is thought of as a point, the fourth dimension can be like a line, and the fifth dimension can be like a plane, and that is an accepted way in science to imagine any number of spatial dimensions. But here's an important concept: in Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions, I pointed out that saying there are ten spatial dimensions only makes sense when people accept that the fourth dimension is just as much a spatial dimension as all the others, and we get to that conclusion by accepting that for us "time" is just a way of moving within a particular spatial dimension, from one state to the next in a causal chain, and that there are other ways of moving within the fourth spatial dimension which make just as much sense. Time is a direction, not a dimension. The opposite direction to time can be called anti-time, and is no different than thinking about up/down or east/west as being other words we use to describe the opposing directions within some specific spatial dimension. Plus, the fourth spatial dimension has additional easily-visualized spatial dimensions on top of it, as we discussed in Time in 3 Dimensions.

Here's three videos for you to look at that include animations that extend the visualization from my original Imagining the Tenth Dimension animation. I hope you will keep the Michio Kaku quote we looked at here today in mind as you watch these presentations.

What Would a Flatlander Really See?

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


Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfhOBevrN2U

The Holographic Universe

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMLVjFrtq6Q

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Polls Archive 48 - Amazing Psychic Readings

Polls Archive 46 - Big Bang an Illusion?

Poll 46: "Many of the great physicists have said that "time is an illusion". In the same sense, does that mean the big bang is an illusion?" 47.9% agreed, while 52.1% disagreed. Poll ended August 20, 2009.

One of the quotes I've used most often with this project was this one from Einstein: " this separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion". Did Einstein accept that time was an illusion, and that there is a way of viewing our reality "outside" of time where everything happens simultaneously? You bet!

As regular readers of my blog will know, I was entrusted with the care of Gevin Giorbran's book "Everything Forever: Learning to See Timelessness" after his untimely death last year. Here's a blog from Gevin's website, everythingforever.com (which I am now paying to keep running as a tribute to Gevin's great ideas) which explores Einstein's attitude towards timelessness in much more detail:

Albert Einstein and the Fabric of Time

Surprising as it may be to most non-scientists and even to some scientists, Albert Einstein concluded in his later years that the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. In 1952, in his book Relativity, in discussing Minkowski's Space World interpretation of his theory of relativity, Einstein writes:

Since there exists in this four dimensional structure [space-time] no longer any sections which represent "now" objectively, the concepts of happening and becoming are indeed not completely suspended, but yet complicated. It appears therefore more natural to think of physical reality as a four dimensional existence, instead of, as hitherto, the evolution of a three dimensional existence.

Einstein's belief in an undivided solid reality was clear to him, so much so that he completely rejected the separation we experience as the moment of now. He believed there is no true division between past and future, there is rather a single existence. His most descriptive testimony to this faith came when his lifelong friend Besso died. Einstein wrote a letter to Besso's family, saying that although Besso had preceded him in death it was of no consequence, "...for us physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one."

Most everyone knows that Einstein proved that time is relative, not absolute as Newton claimed. With the proper technology, such as a very fast spaceship, one person is able to experience several days while another person simultaneously experiences only a few hours or minutes. The same two people can meet up again, one having experienced days or even years while the other has only experienced minutes. The person in the spaceship only needs to travel near to the speed of light. The faster they travel, the slower their time will pass relative to someone planted firmly on the Earth. If they were able to travel at the speed of light, their time would cease completely and they would only exist trapped in timelessness. Einstein could hardly believe there were physicists who didn’t believe in timelessness, and yet the wisdom of Einstein's convictions had very little impact on cosmology or science in general. The majority of physicists have been slow to give up the ordinary assumptions we make about time.

The two most highly recognized physicists since Einstein made similar conclusions and even made dramatic advances toward a timeless perspective of the universe, yet they also were unable to change the temporal mentality ingrained in the mainstream of physics and society. Einstein was followed in history by the colorful and brilliant Richard Feynman. Feynman developed the most effective and explanatory interpretation of quantum mechanics that had yet been developed, known today as Sum over Histories.

