Polls Archive 32 - Is Time a Direction?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEU48-0a5r0

Poll Question 32 - "In the same sense that "up" is not a dimension, "time" is a direction, not a dimension. Poll ended January 28 2009. 56% agreed while the rest disagreed.

These polls can be very instructive to me - some concepts that I think will be contentious end up with much more agreement, and some - like this one - that I think the majority will be willing to agree to come out close to a tie.

Let's talk a little more about this question.

What dimension is "up" a dimension within? If we call the first dimension length, the second dimension width, and the third dimension depth, is "up" in the first dimension? This is where the confusion begins. What dimension is "east" a direction in? What dimension is "forwards" a direction in? None of these questions make sense, because a direction can be in any dimension, and the direction only makes sense as a dimension when we consider the opposite direction at the same time.

Okay then, in what dimensions do we find "up/down"? "East/west"? "Backwards/forwards?" The questions still don't really make sense, because we need even more context. Depending upon your orientation within 3D space, any of these words could apply to any vector within that space: but as soon as you arbitrarily establish one of those sets as being your current orientation, you then bring to mind two additional sets of directions that make sense within that context, and each of those sets is at right angles to the others.

Discussions of the fourth spatial dimension, then, are bothered by all the same possible miscommunications. Is "time" a direction in the fourth spatial dimension? Sure, it could be one of them, but depending upon your orientation within that space, you could just as easily say that "up", "forwards", or even "east" is a direction within 4D space. As soon as you pick one of those words, you then limit what you can call the other directions. As it says in the wikipedia article on the fourth dimension, one of the proposed sets of names for the two new directions in the fourth spatial dimension would be "ana" and "kata". For our own entropy-driven reality riding the "arrow of time", I've been encouraging people to think of the two directions in the fourth spatial dimensions as "time" and "anti-time", and to think of that dimension as a whole as "duration".

If "up" can be a direction in any spatial dimension, does that mean that "time" could be as well? Sure! It just depends upon your orientation, your frame of reference. This is why I say that for a 2D flatlander, they would perceive "time" to be in the third spatial dimension. Generally speaking, I would say that "time" is a direction in the next dimension up from the one you're examining, but that is only one of the possible ways of describing how one spatial dimension relates to another.

This is an idea I'm passionate about, as it's central to this way of visualizing the dimensions. In "Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?" I show how important this is: the ten dimensions that physicists talk about are spatial dimensions. Spatial dimensions have a clear relationship to each other, each is at right angles to the one before, which means (as hard as this is to visualize) that all spatial dimensions are at right angles to each other. One useful way of thinking about this is with a set of nested spheres, with each new dimension enfolding all of the other previous ones.

Another way of approaching this idea is to think of those ten spatial dimensions as a tower, but if the fourth dimension is "time" rather than a full spatial dimension encompassing the two directions of "time" and "anti-time", then that tower is built on a shaky foundation. No wonder there are still scientists who refuse to believe that there are any extra dimensions at all!

Here's the video for "Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?", which includes an animation showing this "tower" visualization.


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

Based upon the results of the above poll question, it looks like this is a flag I'm going to have to continue waving. Some of the other videos where I've talked about the idea that time is just a direction in the fourth spatial dimension include Hypercubes and Plato's Cave, Time is a Direction, Dr. Mel's 4D Glasses, Time in 3 Dimensions, Wormholes, and "t" Equals Zero.

To close, here's one of my songs about trying to achieve that perspective where, as Einstein, liked to say, the distinction between past, present and future is meaningless. The song is called "Big Bang to Entropy".


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

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Poll 33 - Could I Meet My Incarnation?

Creativity and the Quantum Universe

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBNv8LMbEPA

There's an article published in the February Issue of Discover Magazine which really caught my eye - written by Mark Anderson, it's called Entangled Life. Let's look at some excerpts from the article:

Graham Fleming sits down at an L-shaped lab bench, occupying a footprint about the size of two parking spaces. Alongside him, a couple of off-the-shelf lasers spit out pulses of light just millionths of a billionth of a second long. After snaking through a jagged path of mirrors and lenses, these minus­cule flashes disappear into a smoky black box containing proteins from green sulfur bacteria, which ordinarily obtain their energy and nourishment from the sun. Inside the black box, optics manufactured to billionths-of-a-meter precision detect something extraordinary: Within the bacterial proteins, dancing electrons make seemingly impossible leaps and appear to inhabit multiple places at once.

