a new way of thinking about time and space ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ by Rob Bryanton
--author and research scientist David Jay Brown says: "one of the most brilliantly-conceived and mind-stretching books that I've ever encountered".
--science fiction author Greg Bear says: "a fascinating excursion into the multiverse - clear, elegant, personal and provocative"
This annotated artist’s impression shows the
Milky Way galaxy. The blue halo of material surrounding the galaxy
indicates the expected distribution of the mysterious dark matter. New
measurements based on the movements of stars show that the amount of
dark matter in this region around the Sun is far smaller than predicted
and have indicated that there is no significant dark matter at all in
our neighbourhood. The blue sphere centred on the Sun’s position shows
the approximate size of the newly surveyed volume, but not its precise
shape. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada
The opening paragraph of the article pretty well sums it up, for more please follow the link:
(Phys.org) -- The most accurate study so far of the
motions of stars in the Milky Way has found no evidence for dark matter
in a large volume around the Sun. According to widely accepted theories,
the solar neighbourhood was expected to be filled with dark matter, a
mysterious invisible substance that can only be detected indirectly by
the gravitational force it exerts. But a new study by a team of
astronomers in Chile has found that these theories just do not fit the
observational facts. This may mean that attempts to directly detect dark
matter particles on Earth are unlikely to be successful.
And the final note appended to this article gives us this very specific information:
Theories predict that the average amount of dark matter in the
Sun's part of the galaxy should be in the range 0.4-1.0 kilograms of
dark matter in a volume the size of the Earth. The new measurements find
0.00±0.07 kilograms of dark matter in a volume the size of the Earth.
Hmm, quite the head scratcher! It's almost like the act of observing dark matter changes its nature, from something indeterminate and amorphous to something much more specific. Now what, what does that remind us of?
Does Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics allow for the possibility that observation causes something to not be observed? At first, this seems like a contradiction. But with this project we've talked often about how this logic works when applied to our physical reality: if all possible outcomes connected to "now" really do exist within the underlying quantum wave function, then observing one outcome doesn't mean the others somehow disappear, it only means that we're not observing them. By observing the version of the universe where I had an apple and half a protein bar for today's breakfast, it's now impossible for me to observe the version where I had bacon and eggs this morning. But Everett's theory says that those "other" versions of the universe really do continue to exist even though we can't see them.
So what's unique about our solar system that would cause dark matter to disappear within our vicinity? Well, how about the fact that there are so many lifeforms actively engaged with the quantum wavefunction, not just passively observing random outcomes but sometimes actually choosing one path or another? Could such a concentration of observers be "adding focus", so to speak? Since the beginning of this project I've always maintained that dark matter will eventually be used to confirm the physical existence of the other universes that are "just around the corner in time", as I say in my song The Unseen Eye.
Think about this: the standard imagery used to describe gravity is to think of space-time as a flat rubber sheet, and to think about massive objects causing depressions in that sheet. And the standard description of the cosmological horizon is that no matter where an observer is in the universe, they will find themselves to be right at the center. So if I take these ideas and now think of our universe's fifth-dimensional probability space as a flat rubber sheet, here's what I'm visualizing: vast expanses of that sheet will lie undisturbed, as a superimposition of possible states. But here and there we'll see places where the sheet is distorted, and if we could observe the entire universe with the same degree of accuracy that the astronomers in the above article were able to achieve within the vicinity of our solar system, that would be our guide to finding the scattered locations throughout the universe where life has taken hold. And according to these new findings each of these distortions would be where there is less dark matter as a result of those concentrations of quantum observers!
Is this a flight of fancy, a conjecture, with no math to back it up? Of course! As always, please keep in mind this project is a creative exploration of ideas, food for thought being tossed out for other minds to munch on.
A couple of weeks ago we looked at a concept called "Flow": being in the moment, in the groove, completely centered, a very internal idea connected to the nature of consciousness and our interface with reality. This time we're going to look at a very different and much more external concept from cosmology called "Dark Flow". The illustration below is credited to NASA and comes from an article published a few months ago in New Scientist magazine, entitled "Mystery 'dark flow' extends towards edge of universe". The article, written by Marcus Chown, begins with these paragraphs:
SOMETHING big is out there beyond the visible edge of our universe. That's the conclusion of the largest analysis to date of over 1000 galaxy clusters streaming in one direction at blistering speeds. Some researchers say this so-called "dark flow" is a sign that other universes nestle next door.
Last year, Sasha Kashlinsky of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and colleagues identified an unusual pattern in the motion of around 800 galaxy clusters. They studied the clusters' motion in the "afterglow" of the big bang, as measured by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). The photons of this afterglow collide with electrons in galaxy clusters as they travel across space to the Earth, and this subtly changes the afterglow's temperature.
The team combined the WMAP data with X-ray observations and found the clusters were streaming at up to 1000 kilometres per second towards one particular part of the cosmos (The Astrophysical Journal Letters, vol 686, p L49).
Many researchers argued the dark flow would not turn up in later observations, but now the team claim to have confirmed its existence. Their latest analysis reveals 1400 clusters are part of the flow, and that it continues to around 3 billion light years from Earth, a sizeable fraction of the distance to the edge of the observable universe (arxiv.org/abs/0910.4958). This is twice as far as seen in the previous study.
What does Mr. Chown mean when he says this force is coming from "beyond the edge of the universe"? Is he talking about a concept we explored in The Statistical Universe? Here's the new video for that previous entry:
In that entry we looked at a Seed magazine article by Raphael Bousso, a theoretical physicist at The University of California, Berkeley. The image he painted for us of the multiverse is that if we were to head off in a particular direction in our universe, we would eventually (after traveling for a very very very long time!) get to some other universe with different basic physical laws. This might seem to imply that we need no more than 4D spacetime, but also then presents us with a difficult to imagine process where once we got to the "edge" of our universe with its unique physical laws, we would encounter some kind of a difficult transition to another universe that has its own unique physical laws.