Just as Einstein's own Relativity Theory led Einstein to reject time, Feynman’s Sum over Histories theory led him to describe time simply as a direction in space. Feynman’s theory states that the probability of an event is determined by summing together all the possible histories of that event. For example, for a particle moving from point A to B we imagine the particle traveling every possible path, curved paths, oscillating paths, squiggly paths, even backward in time and forward in time paths. Each path has an amplitude, and when summed the vast majority of all these amplitudes add up to zero, and all that remains is the comparably few histories that abide by the laws and forces of nature. Sum over histories indicates the direction of our ordinary clock time is simply a path in space which is more probable than the more exotic directions time might have taken otherwise.

Other worlds are just other directions in space, some less probable, some equally as probable as the one direction we experience. And some times our world represents the unlikely path. Feynman's summing of all possible histories could be described as the first timeless description of a multitude of space-time worlds all existing simultaneously. In a recent paper entitled Cosmology From the Top Down, Professor Stephen Hawking of Cambridge writes; “Some people make a great mystery of the multi universe, or the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum theory, but to me, these are just different expressions of the Feynman path integral.”

(below is not in book)

What is still not quite resolved in modern physics is how to properly combine Quantum theory with Einstein's Relativity Theory. It appears evident that time is purely a direction in space but how then do we explain the uncertainty of quantum mechanics? Why does it appear that God plays dice with the world. The two theories, each having been proven by their usefulness, do of course tell the same story about this one universe, but we just haven't learned yet to hear the story right. The best modern theory going is probably the No Boundary Proposal, put fourth by Stephen Hawking and Jim Hartle. This theory introduces a second reference of time which has been inappropriately named Imaginary time. Hawking, writes of the no boundary proposal, "The universe would be completely self contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE."

In my book Everything Forever, and here at my website, I explain how fourth dimensional spatial directions travel through a series of independent three dimensional block-like spaces, which in science we call states, but they can also be thought of simply as patterns. Hawking has already proposed that imaginary time can be found at right angles to ordinary time. I further explain that it is possible in an objective way to understand the universe to be like a book or a movie film. Each moment is a separate universe just like each frame of a movie or page of a book is separate. Yet those separate states simultaneously form the larger whole of the movie or the book. Seeing each moment as a continually existing place sheds light on why particles would then travel as a quantum wave, rather than linearly from point a to point b. This is explained better elsewhere, but if each moment of ordinary time is a solid, static, "block of now", or field of space, then time each new moment is a distinctly different universe. What we call time is a spatial direction that travels through many static three dimensional universes.

In such a model, what we call time is created purely out of space. Special directions in space travel through each static three dimensional space, therein producing a new realm of space beyond three dimensions, which we call time. The interesting quality this produces, is how the inhabitants of this fourth dimension of space travel a linear path from past to future, but the surrounding environment of each path is shifting from one pattern to the next. This sends particles from one position in four dimensional space to the next without moving linearly. As a result, each individual observer in the fourth dimension experiences a continuous linear time, even though everything in their immediate environment is moving sequentially from place to place. Hence each temporal environment of four dimensional space is constructed relative to each independent observer.

One can imagine oneself smoothly traveling a direct and interconnected path through time, but in looking around at one's environment, one sees that all other directions of time are broken, causing particles to appear to sequentially leap from one place to another. Paradoxically, everyone observes their own path and experience of time to be linear, while all else around them is sequential. In fact, when we explore time as a direction through many 3D spaces, we find qualities of curvature, time dilation, and spatial contraction, precisely as relativity describes those qualities within our own spacetime.

There is one quote I have found from Einstein which is more or less a contemplative mental thought about the notion of infinite spaces, which doesn't directly relate to my own approach of describing a shape to all possible spaces, but it does at least open up the subject of an infinite number of spaces to speculation. And it also shows the open minded nature of Einstein's thoughts about empty space, which some have thought were closed.

When a smaller box s is situated, relativity at rest, inside the hollow space of a larger box S, then the hollow space of s is a part of the hollow space of S, and the same "space," which contains both of them, belongs to each of the boxes. When s is in motion with respect to S, however, the concept is less simple. One is then inclined to think that s encloses always the same space, but a variable part of the space S. It then becomes necessary to apportion to each box its particular space, not thought of as bounded, and assume that these two spaces are in motion with respect to each other...