Peering deep into these proteins, Fleming and his colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley and at Washington University in St. Louis have discovered the driving engine of a key step in photosynthesis, the process by which plants and some microorganisms convert water, carbon dioxide, and sunlight into oxygen and carbohydrates. More efficient by far in its ability to convert energy than any operation devised by man, this cascade helps drive almost all life on earth.

One of the central controversies surrounding my project is whether it's really correct to apply the thinking of quantum mechanics to the macro world: traditionally, science has taught that the weird world of the quantum wave function--where outcomes are derived from probabilities and randomness, and particles can be in more than one place at the same time--is completely separate from the physical world we see around us. One of the main ideas of my project is that all of these quantum effects occur in the fifth dimension rather than the fourth, and this logical application of what makes one spatial dimension "outside" the previous one works all the way up - we've talked about this logic in entries like Why Do We Need More Than 3 Dimensions, Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?, and You Can't Get There From Here.

Visualizing the wave function for our universe as coming from the "next dimension up" gives us a way to reconcile how such seemingly strange and unimaginable quantum effects as entanglement and tunneling could be a part of our reality: like the 2D flatlander, who would have some hope of being able to imagine the third spatial dimension as "time" but would find the fourth dimension completely strange and unimaginable, we as 3D creatures are in the same quandary. How can we imagine all this quantum weirdness as being connected to our solid physical world? With my project, I provide a way to visualize the fifth dimension that ties in with that idea and many others.

Here's some more excerpts from that Discover Magazine article:

From tunneling to entanglement, the special properties of the quantum realm allow events to unfold at speeds and efficiencies that would be unachievable with classical physics alone. Could quantum mechanisms be driving some of the most elegant and inexplicable processes of life? For years experts doubted it: Quantum phenomena typically reveal themselves only in lab settings, in vacuum chambers chilled to near absolute zero. Biological systems are warm and wet. Most researchers thought the thermal noise of life would drown out any quantum weirdness that might rear its head.

One of the most significant quantum observations in the life sciences comes from Fleming and his collaborators. Their study of photosynthesis in green sulfur bacteria, published in 2007 in Nature [subscription required], tracked the detailed chemical steps that allow plants to harness sunlight and use it to convert simple raw materials into the oxygen we breathe and the carbohydrates we eat. Specifically, the team examined the protein scaffold connecting the bacteria’s external solar collectors, called the chlorosome, to reaction centers deep inside the cells. Unlike electric power lines, which lose as much as 20 percent of energy in transmission, these bacteria transmit energy at a staggering efficiency rate of 95 percent or better.

The secret, Fleming and his colleagues found, is quantum physics.

To unearth the bacteria’s inner workings, the researchers zapped the connective proteins with multiple ultrafast laser pulses. Over a span of femto­seconds, they followed the light energy through the scaffolding to the cellular reaction centers where energy conversion takes place.

Then came the revelation: Instead of haphazardly moving from one connective channel to the next, as might be seen in classical physics, energy traveled in several directions at the same time. The researchers theorized that only when the energy had reached the end of the series of connections could an efficient pathway retroactively be found. At that point, the quantum process collapsed, and the electrons’ energy followed that single, most effective path.

Electrons moving through a leaf or a green sulfur bacterial bloom are effectively performing a quantum “random walk”—a sort of primitive quantum computation—to seek out the optimum transmission route for the solar energy they carry. “We have shown that this quantum random-walk stuff really exists,” Fleming says. “Have we absolutely demonstrated that it improves the efficiency? Not yet. But that’s our conjecture. And a lot of people agree with it.”