In You are the Point we talked about the cosmological horizon, and the idea that no more matter where you go in our universe you will ultimately observe yourself to be at the center. Doesn't Dr. Bousso seem to be opposing this viewpoint? Isn't this like claiming the world is flat and that if we travel far enough we will fall off the edge? One might get that impression. But since Dr. Bousso is a string theorist, I would say that what he's really telling us is that we would need to be moving through the extra dimensions to make such a journey to another different-initial-conditions universe, an idea that would then connect much better with my approach to visualizing the dimensions. We looked at similar concepts in The Holographic Universe, here's the video for that one again:
A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMLVjFrtq6Q Coincidentally, in this video we looked at another New Scientist article written by Marcus Chown, and at about the 1:14 mark we show the cover of the issue that article came from, which has the headline "You are a Hologram Projected from the Edge of the Universe". At the 5:55 mark, I show some animations demonstrating some of the ways I'm proposing it's more useful to think about what the "edge of the universe" really is. This takes us back to the spatial dimensions that our reality comes from, and the important concept that each additional dimension is at "right angles" to the previous one. "What's Around the Corner" has turned out to be one of my more popular recent blogs showing how we can work through this logic one dimension at a time, please check it out if you still have questions about the validity of my approach and see if it helps to convince you.
Magnets and Flatlanders Here's a visualization: imagine that our 4D spacetime is like the 2D plane that is home to our old friend, the flatlander. What would happen if we moved a magnet near that plane? In the flatlander's world, he would see objects moving towards the magnet's location, but have no way to see the magnet itself. That magnet is, in a sense "beyond the edge of the flatlander's world", in that it is in the third dimension rather than the second, at and additional right angle that is beyond his perception and perhaps even his ability to conceive.
Likewise, when cosmologists are suggesting that the observed evidence of "dark flow" is evidence for "universes next door" I would say the same analogy holds: this dark flow would be evidence of gravitational attraction coming from an additional dimension, one that is "outside" of our 4D spacetime in the same way that magnet was "outside" of the flatlander's 2D world.
"Dark flow" is still somewhat controversial, and even those scientists who accept its existence as a phenomenon have a variety of opinions on what its source might be.
As you'll see if you read the whole article, one theory is that this is evidence of certain regions of our universe having quantum entanglement with other universes, and if that turns out to be the case I would refer back to a recent entry I called The Fifth Dimension is Spooky. It seems that dark flow is very similar in nature to the dark energy that accelerates our universe's expansion and the dark matter that has held our universe together: I am proposing that all would appear to be evidence of different kinds of gravitational attraction from additional dimensions. Regular readers of this blog will recognize that this is not a new concept for me, but is rather one of the central ideas from my book. Another blog entry that explores this concept of how dark energy and dark matter are evidence for the existence of extra dimensions is Dark Gravity Across the Dimensions. Here's the video for that entry again:
A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhGOgKIWBaQ I was surprised to recall now that this blog entry looks at yet another article written by Marcus Chown: clearly I'm a fan!
Enjoy the journey,
Rob Bryanton
Next: When we talk about dark flow, dark energy, and dark matter we're talking about something that is undetectable except for indirect evidence. Next time we'll take another tangential leap from that idea with an entry called "Nothing is Real".
The image at the left comes from an article published March 16 09 in New Scientist Magazine. A much larger version of this picture can be found at this link, and Marcus Chown's article can be found here.
One of the arguments I've advanced in my book and this blog has some interesting echoes in this new article, which makes the point I've used for my reasoning about dark matter and dark energy many times before: gravity is the only force that exerts itself across the extra dimensions.
The three blue bars you're seeing at left represent the universe at 3 different scales, and the proposition from the scientists whose theoretical work is being reported in this story is that gravity might vary depending upon the scale you are viewing the universe. Those scientists are Justin Khoury, now of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and his colleagues Niayesh Afshordi and Ghazal Geshnizjani of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. To quote from the article:
They have listed a series of cosmological observations that cannot readily be explained with a one-size-fits-all gravity (www.arxiv.org/abs/0812.2244). None of these effects on its own, they stress, necessarily indicates anything amiss. But intriguingly, all of them melt away if you make just one assumption, albeit a controversial one: that how gravity works depends on the scale on which you look at it.
The little graph next to each of the blue bars, then, shows how gravity might vary with scale. For more "local" observations of our universe, the standard linear model for gravity holds true. The second graph indicates that at larger scales gravity operates differently, and this would account for the effects of dark matter, which has been shown to be unevenly distributed throughout the universe - it's "lumpy" rather than smooth. The largest scale shown in this picture, on the other hand, shows how gravity drops off in a way that is larger than the normal linear curve, and this is a proposed explanation for the evenly distributed dark energy - the universe is flying apart faster than we should expect it to, because at the largest scales gravity is lower than a linear relationship would lead us to expect.
With my project, I've proposed that dark matter and its lumpiness are explained by the fact that there are other universes which are nearby to our own in the nearest extra dimensions, and dark matter's effects are a direct result of the fact that gravity is the only force that can exert itself across the extra dimensions. In the same way, these scientists are proposing that extra dimensions are responsible for dark matter, and there is research being done right now that could, in the next few years actually confirm or deny the existence of extra dimensions through direct observation of gravitational anomalies! Here's a bit more from that article:
According to general relativity, light and matter feel gravity in the same way: they both follow the same paths around massive objects dictated by their warping of space-time. But any pure theory of gravity such as Khoury's variable gravity affects only matter. So proving the existence of hidden dimensions could be as simple as observing the bending - "gravitational lensing" - of light from a distant source as it passes by a galaxy cluster on its way to Earth, and so inferring the cluster's mass. If we can then measure the cluster's gravitational pull on a second cluster - for instance, by how fast it is dragging the second cluster towards it - we can acquire a second, independent mass estimate.
If hidden dimensions are modifying gravity, the two estimates will be different by 20 to 30 per cent, says Khoury. Current galaxy cluster measurements are not quite accurate enough to pinpoint an effect of this size, but the current generation of surveys should deliver a definitive answer within the next 10 years.
