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?

Illusions and Reality

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aSqfZR8v1A

Here's a link to an article published yesterday at physorg.com: it talks about fascinating new research being conducted at MIT regarding the ways our senses interact with each other.

Have you ever thought about how much our brains are synthesizing the input that comes in from our senses into one coherent whole? With sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste we perceive not five worlds but one. Adding other senses, like equilibrioception (balance and acceleration), thermoception (heat and cold), proprioception (relative positions of the parts of the body), and nociception (physiological pain), only makes us appreciate that much more what a complex set of data is coming in, to be knit together into one experience that becomes our conscious and unconscious observation of the world around us.

The surprising information this MIT study reveals is that it shows how one sense can trump another in surprising ways, as part of the synthesis process we're talking about here. It demonstrates this by using a variation on what's known as the waterfall illusion, which you can read about in the wikipedia article on motion after-effects. The waterfall illusion occurs when you watch falling water for a minute or so, then look over at the rocks and they appear to be slowly rising.

Here's a YouTube video called "LSD Trip" that provides another nice example of motion after-effects:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9uYEM2osYQ

Back in October 2008, in Predicting the Future (Here Come the Aliens), we talked about other optical illusions that demonstrate how much our minds are responsible for what we see around us. A few weeks after I published that entry, there was another article at physorg.com called "Optical Illusions: Caused by Eye or Brain?", which talked about microsaccades - the tiny involuntary motions of the eye that help us to see the world around us by continually providing very slightly different input. I talked about microsaccades back in August 2007 in a blog entry called Constructive Interference. Amazingly, without microsaccades, it turns out that we would quickly become blind to any stationary objects around us unless we were continually moving our heads around.

By the time we're thinking about the unbelievably complex amount of information that we are processing instant by instant throughout the day, I've proposed that it's really not that big a leap to think that there could be some multi-dimensional awareness of our non-local universe which each of us already possesses, and that experiences like instinct, intuition, deja vu, simultaneous inspiration, creativity, the power of music, empathy, and even much more supernatural concepts than that might all be indications of our ability to perceive and process information which comes from beyond the already complex "now" of any particular moment in spacetime. Mind boggling? Sure. But like most of the concepts we play with in this project, if we take these ideas one at a time and enfold them together, seeing how one can be encapsulated within another, we can work our way back out to the biggest picture of all, where all of this happens simultaneously as part of the enfolded symmetry state which Gevin Giorbran called SOAPS, the Set Of All Possible States. As we discussed last time, physicist Tim Palmer is now calling that biggest picture of all The Invariant Set, but mystics, philosophers, and scientists have all come up with other ways of thinking about exactly the same thing.

Speaking of mystics, last time we looked at a video by artist Charles Gilchrist, who I've really become a fan of. Here's the next video in that same series of his about sacred geometry, another way of thinking about the parts of our reality which exist outside of spacetime. Regular readers of my blog will recognize a lot of the same themes that I am constantly playing with in Charles Gilchrist's inspiring work.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoMk0estzXc

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next - The Time Paradox

The Invariant Set

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrIhi2urqJ0

Gevin Giorbran called it SOAPS - the "set of all possible states". For our universe, I called it "a point in the seventh dimension", and for the omniverse of all possible universes and information patterns, I called it the tenth dimension in its unobserved state of perfectly enfolded symmetry. Now, here's some excerpts from an article in the March 30 2009 issue of New Scientist Magazine that explores a concept from physicist Tim Palmer called "The Invariant Set". I would say we're all talking about the same thing: viewing the universe from a timeless perspective.

Can fractals make sense of the quantum world?
New Scientist Magazine, 30 March 2009
by Mark Buchanan

QUANTUM theory just seems too weird to believe. Particles can be in more than one place at a time. They don't exist until you measure them. Spookier still, they can even stay in touch when they are separated by great distances.

...what if there were a way of showing how quantum theory might emerge from a deeper level of non-weird physics?

If you listen to physicist Tim Palmer, it begins to sound plausible. What has been missing, he argues, are some key ideas from an area of science that most quantum physicists have ignored: the science of fractals, those intricate patterns found in everything from fractured surfaces to oceanic flows (see What is a fractal?).

...Palmer's ideas begin with gravity. The force that makes apples fall and holds planets in their orbit is also the only fundamental physical process capable of destroying information. It works like this: the hot gas and plasma making up a star contain an enormous amount of information locked in the atomic states of a huge number of particles. If the star collapses under its own gravity to form a black hole, most of the atoms are sucked in, resulting in almost all of that detailed information vanishing. Instead, the black hole can be described completely using just three quantities - its mass, angular momentum and electric charge.

Many physicists accept this view, but Palmer thinks they haven't pursued its implications far enough. As a system loses information, the number of states you need to describe it diminishes. Wait long enough and you will find that the system reaches a point where no more states can be lost. In mathematical terms, this special subset of states is known as an invariant set. Once a state lies in this subset, it stays in it forever.

A simple way of thinking about it is to imagine a swinging pendulum that slows down due to friction before eventually coming to a complete standstill. Here the invariant set is the one that describes the pendulum at rest.

Because black holes destroy information, Palmer suggests that the universe has an invariant set too, though it is far more complicated than the pendulum.

Complex systems are affected by chaos, which means that their behaviour can be influenced greatly by tiny changes. According to mathematics, the invariant set of a chaotic system is a fractal.

Fractal invariant sets have unusual geometric properties. If you plotted one on a map it would trace out the same intricate structure as a coastline. Zoom in on it and you would find more and more detail, with the patterns looking similar to the original unzoomed image.

Gravity and mathematics alone, Palmer suggests, imply that the invariant set of the universe should have a similarly intricate structure, and that the universe is trapped forever in this subset of all possible states. This might help to explain why the universe at the quantum level seems so bizarre.

...The key is the invariant set. According to Palmer's hypothesis, the invariant set contains all the physically realistic states of the universe. So any state that isn't part of the invariant set cannot physically exist.

...In a paper submitted to the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A, he shows how the basic idea can account for quantum uncertainty, contextuality and other quantum puzzles (www.arxiv.org/abs/0812.1148).

I've talked before about fractals and recursion, and how those relate to this way of visualizing reality. While Dr. Palmer is not talking about extra dimensions with his theory, it's very easy to use his "Invariant Set" concept in the context of my project: in entries like The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic, Our Non-Local Universe, and Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions? I've talked about what's possible and impossible within this way of viewing reality, and how the logical progression from one spatial dimension to the next that I'm portraying gives us a way to see how the universe, the multiverse, and the omniverse are related to each other: each is a subset of the next, and all make more sense when we learn to view them from the perspective where (as Einstein liked to say) "the distinction between past, present, and future is meaningless".

I mentioned that with my system, I would say our own universe's "invariant set" is locked in at the seventh dimension: this can also be connected to the string theory idea that our 3D universe is constrained by a seventh-dimensional brane. Now, here's a lovely video by artist Charles Gilchrist that shows a connection between the number seven, fractals, infinite recursion, timelessness, and the forms of sacred geometry.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJ9OlPsndVs

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Edit: Here's a link to a story on Tim Palmer's Invariant Set Postulate published August 17th 2009 at physorg.com.

Next: Illusions and Reality