This revelation is amazing enough. But then the article goes on to talk about new research that explores other ways in which the quantum world is very much a part of our macro world, imparting unique fragrances to molecules that are almost identical, imparting healing qualities to substances like green tea, and perhaps even directly contributing to consciousness. Please do read the entire article, here are three more brief quotes:

• Quantum physics may explain the mysterious biological process of smell, too, says biophysicist Luca Turin, who first published his controversial hypothesis in 1996 while teaching at University College London. In 2007 Turin... and his hypothesis received support from a paper by four physicists at University College London.
  

• In 2007 four biochemists from the Auton­omous University of Barcelona announced that the secret to green tea’s effectiveness as an anti-oxidant... may also be quantum mechanical. Free radical molecules, by-products of the body’s breakdown of food or environmental toxins, have a spare electron. That extra electron makes free radicals reactive, and hence dangerous as they travel through the bloodstream. But an electron from the catechin (catechins are among the chief organic compounds found in tea, wine, and some fruits and vegetables) can make use of quantum mechanics to tunnel across the gap to the free radical. Quantum tunneling has also been observed in enzymes...

• Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist and director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona... speculates that anesthetics “interrupt a delicate quantum process” within the neurons of the brain. Each neuron contains hundreds of long, cylindrical protein structures, called microtubules, that serve as scaffolding. Anesthetics, Hameroff says, dissolve inside tiny oily regions of the microtubules, affecting how some electrons inside these regions behave.

Visualizing how much this quantum dance is participating in the creation of the world we see around us is really not that dissimilar to the journeys of discovery that we've just looked at in The Shaman and Modern Shamans. In Music and the Dance of Creativity, we talked about this joyful process of creativity that underlies our universe, and in The Holographic Universe we talked about the new scientific evidence announced in 2009 confirming that for our 4D universe, our "line of time" is not continuous but rather being constructed one planck frame at a time. That new scientific evidence can be added to the list of reasons supporting my conclusion that in order for the quantum world to make sense, we have to see how it is coming from the fifth dimension.

Out of All Possibilities, One is Selected
In entries like Dreaming of Electric Sheep and Imagining the Omniverse, we looked at trying to visualize how our specific universe might be able to "come into focus" from the omniverse, where every possible state exists simultaneously. Let's think about how that is essentially a creative process that we are describing - out of all possibilities, one is selected. Take a close look at Mark Anderson's Discover Magazine article, and his description of how photosynthesis uses quantum effects to achieve such high efficiency. Now, here's a section of that article in which I've substituted some words to help us to see how "quantum weirdness" can also easily be thought of as a description of the creative process:

Instead of haphazardly moving from one idea to the next, as might be seen in work that has no focus, creative ideas travel in several directions at the same time. By simultaneously exploring a set of connections, the "eureka" of a new inspiration can be found. At that point, the exploration process is "collapsed", and the creative person follows the new idea that they find most inspiring.

Seeing the probability space of our "fifth dimensional hologram" all around us, waiting with new ideas and inspirations for us to bring into our reality simply by observing some aspect of the wave function of possibilities, is another way of understanding how much the quantum world and our macro world are tied together, all part of the same continuum, and all part of the ongoing creative process that is happening at every instant in every part of our universe.

Enjoy the journey of discovery!

Rob

PS - Here's a song about how these quantum processes are part of the creation and creativity that is all around us, and that we are a part of as we distill one physical reality from the many quantum paths available to us: it's called "Making It Up as I Go".

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpkehQ97ltA

Next: New Translations of Imagining the Tenth Dimension

Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?

(In some ways you could consider this a sequel to the original animation that started it all, which you can view here.)