The explanation of dark energy that Justin Khoury and his colleagues are proposing is related to my own suppositions, but not as directly connected. With my project, I've proposed that the effects of dark matter come from the most directly adjacent extra dimensions - the fifth dimension in particularly. I've proposed that the effects of dark energy come from the highest extra dimensions, which have more "degrees of freedom" away from our own location within the omniverse of all possible universes and multiverses. Thinking of our own universe and all of its potential spacetime expressions as a "point" in the seventh dimension gives us a way to think about how the dimensions beyond that would "pull" equally hard on the universe in all directions, creating the eerily omnidirectional pull that science is seeing for dark energy. With their project, Khoury and his colleagues are proposing that dark energy comes from a brane in at least one additional dimension that is infinite in size: another way of saying what I'm proposing? Not directly, but a similar idea.
To finish, here's a song that suggests that all of us might have little bits of our awareness that are already connected to other dimensions, and that we sometimes connect to those parts of ourselves in our dreams: "I Remember Flying".
...if the Higgs boson is not responsible for most of the mass around us, what is? The answer, Wilczek tells us, is empty space.
Still, the idea that all familiar mass - our desks, chairs, bodies - comes from energy crystallized out of nothing is rather mind-bending. And it leads Wilczek to wonder...is space and time themselves a condensate that similarly crystallized from nothingness in the earliest moments of the big bang?
Again and again, new revelations come from the scientific community that confirm the basic ideas I've been putting forth - that there is a place where everything fits together, where every state exists simultaneously outside of our 4D spacetime, an enfolded zero or "nothing", and that is where our universe or any other comes from. As Wilczek suggests, and I have been saying as well, this is also where the missing 96% of our universe, the dark matter and dark energy which pervade our reality, comes from as well.
So this time around, I'd like to continue with ideas introduced in my previous blog, "Dreaming of Electric Sheep".
Here we are, out in timelessness, the underlying fabric that is "outside the system": the place where past, present and future have no meaning. This is the perfectly balanced symmetry state that physicists talk about as being where our universe comes from - and the phrase they commonly use is that our universe came about as a result of the breaking of that symmetry. As we mentioned in "The Big Bang and the Big Pie", the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics is about to be awarded to scientists who described the mechanism for how our universe spontaneously arose from this broken symmetry. Symmetry-breaking is often used to explain why our universe is composed mainly of matter rather than antimatter, and the fact that our universe is so far out of balance in this way is often described as being one of the major unexplained mysteries of modern science.
What does symmetry mean, exactly? It means that things are balanced. Every possibility has an opposite possibility. Every plus has a minus. What may not be immediately evident about symmetry, though, is that when you take all of those positives and negatives contained within perfect symmetry and add them together, you end up with a big, beautiful number - zero.
Zero, then, is not empty, it's full - full of every other possibility, perfectly balanced and assembled in that underlying symmetry that our universe or any other universe comes from - zero is where it all starts, and zero is where it all ends. Because it's the source of everything else, that zero has many names in many different ways of thinking - but right now, let's call that zero the "omniverse".
What happens within this omniverse, this zero, when things become out of balance? Most of the time, the results are quite inconsequential, and balance is soon restored. Down at the quantum level, physicist John Wheeler described how there's a constantly bubbling chaos, a random noise of particles and energy that continually pop in and out of existence - a "quantum foam", as he called it, and this quantum foam continues to be part of the background for our universe or any other.
But as we travel around within all the different variations contained within this zero--this underlying set of all possible states where past, present and future all exist simultaneously--occasionally we'll come across a surprisingly large deviation, where the information that is contained within this zero is pushed in a very interesting way in one direction or another, creating a large move away from the perfect balance of where we started. Here's something amazing then: from this perspective, out here within the timeless background of the omniverse, when we look at one of these interesting deviations we're looking at the entire life of a universe as one simultaneous shape. This could be a universe where nothing much ever happens, or it could be a universe that quickly flies apart into maximum entropy. It could be our universe, with its unique values for gravity and the speed of light; or it could be some other universe with a completely different value for its fine structure constant. It could even just be an interesting pattern of information, an idea, that doesn't actually coalesce into a universe at all! Still, no matter what we're looking at, it's something that defines a shape that represents a break from symmetry at one extreme, and a return to symmetry at the other.
Now let's think about this in terms of our own universe. That break from symmetry, from down here in spacetime, looks in one direction to be our highly ordered big bang, and in the other direction looks to be the end of the universe. Right at this very instant, we're someplace within that shape, and all of the other possible positions within that shape represent all of the possible timelines that could have or will have occurred for our universe right from one edge of its existence, right from one edge of this shape, to the other.
(And what's "before" the big bang, and "after" the end of our universe"? Thinking about timelessness, we can see that both are the same thing - in either case, we're talking about being back within that beautiful enfolded "zero", that perfectly balanced symmetry, the omniverse.)
But still, what does all this have to do with something as complex as our own universe? What would cause a larger, more complex deviation to occur? There needs to be some sort of logical pattern, an ordered causality that moves from one state to another, creating steps that allow us to move further and further away from the balancing point. For our own universe, that logical causality happens because our universe is constrained by a set of locked-in physical laws that allow these different states to be stacked upon each other, moving us far away from that underlying perfectly balanced symmetry state, all the way out to that very first yes/no selection pattern that quantum computing expert Seth Lloyd invites us to think of as the beginning of our universe.
Here's a way to think about that: let's dive right into that forest of all possible states for all possible universes contained within the omniverse. No matter where we begin, the most likely result is that the place we start to observe will appear to be random information, and we won't be able to see very far at all. But as we move around and look at this data from different angles and starting positions, every now and then we'll see places where the "trees" within our forest happen to align, and we'll be able to see further, or we'll see coherent patterns. For something as complex as our own universe, we're talking about an exceedingly unlikely set of alignments to take place within the data: but because we're talking about underlying selection patterns that exist outside of time and space, the word "unlikely" ceases to have much meaning. No matter how unlikely a pattern might be, if it's a pattern that could possibly exist at all, then that pattern already exists within the timeless background of the omniverse.