Before one has become aware of this complication, space appears as an unbounded medium or container in which material objects swim around. But it must be remembered that there is an infinite number of spaces, which are in motion with respect to each other...

The concept of space as something existing objectively and independent of things belongs to pre-scientific thought, but not so the idea of the existence of an infinite number of spaces in motion relatively to each other. This latter idea is indeed unavoidable, but is far from having played a considerable role even in scientific thought.

I can testify that Einstein's speculations revealed here concerning infinite spaces in motion do at least carry us in the right direction in how they suggest space might have an unseen and possibly infinite content. Similar ideas were introduced by David Bohm, who claimed there are two kinds of order in nature, what he called explicate order and implicate order. Implicate order for Bohm was a way of acknowledging how quantum mechanics reveals a hidden order where our world is influenced by the whole of all possible states. However, that order is much more visible than Bohm ever realized, as explained in part two.

Unfortunately it wasn't until Einstein died that scientists began to consider the Many Worlds Theory in science. It's safe to say that in Einstein's time we were still getting used to the idea of the Big Bang, adjusting to the ever more visible vast sea of other galaxies, and the possibility of alien life on other planets. The universe and reality were still primarily considered purely solid and material based. Quantum theory, which eventually led to the theory of many worlds, had not yet fully withstood the test of time. Einstein even rejected its implications, saying "God does not play dice" with the world, even as he himself established that there is more to the universe than a single evolving moment of now.

In my explorations of timelessness I reveal that ordinary space is not merely full of other empty spaces, but empty space is actually the whole of all physical realities; all the universes of the many worlds theory. Profound as it may be, if the theories I propose are correct, space is full, rather than empty. Material things are less than the fullness of space. In fact, it may be that space must include all possibilities in order to seem empty to us. So in summary, the universe we see is just a fragment nested in a timeless (everything) whole, rather than a single material world magically arisen above some primordial nothing. All universes exist without beginning or end in the ultimate arena of time, and each moment we experience exists forever.

Find out more about timelessness at:

EverythingForever.com

Gevin's words still carry a lot of weight for me, and regular readers of my blog will recognize how connected Gevin's ideas are to my own. If you'd like to buy a copy of Gevin's book, it's available at online book sellers, or I have it at my tenth dimension store. I also have a downloadable pdf version of it available at the tenth dimension digital items store. Profits from the sale of Gevin's book will go to the Gevin Giorbran Memorial Fund.

Enjoy the journey.

Rob Bryanton

Next: Polls Archive 47 - In Science, are Pictures More Important Than Mathematics?

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 21

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Tom Huston Interviews Rob Bryanton

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

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

Gevin Giorbran - Everything is Forever

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Brilliant Jewel
By P.J Young

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


The Universe is NOT winding down.
By "Jerry"

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


GENIUS
By Dr. Lee Price

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: The Foreword to Gevin Giorbran's Acclaimed Book

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

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

Time is a Direction

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

One can think of ordinary, real, time as a horizontal line. On the left, one has the past, and on the right, the future. But there's another kind of time in the vertical direction. This is called imaginary time, because it is not the kind of time we normally experience. But in a sense, it is just as real, as what we call real time.

From a lecture by Stephen Hawking

For us, time is a direction in the fourth spatial dimension. That's one of the ideas that is central to the way of visualizing reality that I have advanced in my book and its well-known animation.

In the third dimension, we might visualize the first three dimensions this way:

1st dimension: left/right
2nd dimension: backward/forward
3rd dimension: up/down

There's many other sets of words we could use, but the basic idea will always be the same: within the third dimension, if we think of it as having three dimensions of length, width, and depth, then each of those dimensions has a positive and negative direction. I can stand at a city intersection and visualize north/south, east/west, elevation/submergence: three dimensions, six directions. In an airplane or a spaceship, I can think of pitch, yaw, and roll, and apply positive/negative values to each of those: three rotations, six directions. Look at a wii controller while somebody plays the boxing game: up/down, left/right, forward/backward, all elements combined describe a full range of all possible motions.

Six Directions
By combining those ideas together we arrive at a way to describe any orientation within the third dimension. Is left/right the first dimension, or should it be forward/backward, or up/down? Whatever you prefer. The important thing is not what words we use, but that all three dimensions are at right angles to each other, and once those three dimensions are combined, we arrive at six directions that can encompass all aspects of three-dimensional space.