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

In science, a physical picture is often more important than the mathematics used to describe it.
- Michio Kaku, in his book Physics of the Impossible

One of the most often-asked questions related to this project is "Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?". This question relates to the basic idea of what we're talking about here, which is a way of visualizing spatial dimensions. We've talked before about the point-line-plane postulate, which you can look up in wikipedia: it uses a very similar logic to what my way of visualizing dimensions uses, and this postulate states that it can be used to imagine any number of spatial dimensions. Here's how the point-line-plane postulate works:

We start with a point. We can place a point within any specific spatial dimension, and then place another point in that same dimension. The line that passes through those two points can be thought of as having any number of divisions along its length, but ultimately the line extends to infinity in either direction. To define an additional dimension, all we have to do is find a point that isn't on any of the lines we could possibly have just created within the constraints of our current dimension. That additional point can then be used to define a plane that extends to infinity in all four directions within that plane, and this is how we imagine an additional spatial dimension. And finally, to define yet another dimension up from that one, all we have to do is find a point which is not within any of the planes we could possibly have just created.

Right angles to right angles
Using this logic, we can continue to build one spatial dimension upon another. How does this work? It's because each additional spatial dimension is at "right angles" to the one before, and the tricky part for we 3D creatures is trying to find ways to allow our brains to conceive of what "right angles" means as we try to imagine each additional spatial dimension beyond the three with which we're so familiar. The point/line/branch/fold imagery that my project uses is another very similar way of helping us to visualize additional spatial dimensions, using a logical consistency which works no matter what spatial dimension you choose to start from.

When string theory talked about spatial dimensions, for a while there it was nine spatial dimensions plus one of time. When physicist Edward Witten introduced a way to unite five different versions of string theory into what became known as M-Theory, he was describing ten spatial dimensions plus one of time. Because of that shorthand way of saying it, some people jump to the conclusion that this means physicists are saying "time" is the eleventh dimension, but it's not that simple.

"Time" overlaid upon "Space"
What science has traditionally visualized is three dimensions of space, and an additional quality called "time" which is overlaid on space to create the familiar concept of "space-time". In that way of thinking, "time" is not really a full dimension, which is why it sometimes gets counted separately. So with M-Theory's 11 dimensions, it's like we're imagining an eleven-story building, but the fourth floor is somehow not as real as the other floors: no wonder some people are unwilling to accept the existence of additional spatial dimensions when this building looks like it could collapse at any moment!

String theory relies upon extremely complicated math to arrive at its portrayal of reality. My animation is a visualization tool, which provides a comparatively easy window into imagining the extra spatial dimensions, and also has many interesting connections to other ideas from physics and cosmology - for instance, the idea that the fifth dimension is curled up at the planck length because we're experiencing it one planck frame at a time, and the idea that our 3D universe is "constrained" by a seven-dimensional brane can be seen in my "new way of thinking about time and space".

Imagining the Tenth Dimension is a Visualization Tool
What I've created, then, is an intuitive, rather than a mathematical way of visualizing the spatial dimensions. As physicist Michio Kaku says in the opening quote to this entry, sometimes finding a way to visualize a problem is more important than the math used to solve a problem: but saying that in no way diminishes our respect for the difficulty of the rigorous mathematical concepts physicists dealing in cosmology and extra dimensions must use to properly study these ideas.

So here we are with our eleven-story building, somehow managing to stay up even though its fourth floor is not as solid as the others. What's wrong with this picture? If the first three dimensions are spatial, and the fifth dimension and above are spatial (or "space-like" as some physicists prefer to say), and each additional spatial dimension is defined by the one before, then I would say that we have to find a way to agree that the fourth dimension is a full spatial dimension just like the others or the leap from the third spatial dimension to the fifth spatial dimension simply doesn't make sense. We need to show how there is a continuum, from the first dimension to the second, from the second to the third, and so on all the way up to the top of our building.

Many Worlds Leads to Many Dimensions
Here's another continuum that I believe ties in to this way of visualizing. In 2007, a team of scientists at Oxford, under the direction of physicist David Deutsch published a proof demonstrating that there is a direct continuum from the probabilistic outcomes of the quantum world to the macro world of parallel universes resulting from chance and choice (Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation).

If every decision I make, every decision someone else makes, and every random outcome where no one made a choice but something just happened are all creating different versions of our universe, this seems like a mind-boggling amount of universes for us to be asked to imagine. And yet, the Many Worlds Interpretation is gaining ground amongst serious scientists because it answers so many other questions about how our universe works. So, while Everett's MWI still has its detractors, as cosmologist Max Tegmark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been quoted to say,

The critique of many worlds is shifting from 'it makes no sense and I hate it' to simply 'I hate it'.