Let's go back to that perfectly balanced zero that we started from. We can think of this as a vast plain representing every possible expression of matter, energy, and information. That "quantum foam" we talked about, then, is really the quantum equivalent of a series of coin tosses: tiny little deviations one way or the other, particles and antiparticles, waveforms that are pushing towards the positive or the negative. Baby universes that quickly pop in and out of existence, then, would be (on a much larger scale, or course) like those areas of grouping and symmetry order that we would see within 100 tosses of a coin.
Traveling around within this omniverse of all possibilities, we'll occasionally find coherent structures that represent a potential universe, and if we then look more closely at the dimensions below, we'll find the wave function for that particular universe and all of the possible states for that particular universe, and each universe will have unique characteristics as defined by its position within the omniverse.
Our own universe, then, is constrained by its basic physical laws, which appear to not have changed over the life of our universe. Physicists talk about the big bang as being the "most ordered state" for our universe, and how everything from there on has been a move from more order to more entropy. Now, we've just been looking at a way to see how our universe is the result of a push towards a large amount of grouping order, and the arrow of time that we are experiencing now is the result of a return to symmetry order - but here's the hardest part to wrap our minds around: where this is all occurring is outside of time and space, and it all occurs simultaneously.
A number of the great minds of the twentieth century tried to get us all to visualize this place where, as Einstein liked to say, "the distinction between past, present and future is meaningless". As we're imagining the omniverse, what we're thinking about is the timeless place where our universe, and all of the possible parallel universes resulting from chance and choice for our universe, and all of the other possible universes and their own wave function of possible expressions all enfold together - into a beautifully balanced zero which is not empty, but full, of all the other possibilities.
To finish, here's a video for one of the 26 songs I've attached to this project: this is me sitting at my old piano in my living room, singing a song about the extra dimensional patterns that create our reality, and how sometimes we might be able catch a glimpse of those patterns in our day-to-day life. The song is called "From the Corner of My Eye".
Click here for the archive of polls 1 to 10. Click here for the archive of polls 11 to 15.
Poll # 19 - The LHC is going to be successful in proving the existence of extra dimensions. Poll ended July 28 2008. 71% agreed while the rest disagreed.
Poll # 20 - The LHC will reveal the source of dark matter and/or dark energy. Poll ended August 8 2008. 63% disagreed while the rest agreed.
Very interesting! While neither of the questions had a resounding victory, this blog's readership are leaning towards the LHC finding proof of extra dimensions, but more readers also believe the LHC will not find the source of dark matter and dark energy. What can we make of this?
These two poll questions relate to discussions in my blog from a couple of weeks ago: Dark Energy, Linelanders, and the LHC, as well as Randomness and the Missing 96 per cent. There are many articles out there about the Large Hadron Collider, which is scheduled to go online this month, and what it may or may not find. Will it reveal the Higgs Boson, called by some the "God Particle"? Will it reveal evidence of extra dimensions, or the source of dark energy? Naturally, I am rooting for the extra dimensions discovery, as the whole discussion of extra dimensions in an environment where some mainstream physicists are claiming their existnce is unprovable conjecture would be finally laid to rest. My biggest fear for the LHC is that it will only reveal another forest of tinier and tinier particles, leaving science with the task of coming up with an even larger and more powerful particle collider for further experiments in the decades to come.
The July 21st edition of New Scientist magazine had an interesting article related to all this, here are some quotes:
Awaiting a messenger from the multiverse
by Stephen Battersby
AT THE most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the twin colliding beams of protons have been switched off for a few hours. All seems quiet, but both the giant machine and the foundations of physics are about to be shaken by a tiny time bomb. Hiding within a copper plate deep inside one of the accelerator's massive detectors is a peculiar interloper: a particle that is waiting to explode, and with its incandescent fragments write a message from beyond our universe.
If this particle does appear at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, it could change the nature of physics. Physicists might have to abandon their goal of explaining the fundamental basis of our reality and just accept that the properties of matter and energy in our universe arose at random. It could mean not only that we live on a small planet in an insignificant solar system in one of a trillion galaxies in the universe, but our own universe is just one insignificant slice of an unimaginably vast and diverse multiverse.
To many physicists, that is anathema; but not to Savas Dimopoulos of Stanford University in California or his colleague Nima Arkani-Hamed at Harvard University. In 2002, they first began to wonder what a multiverse might mean for particle physics.
This was at a time when the multiverse was being discussed, albeit reluctantly, as a solution to a cosmic problem. Astronomers had discovered a repulsive force pushing the galaxies apart, caused by an inherent energy present in space. Often called the cosmological constant, no one knows what is generating this force.
On the face of it, physics has a ready-made explanation. According to quantum theory, the vacuum, or the space between particles, is not totally empty. It is home to short-lived "virtual" particles that flicker in and out, created by the fundamental quantum fuzziness of the world. Although that might be a hard concept to swallow, it is an enormously successful idea. The calculations of quantum field theory show that these virtual particles cluster around the ordinary, solid, long-lived particles of matter, changing their properties in ways that accurately match many experimental observations.
It is relatively easy to devise a model of particle physics in which virtual particles with positive and negative energies cancel out exactly to zero, but why they should almost cancel each other out, leaving us with a tiny residual energy, is much harder to see.
One physicist had already predicted this, however. In the 1980s, Steven Weinberg at the University of Texas in Austin adopted a controversial line of argument called the anthropic principle, which roughly states that the universe has to possess properties that make it hospitable to life, otherwise we wouldn't be here to see it.
He started by pointing out that if our cosmological constant were only 100 times as big as observed, we would be in trouble. Its repulsive force would have stretched out the thin gas of the early universe, preventing it from ever collapsing into stars and planets. But if you have a lot of universes, each with a random value of the cosmological constant, there's going to be at least one with an energy density of roughly a few joules per cubic kilometre. That would enable the existence of planet-dwelling life forms who would then be in a position to observe this value of cosmological constant.
Such a range of universes might sound like wild speculation, but some respected cosmological models imply that there could indeed be many universes, perhaps even an infinite number. In the theory of eternal inflation, for example, our own universe is just one offshoot of an endlessly growing "tree" of universes.