Do a google search on the words "six directions" and you will see how deeply embedded that concept is into various spiritual/metaphysical systems. Do a google search on "six dimensions" and you will find an interesting mix of musings about business/social connections (the six degrees of separation concept), geometry/physics, and other discussions about the nature of reality from the viewpoint of ancient spiritual systems.

In the way of visualizing reality that we're playing with here, "time" is a direction within the fourth dimension, but all of the above ideas apply again: if "forward" is described as a direction in the first dimension, it is just as much a direction in the third dimension. Here's where I'm going with this: we can use this jumping off point of what we know from the first three dimensions to see how time is a direction in the fourth, fifth, and sixth dimension, and what dimension we choose to place it within has more to do with our point of view than it does with the "direction" we're examining.

Let's Go Back
If the 1st dimension is described as forward/back, then we could build our analogy by calling the fourth dimension time/anti-time. Look up "time reversal symmetry" for more about this concept: even though the phrase "anti-time" is more commonly known from science fiction, you will find the idea of time being a process that makes just as much sense in the reverse direction is an accepted scientific viewpoint.

Now, if we think of the second dimension as left/right, what would the fifth dimension be? No matter what dimension we're talking about, we should be able to make a new dimension by moving at right angles to the current one. Naturally, this gets harder and harder to visualize as the number of dimensions grow, but Stephen Hawking's idea quoted above ties into another basic idea I have promoted here: if fourth-dimensional spacetime is like a flat plane until it is bent by gravity, what is it being bent into? I would say, the fifth dimension. If there are parallel universes being created by choice and circumstance (as per the David Deutsch team's proof I have quoted in this blog so often), then the bush-like structure of those branches would be, in a sense, at right angles to the fourth dimension of time, so those branches must be in the fifth dimension. Everything about our observed reality, then, is being knit together, one planck length at a time, at the fifth dimension into what we think of as a fourth-dimensional line of time.

What More Can There Be?
Kaluza-Klein theory, and the underlying granular nature of spacetime, and the idea that the higher dimensions are, from our vantage point in the fourth dimension, curled up at the planck length... all of these ideas tie together into this way of understanding the fifth dimension. Now let's go one step further - what's at right angles to the fifth dimension?

If we can accept that our fourth-dimensional line of time is analogous to the first dimension as the direction "forward", and the fifth dimension's probabilistic branches coming towards us (and extending out behind us!) are like the "left/right" of the second dimension, what would be the corresponding "up/down"? Let's think back to us standing on the street corner. The north/south, east/west plane of the first two dimensions gave us a way to locate ourselves at a particular intersection, but we needed the third dimension to describe the up/down of "I'm on the third floor" or "I'm in the basement". So, to imagine the sixth dimension, we have to try to imagine what we have described in the fifth dimension, and what it is impossible for us to get to get to without adding an additional dimension, which would again be at "right angles" to the ones below.

You Can't Get There From Here
This is one of the central ideas of this way of visualizing the dimensions. By taking our astonishingly large universe encompassed by the third dimension, then treating that as a line of time being created by quanta that are one planck length after another to imagine time as a direction in the fourth dimension, we are already holding a mind-boggling amount of information in our minds. By imagining that the fifth dimension is a "ray", or a bush-like branching structure of parallel universes at both the quantum and the macro level, we have exceeded what most people are able to hold in their minds simultaneously. The human brain is not built for holding so many differently-scaled concepts in our head at once - we prefer hierarchies of information, groupings, layers of meaning. So, while we know that the fourth dimension is not really as simple as a first-dimensional line, and the fifth dimension is not really as simple as a second-dimensional plane, by taking these higher concepts and simplifying them, this way of visualizing allows us to continue building ideas on top of each other, one layer of meaning stacked upon the next.

Here's the question, then. If our four-dimensional universe of spacetime is being created from a set of choices within the fifth dimension, what choices are not available to us? Now you're starting to think about the sixth dimension.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Here are some other entries relating to these ideas:
What Was Done Today
See No Future
Big Bang to Entropy
You Can't Get There From Here