Here's the intuitive leap my project takes on all this: if there are multiple branching timeline versions of our universe being created by chance, choice, and the actions of others, and yet we somehow can't get to those other universes once a certain outcome has been observed, we are talking about the point-line-plane postulate again: we define a line in a spatial dimension, and we find a point that is not on that line, and that's how we visualize the next dimension up. In other words, with my project I'm contending that the versions of our universe that we can't get to are being defined within additional dimensions, and this aligns with the most basic definition of spatial dimensions.

What's Not On Our Line?
As we discussed recently in Elvis and the Electrons, one of the commonly used examples of a universe we're not in, or a point that is not on our line, is that Everett's MWI says there must be a version of our universe where it's 2009 and Elvis is still alive. In other words, I am insisting that these branching choices, as per the definition of spatial dimensions, come from the next dimension up above our spacetime, a constantly evolving "probability space" which is the fifth spatial dimension. The fact that Kaluza convinced Einstein that the equations for gravity and light for our universe are resolved in the fifth dimension also ties in nicely with this idea.

But in order to get to that conclusion, we still have to fix our ghostly fourth floor. This project does so by insisting that "time" as we experience it is just one of the two possible directions in the fourth spatial dimension. Most scientists are willing to agree with the concept of time reversal symmetry, which says that time's opposite direction is just as valid as the "arrow of time" that we are experiencing within our universe. As per the point-line-plane postulate, my way of visualizing the dimensions uses time reversal symmetry for its reasoning - if we define a point in the fourth dimension, let's call it "now", then we can define a second point any arbitrary amount of time before or after "now" which creates a line that extends to infinity in either direction. Those two directions are "time" and "anti-time", and those two directions combined create a full spatial dimension.

Talking about "time" without acknowledging "anti-time" is like talking about "up" without acknowledging "down". Here's another analogy: if I were to tell you that our 3D physical world is made from length, width, depth, and "forward", you would ask why I was counting "forward" separately. Isn't "forward" already one of the possible directions within our 3D space of length,width, and depth? Of course it is. We reach the same conclusion with the fourth spatial dimension: "time" as we experience is just one of the two possible directions that make sense within that dimension, but it does not belong in a list of length, width and depth: this is why I suggest that the fourth spatial dimension be referred to as "duration".

Which means, then, that by the time we have counted ten spatial dimensions, we have already considered "time" as being one of the possible directions within those spatial dimensions so there's no need to count it separately. To be clear, though, this conclusion is unique to this project, so anyone taking a university class on M-Theory will continue to be told to count time separately.

Like wormholes, or anti-matter, some people jump to the conclusion that because they learned about "time as the fourth spatial dimension" from science fiction (the H.G. Wells novel "The Time Machine" for instance) that means the idea is incorrect, just a figment of overactive imaginations. In fact, the controversy over whether time is part of a full spatial dimension is at the core of many people's criticism of this project. Time, some critics say, is a temporal dimension and thus any additional dimensions based upon my description of the fourth dimension must also be temporal, and not the spatial dimensions that physicists dealing with extra dimensions are thinking about.

Because the idea that "time" is a direction, not a dimension, is so central to my project, I have spent a great deal of time discussing it. Here, to close, are some of the other blog entries where I have explored this idea that time is just one of the two possible directions in the fourth spatial dimension.

Hypercubes and Plato's Cave

Time is a Direction

Time in Either Direction

Scrambled Eggs

Dr. Mel's 4D Glasses

The Big Bang and the Big Pie


Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Google and the Group Mind

The Big Bang and the Big Pie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

Rob

Next: Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs, November Report

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

What Would a Linelander Really See?