So: will the LHC find proof of extra dimensions, but not the source of dark matter and dark energy, as this blog's participants have predicted? The idea I have promoted with this project (in my book and in blog entries like Dark Energy, Linelanders, and the LHC) is that dark matter and dark energy come from the combined gravitational effects of the neighboring parallel universes in the fifth dimension (for dark matter), and the combined "pull" from other expressions of matter and energy in the sixth dimension and beyond (for dark energy). Will the LHC push us further towards such an understanding? Only time will tell.
junk DNA DNA that does not code for proteins or their regulation but constitutes approximately 95 percent of the human genome. - from American Heritage Dictionary
dark energy A form of energy hypothesized to reside in the structure of space itself, responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe. - from American Heritage Science Dictionary
With all that in mind, here are two facts that might be revealing more about the nature of our reality than we realize:
95% of a human being's genome appears to be random repetitions and noise.
96% of the universe is completely undetectable dark matter and dark energy.
Don't both of those numbers seem much higher than we should expect them to be, yet remarkably similar? With only 90% hidden, even an iceberg has more to show than would appear to be indicated by these two basic facts about our universe and us as life within it!
In entries like Time in Either Direction and God 2.0, we've talked about the patterns that create the world around us from out of a background equilibrium state. Are these high percentages an indication of grouping and symmetry order at work (as Gevin Giorbran suggested) on an underlying fabric which is ultimately random? Could we be seeing evidence of this underlying pattern, which exists not just in the present, the past, and the future, but outside of time completely? If you look up "normal distribution" in wikipedia, you are shown the bell curve, which is the natural result of random generation of data.
The graph shown here is from that wikipedia article. If you add up the dark blue and the medium blue data from this bell curve, you are looking at what is known as "two standard deviations" from the mean (the mean being the exact center of the graph). And what do two standard deviations add up to? Why, 95.4%, virtually right in the middle of the 96% of the universe that is missing, and the 95% of the human genome that appears to be noise.
Does it seem backwards to be looking at bell curves when we're talking about unlikely probabilities? It does if you believe our universe was the inevitable and only outcome possible - in other words, if you don't believe there is a multiverse of universes out there, most with different basic physical laws than our own. I believe that dark energy and junk DNA could be showing us that our universe is not in the center of this bell curve, but on the outside edge: in other words, the least likely parts of the bell curve represent both the reality we are observing, and the genetic outcome that creates us as living creatures. The central part of this bell curve, then, is in the patterns and higher-dimensional shapes that occur in the extra dimensions. For our genome and our universe, the missing/unexplainable 95% makes more sense when viewed from those extra dimensions: but ultimately most of the potential shapes that exist within the omniverse are not connected to our universe, they are connected to the other possible expressions of matter and energy that exist out there within timelessness.
Which takes us back to our old friend, the oft-maligned Anthropic Principle: if we are really thinking about all possible universes and all possible expressions of life, then the one unique universe and the one unique expression of life that we are witnessing here in our little corner of the omniverse is only a tiny subset of a much larger expression of other versions of the possibilities that are out there within the information that becomes our reality, or any other reality.
In entries like Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains, we looked at the random, burbling, fields of indeterminacy that might occasionally generate a partial universe or a partial bit of organized information, from a random collection of quantum outcomes that would (with even less likelihood of success) occasionally coalesce into a universe as complex and detailed as the one in which we live. In God 2.0, we looked at the patterns that create our reality, and how what you name those patterns has more to do with your point of view than what is really happening. Now let's think about this: is the fact that our universe is missing 96% of itself really a very strong indication of the fact that it comes from higher dimensional patterns the sum of which have only a third-standard-deviation likelihood of falling outside of the bell curve of random noise? Randomness and patterns, patterns and randomness - it's all in the way you choose to look at the data.
Let's finish this entry with a song about how unlikely our universe really is when you look at the biggest picture of them all: "The Anthropic Viewpoint".
Over three million unique visitors have now visited the tenth dimension website. Thank you tenth dimension fans around the world!
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
With this quote, Michio Kaku was summing up the work of Michael Faraday (1791 - 1867), who, with very little mathematical or scientific training but a strong visual imagination, came up with a way of describing the waves of electromagnetic energy that underlie our universe, and created the cornerstone for much of the twentieth century's discoveries about the nature of our reality. Since my project is also about a powerful way of visualizing how our reality is constructed, and incorporates the idea of patterns and waves across the dimensions as being key to that process, Dr. Kaku's quote struck quite a chord for me. With that in mind, this time around I'd like to talk a little more about dark energy and dark matter.
In Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Dark Information, we looked at the astonishing fact that 96% of our universe is invisible and undetectable dark energy and dark matter. What a strange situation science is caught in right now! Some have expressed hopes that the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, which is scheduled to go online this summer, may reveal evidence of extra dimensions or the source of dark matter and energy: but the astonishingly huge amounts of data (15 trillion gigabytes per year!) the LHC will be collecting means it will still be a while until that evidence is analyzed and the findings revealed.
We have two poll questions currently running that ask visitors' opinions on what the LHC is going to find, please be sure to cast your vote. In the meantime, let's talk a little more about how the way of visualizing reality that we're playing with here might be used to portray the missing parts of our universe. Coincidentally, the current edition of What is Enlightenment? magazine interviews five prominent physicists about dark matter and dark energy. Here's a couple of quotes from that article:
If you add up all the matter and energy in the universe, it comes to just four percent of all that drives cosmic expansion. So we're clueless... with no idea about what occupies the remaining ninety-six percent of the universe. - Neil de Grasse Tyson, astrophysicist, author, and director of New York's Hayden Planetarium
I've been interested...whether or not the dark energy could come from extra spatial dimensions...where a kind of vibration in those multidimensional spaces creates this energy that's felt everywhere in the universe. Now with dark matter, it would be nice if it connected to dark energy in some way, and it wasn't just a completely separate, random piece of information about the universe. It would be nice if it were somehow a different side of the same coin... - Janna Levin, theoretical cosmologist, author, and professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University
With my way of visualizing how our reality is constructed, we are looking at a way to explain dark energy and dark matter, and how they are both related to the mainstream physics idea that gravity is the only force which exerts itself across the extra dimensions. So let's go back and look at the original Imagining the Tenth Dimension animation in a little more detail.