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9_-ZOIES0U

In mathematics, no definition of dimension adequately captures the concept in all situations where we would like to make use of it. Consequently, mathematicians have devised numerous definitions of dimension for different types of spaces. All, however, are ultimately based on the concept of the dimension of Euclidean n-space E ⁿ. The point E ⁰ is 0-dimensional. The line E ¹ is 1-dimensional. The plane E ² is 2-dimensional. In general, E ⁿ is n-dimensional.
- from the wikipedia article on dimensions

Because there are so many different ways to define the word "dimensions", some people with their own narrow definition of the word have claimed that my use of the word is not correct. The definition above, from wikipedia, works very well for the way of imagining the dimensions that we've been playing with here: each additional dimension adds an additional "degree of freedom" that was unavailable from the previous one. If the ten dimensions that physicists are talking about are truly spatial dimensions (or as some prefer to say "space-like dimensions"), then a seven dimensional space must have seven co-ordinates that would define the position of a unique point within that seven-dimensional system, and so on: the space E ⁷ is 7-dimensional, and that is the kind of dimensions we are talking about in Imagining the Tenth Dimension.

When the website for this project first went live two years ago, a number of people had questions about the animation, since parts of it didn't just parrot what the mainstream had been saying about how our reality is constructed. Two years later, I'm pleased that a number of new theories have come forward from respected physicists which can be easily connected to the supposedly "out there" ideas that were in this original video and its accompanying book, but there are still many more ideas attached to this project that will eventually be proved or disproved in the months and years to come.

One of the most important basic assumptions about this project is that if physicists are really saying that these ten dimensions are spatial, then we should be able to use what we know about the first three or four dimensions to deduce some things about the additional degrees of freedom that these extra spatial dimensions would add. Saying "you can't imagine the fifth dimension and above because they're totally unlike the dimensions of spacetime" is, I think, taking the easy way out*: are we saying these additional dimensions are spatial or not? Of course it becomes harder to harder to imagine each additional dimension beyond the spacetime we're familiar with, but that doesn't mean it's impossible!

"Don't say Higher, say Extra"
Here's a brief side note: you may have noticed that the term "extra dimensions" is often used rather than "higher dimensions" when talking about the dimensions beyond spacetime: I think this is a useful distinction, because saying "higher" somehow sets the idea up in our minds that we should be gazing skyward as we think about these additional dimensions. A more valid way of thinking about each new dimensions is that it is somehow "outside" the current dimension, and that there is no way for us to get to the states that are within that additional dimension if we stay within the current one. For instance, with three-dimensional space we need to add the fourth dimension or there is no way for us to get from 3D space in one state to 3D space in another state: the directions of time and "anti-time" are the two new directions that we are able to reach by adding the fourth dimension into the equation. Saying that each new dimension is at "right angles" to the one below is another way of thinking about that same idea.

The "Linelander"
Last blog, we talked about the viewpoint of a Flatlander, an imaginary two-dimensional creature. Now, let's try this as a thought experiment: imagine yourself on a one-dimensional line. If that were your world, anything other than "forward on the line" and backward on the line" would be unfathomable. Imagining some kind of a wormhole that "folded" your line to allow instantaneous jumping from one position to another might possibly be something you could wrap your head around, and that would give you a way to imagine the second dimension, but dimensions beyond that would be so completely outside your experience that you would probably be inclined to say that the extra dimensions beyond the second dimension were theoretical constructs only, with no way for one-dimensional people to be able to imagine such an outlandish geometry.

For a one-dimensional Linelander, a second dimension at right angles to the dimension he lived in would possibly be imaginable, but something that was at an additional right angle that was somehow different from the first right angle already considered (to create a three-dimensional space) might well seem beyond the ability for our poor Linelander to imagine: the difficultly is particularly compounded for the Linelander, since he can easily imagine only one way of extending out to an additional dimension, so visualizing each additional dimension would require him to imagine a repetitive "right angles" operation over and over again. The advantage we have over a Linelander is that we are intimately familiar with a space of three dimensions, so for us, to imagine three unique right angles that together could help to form a cube is much easier - and this is why using "line/branch/fold" works so well for us as a visualization tool, because it gives us an ordered way of imagining how three different dimensions are at right angles to each other.