How is One Dimension Related to Another? In Flatlanders On a Line we talked through the logic of this project's visualization tool more deeply, and how the "ray" of the fifth dimensional probability set from any current "now" is (of course) much more complex than the simple line/branch/fold that I'm using to build our image of the extra dimensions. This relates back to the ideas Edwin Abbott was introducing us to with his original "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions": using what we know of the limitations and inter-relationships of the lower dimensions can help us to build a concept of the additional dimensions. Abbott talked about the imaginary worlds of the Linelanders (living on a one-dimensional line), the Flatlanders (living on a two-dimensional plane), and the Spacelanders (which would be three-dimensional creatures like us).
Most people have drawn the conclusion that Abbott's concept of the befuddled 2D Flatlander trying to imagine a fantastically improbable world of three dimensions is useful for us as three dimensional creatures trying to imagine the fourth spatial dimension. The idea that we've arrived at with this project, though, is that it's even more valuable for us to think of the one-way-arrow of time (as one of the two possible directions in the fourth dimension) as being like the limited one-dimensional world of the Linelander.
Living On a Line In What Would a Linelander Really See, we tried to visualize the highly limited viewpoint of a creature living on a one-dimensional line. Now, let's imagine our 3D universe as a sphere, and a one dimensional line passing someplace within that sphere. If you were a point on that line, in what direction would you perceive the 3rd dimension to be? Clearly, it would be all around you, pulling equally on you from every "side". Of course, as a point on a line someplace within that sphere, the source of whatever was pulling on you from that 3D world would be very mysterious indeed, as you wouldn't even have a name for the direction that this mysterious force was coming from.
Now what if your one-dimensional line was really a part of a 2D plane, and there were a large object nearby on that plane? Two things would happen - from the point of view of the first dimension the gravity of that object would tend to be more localized, and would tend to bunch things together rather than pull things apart. In fact, because the object was only one dimension away, it would be almost like there was an invisible gravitational material or an invisible force pulling together on a part of your one-dimensional line.
Do you see where I'm going with this? Now let's go back to us as "4D Linelanders". Cosmologists are now mapping dark matter throughout the universe, and finding evidence of higher and lower concentrations of this invisible matter based upon its gravitational signature. Imagining the fifth dimension as being like the 2D plane our 1D Linelander was being influenced by shows us how dark matter really could be in the fifth dimension, with higher and lower concentrations that are part of the neighboring bits of the multiverse that are "just around the corner", at that additional right angle that the fifth dimension would be to the fourth: creating areas of higher gravity that, by virtue of their existence in the fifth dimension, have become part of the dark matter that has kept our universe from flying apart as quickly as cosmologists would have expected it to.
And what about the mysterious force of dark energy, which now drives our universe apart, uniformly in every direction? If you're following along here, I hope you can see the logic of my conclusion: dark energy has to be from above the sixth dimension, and is much like the "pulling in every direction" that a 1D Linelander would experience as the 3D sphere of our universe pulled him from directions that he's incapable of perceiving, or even conceiving of.
My song "The Unseen Eye" talked about Dark Matter as well:
And the missing dark matter that binds the universe The mysterious mass that science cannot find Is in the many worlds of possibility That are just around the corner in time
Will the LHC find evidence of extra dimensions? Will, as I have predicted with this project, Kaluza's fifth dimension be proven to be the source of dark matter, a gravitational force from Everett's parallel universes that are nearby to our fourth-dimensional line? And will, as I've also predicted, dark energy be shown to be gravitational attraction from the sixth dimension and above, where we can find the "pulling apart" to other completely different expressions of matter and energy that are found within the surrounding regions of the omniverse? These are exciting times for thinking about the nature of reality, and I can't wait to see what we discover in the upcoming few years.
Enjoy the journey!
Rob Bryanton
Related blog entries:
How the extra dimensions are "compactified" from our perspective:
96% of our universe is invisible and undetectable. Isn't that astonishing?
According to the experts, it breaks down like this: 4% is the energy and matter that creates our perceived universe. 22% is dark matter, and 74% is dark energy. How can it be that our universe, as unimaginably huge and ancient as it is, can only be four one hundredths of what's really creating the reality we're in? This is a very, very large elephant in the room for modern science.
A number of articles have been published recently suggesting that the Large Hadron Collider, when it goes on line later this year, could reveal some new insight into why most of our universe is "missing". Some suggest that the LHC's ultra-high energy conditions could even reveal information about the extra dimensions. What if both turn out to be correct? What if, as I've been saying, dark energy and dark matter turn out to be the proof that higher dimensions really do exist, and are not just mathematical constructs existing solely in the minds of theorists?
"No matter what dark matter and dark energy are, these two phenomena are likely not independent of each other." - Dr HongSheng Zhao, of the University of St. Andrew's School of Physics and Astronomy, commenting on his recent papers published in Astrophysical Journal Letters and Physics Review.
When quantum computing expert Seth Lloyd asks us to think of the big bang as being the very first binary yes/no, his ideas relate strongly to Giorbran's idea of grouping order - out of all possible states, a fluctuation creates the initial conditions, and a particular universe is born. Other universes with different basic physical laws would be born out of different initial conditions, different groupings, all of which exist as potential. Information Equals Reality.
What does this have to do with dark matter and dark energy? Gravity. Gravity, when exerted from the dimensions above the fifth, can become a repulsive force: think of a first dimensional line, think of the third dimension, and you can imagine how an attractive force from the third dimension would appear to be pulling that first dimension from every side. But the attractive force of gravity, for us, comes from the fifth dimension: when 4D spacetime is bent, what is it being bent through? The fifth dimension, where Kaluza proved that the field equations of gravity and light are united.
It's All About Information In the biggest picture of all, information equals reality. The mystery that confronts science is that we can't see where the dark matter that has kept our universe from flying apart too quickly, and the dark energy that now causes our universe's expansion to accelerate, are coming from. I believe that's because they come from the dimensions above spacetime, and that thinking of those highest dimensions as being weighted towards the "information" side of the information/reality equation makes it easier for us to imagine how this could be true.