"Bend Me, Fold Me, Any Way You Want..."
So here we are, imagining ourselves as a Linelander on a one-dimensional line, trying to imagine how our 1D world might be able to be bend or fold to allow instantaneous teleportation to other points on our line. Einstein suggested that we should think of gravity as a "bending" of spacetime. Whether we're talking about folding, branching, twisting, bending or any other spatial manipulation word you care to think of, all of these are ways to start thinking about the next dimension up, the dimension that is moving at right angles to the one currently being examined. To be clear, then, the point/line/branch/fold concepts that this project starts from are really just interchangeable spatial manipulation terms that repeatedly find different ways to describe the same idea of moving to the next dimension, which is why this concept can work no matter where you start. A second dimensional plane can be thought of as a thick line joining two other lines, or it can be thought of as a branch off of a line, or it can be thought of as being created by the folding of a line: these are all ways of thinking how the one dimension we are looking at is at right angles to the other.

Like our Linelander, right angles are relatively easy for us to imagine for the dimensions we live in -- which in our case as 3D "Spacelanders" would be the first three or four dimensions. But for us, saying that "the sixth dimension is at right angles to the fifth dimension" doesn't create a particularly useful mental image. This is why the line, branch, fold metaphor is so powerful - it lets us visualize something that is easier to hold in our minds than if we were to just imagine line/line/line etc, branch/branch/branch etc., or fold/fold/fold.

Time is at Right Angles
So. Each of these terms is a different way of thinking about that same "this is how a dimension is at right angles to the one below" concept. This is also why I say "time" is in the next dimension up no matter dimension you're examining, because "time" is another way of moving at right angles to the dimension below, and this is why "time" for a 2D flatlander would be a direction in the third dimension.


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

Recently I posted a blog entry about wormholes, extending a discussion that's in the tenth dimension faq: the question in the faq is "can you really fold a dimension?". And my answer is yes, you can fold a dimension and science calls that a wormhole. But with the logic of what we're examining here, different wormholes would have different effects depending upon the dimension being folded, and ultimately this gives us ways of thinking how the solid reality we are seeing at this very instant could be nothing more than shadows of higher dimensional shapes and patterns, connecting our reality together in ways that are beyond our ability to directly witness from down here in spacetime.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

Related entries:
Time is a Direction
The Flipbook Universe
You Can't Get There From Here
How to Make a Universe
What Would a Flatlander Really See?
Hypercubes and Plato's Cave

* P. S. - for anyone who is unfamiliar with my project, please read blog entries like The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic to see how the idea that the extra dimensions are "compactified" is easily dealt with in the visualization we're using in Imagining the Tenth Dimension.

Next: The Annotated Tenth Dimension Video

Time in Either Direction

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

Imagining the Tenth Dimension was launched at the end of June 2006. As we approach the second anniversary of this project, I continue to be amazed at the new connections that are appearing between my way of visualizing how our reality is constructed, and the scientific mainstream. That would not be possible without experts like Sean M. Carroll out there, doing the heavy lifting, processing the heavy math, coming up with new leading edge theories that, like my own project, are designed to help us all towards a deeper understanding of the concept of timelessness. Sean M. Carroll, senior research associate in physics at the California Institute of Technology said the following in the June 2008 issue of Scientific American, in his article entitled "The Cosmic Origins of Time's Arrow".

Among the unnatural aspects of the universe, one stands out: time asymmetry. The microscopic laws of physics that underlie the behavior of the universe do not distinguish between past and future... The arrow of time is arguably the most blatant feature of the universe that cosmologists are currently at an utter loss to explain.

Since the idea of time-reversal symmetry, and the idea that time is a direction, not a dimension, are both central to my way of visualizing reality, I loved this article. Here's a couple of quotes from the notes attached to illustrations in that article:

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

In my book there is a chapter called "The Flow of Time" which discusses these ideas. In one section of that chapter, the reader is taken through a fanciful thought experiment of what it would be like to meet a creature created from the chemical processes which can logically flow in the opposite direction to our own arrow of time. Also from the illustration text:

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

Beginning and Ending with Zero
This is the simple and elegant truth that both Gevin Giorbran and I have been trying to get people to see for years: the natural equilibrium state before and after the universe begins and ends is the same state - in my model, it is that place where the zero and the ten are congruent - the omniverse, the indeterminate quantum fabric which is the ever-present background to any observed reality. In Gevin's model, he called this the Set Of All Possible States: same concept. The equilibrium condition that Dr. Carroll's article refers to here can also be thought of as symmetry order, the underlying place where everything balances out, another subject which regular readers of my blog or my book will know is central to this way of visualizing reality. As the first of my 26 songs attached to this project says: ultimately, Everything Fits Together.

In that same Scientific American article, Sean Carroll also said this:

According to the rules of quantum mechanics, the total number of microstates in a system never changes.

In other words, no matter what we are trying to imagine for the background to our reality, there is a place outside of time, outside of space, outside of probability, where all possible states for our universe or any other possible universe exist simultaneously, another central concept to both my and Gevin's projects. Dr. Carroll:

Indeed, as far as entropy is concerned, it would be even more likely for the universe to fluctuate straight into the configuration we see today, bypassing the past 14 billion years of cosmic evolution.

This is a recurring theme to Dr. Carroll's article: what cosmologists are wrestling with is how unlikely our own universe and its unique arrow of time is, and that in fact the low entropy/high order "beginning" to our universe that we think of as the big bang is even more unlikely than the current "now" we are in. Saying that there is an even more highly ordered state before the big bang merely pushes the problem back further and further - unless we can acknowledge what Dr. Carroll (and I) have been saying: there is ultimately a place of equilibrium where all of these states exist simultaneously, and that is the same state before and after our (or any other universe) exists. In fact, where you place the starting point within the omniverse really doesn't matter: but that starting point then sets a probabilistic set of processes in motion that represent the return to the natural balance of that equilibrium state, one planck length at a time.

Time as a return to equilibrium
Time can flow in either direction. It can appear to be moving towards more entropy (as it does in our universe) or it can appear to be moving towards less entropy in other possible universes. The important wrinkles which David Bohm's implicate order added, and which Gevin Giorbran so eloquently built upon, is this: there are two kinds of order, and they are called grouping order and symmetry order. Because we see our universe heading towards high entropy, what we think of as the arbitrary starting point for our own universe (as per Sean Carroll's ideas above) can be thought of as an expression of the maximum grouping order for that data, and what we think of as the ending point for own universe is really an expression of the maximum symmetry order. In my book I advanced a similarly fanciful idea:

But why stop there? It could also be possible then that the universe didn’t actually exist until one second ago, which is when the observer turned their attention upon our universe and collapsed the probability wave function into what we now perceive as our reality, complete with a history which each of us believes we remember. Whether the observer came into existence 13.7 billion years ago or one second ago, the result will be the same: out of all the possible timelines which could have existed prior to this moment, through the act of observation we are now experiencing one of them as our own present, and our own history.

So. The probabilistic line of time we are moving on is just a move from one kind of order to the other, and a return to the natural equilibrium that exists within timelessness. Amazingly, this means that another universe built from a subset of the multiverse that starts with high symmetry order would experience time as a move to lower, not higher entropy. Everything about that universe would be a paring down of choices, rather than the constantly expanding bush-like branching structure that we experience as we travel down our own "line of time"... it would be as if eggs could unscramble themselves and exploded bombs could reassemble themselves in that universe. As I've quoted many times, quantum physicists like Seth Lloyd say we can think of our big bang as the first yes/no that separates our universe out from all other possible universes. In the "reverse-time universe" which Dr. Carroll refers to in this article, one would find their universe moving towards that most basic yes/no state of the highest grouping order, and the lowest entropy. Isn't that an amazing thought?

My song "Big Bang to Entropy" talks about these ideas as well: that we move from, and we move towards, the very same equilibrium state, and that there is a way to think of our universe and all of its probabilistic states as a single entity once we move beyond the concept of time.


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

Enjoy the journey,


Rob Bryanton

Next: Being More Fifth-Dimensional

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