The fourth of the 26 songs is called "The Unseen Eye". Scroll down below the following videos for the lyrics and a brief discussion of how this song ties into the project. A blog post which lists all 26 songs, including 1 video for each song can be found by clicking here.
If time as we experience it is an illusion, where does that leave the Big Bang? The multiverse, the quantum observer, dark matter, consensual reality... this is a song about many things.
THE UNSEEN EYE Music and lyrics (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)
(In the distance we hear children, repeating a strange little skipping song out on the playground:) (“All we are is a point of view It makes me me. It makes you you. Quantum waves are many things Until we view them, then they spring Into our world as what we see It makes you you, and it makes me me”)
In the universe of all universes Anything is possible Everything has happened, and will happen again In the universe of all universes Grey and formless Till you choose a point, to become the first -- when You can think of it as data This dark and shapeless void Unrealized potential In the static and the noise Till in the universe of all universes The unseen eye Opened and collapsed the wave, and we entered on in
Now we know it’s the act of observation That gives the world its how and why So the big bang is just an illusion It’s just the opening of the unseen eye
Now any single point that we choose for entry Leads to a long chain From the very first yes, or the very first -- no All the laws of physics, all the rules of nature Defined in an instant By the very first choice, or the dice we throw Though Einstein objected To imagining a God Who gambles for Creation The thought was just too odd But deep within us in every living creature There’s a connection To this shared consensus, of the world we know
Cause we know it’s the act of participation That gives the world its how and why So the big bang is just an illusion It’s just the opening of the unseen eye
And the missing dark matter that binds the universe The mysterious mass that science cannot find Is in the many worlds of possibility That are just around the corner in time
Now the universe of all universes If the truth be known Is an awful bore, viewed as a whole But just a tiny shard viewed from any angle Reveals complexity It reveals such beauty, reveals a soul So does it make a difference How we got to what we see If it’s really just coincidence It’s still a wondrous thing
And we know it’s the act of observation That gives the world its how and why So the big bang is just an illusion It’s just the opening of the unseen eye And the unseen eye, is you and I And the unseen eye, is you and I And the unseen eye, is you and I
Let's recap where we are so far with these songs: 1. Everything Fits Together - at the quantum level information equals reality. Our universe is a pattern in that information, one of many other patterns within the multiverse. All of those patterns enfold back together into absolute zero of timelessness, which is the underlying fabric of quantum indeterminacy. 2. Seven Levels - As quantum physicist Seth Lloyd says in his book "Programming the Universe" - the big bang can be thought of as the very first binary yes/no in the information that becomes our reality. This song, The Unseen Dye, was written years before Dr. Lloyd's book was published, but it says the same thing. 3. Burn the Candle Brightly - "life" can also be thought of as a pattern in the information that is our reality. Any process that becomes interested in "what happens next" within the patterns of information that create our reality can develop strategies for its own continuation and propogation, which relates to the Richard Dawkins idea of Selfish Genes and Selfish Memes. 4. The Unseen Eye - which leads to the big question of the role of the quantum observer - is the universe observing itself? Are we each a part of that process, operating within our own observer-region? And is it possible, by the time we have imagined patterns in the information/reality of such exquisite complexity that they create you and I and the universe we live in, that it could all just be the result of random chance, tiny fluctuations in the underlying quantum fabric of indeterminacy? And if that's the case, is our world any less amazing, any less worthy of praise?
Many of the videos for my songs are also available at YouTube, if you search for videos by 10thdim. You can audition and buy a high-quality mp3 of this song (and others by Rob Bryanton) at amiestreet.com. Included at amiestreet are 6 channel "stems" of this song and some of the others for remixing and mashups (and you can click here to play with a six-channel mixer that lets you audition and play with those stems). There is also an instrumental track of this song (and others) available from amiestreet for karaoke purposes. Finally, you can also download this song and other items from the tenthdimension digital store, and the items at that store are released under a Creative Commons license.
A half dozen years ago, when I first read in a Stephen Hawkings book about the multiverse, I was immediately struck by how it fit with my unusual way of imagining reality.
Critics of the multiverse concept like to point to this as an unprovable, undetectable fantasy masquerading as a scientific theory, something created by physicists with overactive imaginations, and embraced by nuts like me. How could we prove the existence of parallel universes? Whether you are imagining other universes that spring from other separate sets of initial conditions--other universes that have different basic forces--or whether you are imagining the extreme Many Worlds version of the multiverse that I have come to believe in, which is that every possible branch from any moment in time for every possible universe actually exists... in either case, the easy-to-ask question remains the same: if those other universes exist, why can't we see any evidence of their existence?
One of the more extraordinary claims I have made with this project is that dark matter offers us proof that the parallel universes of the multiverse do exist; and that the source of dark matter is gravitational attraction from those nearby parallel universes of the multiverse which we are constantly branching to (and from!). I believe that dark matter proves that there is more out there than just the single observed universe of hard determinism that we see around us from moment to moment.
Energy and mass are directly related, two sides of the same coin, as Einstein demonstrated. But according to modern science, only four per cent of the universe is accounted for. 73% of the universe is dark energy (the unexplained force which is now causing our universe to accelerate apart from itself), and 23% is the "missing matter" whose gravitational attraction has kept the universe from flying apart as quickly as we would have expected it to, based upon the gravitational attraction of that visible four per cent. So, as I have discussed before, we find ourselves to be living in a “lucky” universe, where the initial big bang conditions created just the right balance between mass and the value of the gravitational force to create a universe which did not immediately collapse in upon itself, or did not immediately fly apart without allowing any significant matter to coalesce.
In a previous blog, I mentioned that experts such as Kaku, Greene, and Randall have told us that of the four basic forces (from weakest to strongest those are gravity, electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force), gravity is the only one that travels across the dimensions. In other words, those other three forces are rooted to the structure of matter within our fourth-dimensional spacetime, while gravity is part of the more basic underlying fabric from which spacetime is constructed. A reader of that previous blog commented that they disagree with this idea because the energy of thought and spirit can also travel across the dimensions, something that I happen to agree with, but here we are talking about what hard science believes about forces and dimensions.
Here's what I say in my book about this idea:
If gravity exists in the fourth dimension and above (which is the current belief of string theorists), doesn’t that mean our new way of viewing the ten dimensions offers a much simpler explanation of dark matter? If all other possible timelines do really exist, then isn’t it conceivable that there will be a certain amount of gravitational pull from the fifth dimensional paths that are most adjacent to our current point in time, with the amount of “gravitational leakage” diminishing as we travel further away on a different fifth-dimensional path from our own fourth-dimensional line?
At any moment in the history of the universe, the number of future paths available to be chosen out of the quantum waves of indeterminacy will be the same. This is not to say that some paths won’t take on substantially more significance for us as a species or for each of us as individuals, but rather that the sum of all available choices that are available will always be the same, which is why the “dark matter” gravitational pull our universe experiences does not constantly fluctuate up and down.
Plus, as we’ve already discussed, Feynman’s “sum over paths” concept tells us that there are an equally large number of paths which could have been taken to arrive at the current moment, even though each of us are aware of only one of those paths. This means that the picture we’re now imagining has an equally large amount of “gravitational leakage” that would be coming from those paths as well. This concept helps us to imagine how the gravitational pull from those other dimensions is not just pulling us forward in time towards the many branches we could be about to take, but is also coming from all of the paths which could have been taken to get us to any particular moment on our fourth-dimensional line.
In my personal opinion, this is the most exciting confirmation that the ten dimensions as we are imagining them here could truly be connected to the structure of reality–in this context, dark matter has a simple explanation. All we have to do is accept that time is a spatial dimension rather than a quality that we overlay on the other dimensions.
One of the verses of my song "The Unseen Eye" talks about this same concept:
And the missing dark matter that binds the universe The mysterious mass that science cannot find Is in the many worlds of possibility That are just around the corner in time
Here is a link to a previous blog which prints all the lyrics to that song. And here, for fun, is a video of that song:
In my song The Unseen Eye, I talk about a number of topics which I explore extensively in my book: the nature of time, the Big Bang, the quantum observer, playing dice with the universe, dark matter, and so on. Here are the lyrics to the song, which you can hear using the link in my list to the right, or there are several ways to hear it from the tenthdimension.com website as well.
THE UNSEEN EYE - music and lyrics (c) 2006 by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)
(In the distance we hear children, repeating a strange little skipping song out on the playground:) (“All we are is a point of view It makes me me. It makes you you. Quantum waves are many things Until we view them, then they spring Into our world as what we see It makes you you, and it makes me me”)
In the universe of all universes Anything is possible Everything has happened, and will happen again In the universe of all universes Grey and formless Till you choose a point, to become the first -- when You can think of it as data This dark and shapeless void Unrealized potential In the static and the noise Till in the universe of all universes The unseen eye Opened and collapsed the wave, and we entered on in
Now we know it’s the act of observation That gives the world its how and why So the big bang is just an illusion It’s just the opening of the unseen eye
Now any single point that we choose for entry Leads to a long chain From the very first yes, or the very first -- no All the laws of physics, all the rules of nature Defined in an instant By the very first choice, or the dice we throw Though Einstein objected To imagining a God Who gambles for Creation The thought was just too odd But deep within us in every living creature There’s a connection To this shared consensus, of the world we know
Cause we know it’s the act of participation That gives the world its how and why So the big bang is just an illusion It’s just the opening of the unseen eye
And the missing dark matter that binds the universe The mysterious mass that science cannot find Is in the many worlds of possibility That are just around the corner in time
Now the universe of all universes If the truth be known Is an awful bore, viewed as a whole But just a tiny shard viewed from any angle Reveals complexity It reveals such beauty, reveals a soul So does it make a difference How we got to what we see If it’s really just coincidence It’s still a wondrous thing
And we know it’s the act of observation That gives the world its how and why So the big bang is just an illusion It’s just the opening of the unseen eye And the unseen eye, is you and I And the unseen eye, is you and I And the unseen eye, is you and I
Here's a paragraph from my book about the starting point for these ideas:
"If we can agree that our conception of time as a one-way “arrow” is an illusion created by our unique point of view, then ultimately we can come to the viewpoint that the big bang is also an illusion, as it is just a side effect of collapsing the tenth dimension with the very first yes/no. The point at which we enter the tenth dimensional system becomes the big bang (that is to say, the beginning) for the dimensions below. The currently accepted version of the big bang is known as “inflationary cosmology”, in which it is proposed that the size of the universe increased by a factor greater than a million trillion trillion in less than a millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. Does this mind-boggling amount of sudden inflation not sound more like the flipping of a gigantic yes/no toggle switch?"
This song is a good example, I believe, of the usefulness of lyrics and melody for conveying ideas that might otherwise seem too intimidating or obscure. As I have discussed in the tenth dimension forum, the 26 songs that appear as lyrics at the end of my book were the original impetus for this project: as I showed the songs around, it became apparent that more explanation was going to be needed to help people understand my thought processes. Originally I had planned to write some notes that would be included as an insert booklet with the CD of these songs. Eventually, though, as I fleshed my ideas out more fully that booklet grew to become the 220 page book called "Imagining the Tenth Dimension" which, much to my surprise, has now found an audience in dozens of countries around the world.
Think about this: the standard imagery used to describe gravity is to think of space-time as a flat rubber sheet, and to think about massive objects causing depressions in that sheet. And the standard description of the cosmological horizon is that no matter where an observer is in the universe, they will find themselves to be right at the center. So if I take these ideas and now think of our universe's fifth-dimensional probability space as a flat rubber sheet, here's what I'm visualizing: vast expanses of that sheet will lie undisturbed, as a superimposition of possible states. But here and there we'll see places where the sheet is distorted, and if we could observe the entire universe with the same degree of accuracy that the astronomers in the above article were able to achieve within the vicinity of our solar system, that would be our guide to finding the scattered locations throughout the universe where life has taken hold. And according to these new findings each of these distortions would be where there is less dark matter as a result of those concentrations of quantum observers!
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