Thinking Biggest

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M__79OCZX58


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4EwA6BhBdc

The above recently published YouTube video accompanies a blog post from earlier this year of the same name, Our Universe as a Point.

Some people watch my original animation, following the logical patterns as they repeat from one spatial dimension to the next, becoming more and more amazed at how much they're holding within their minds, but then think that I'm somehow copping out at the end when I say "there's no place left to go" at the tenth dimension. I've said this before but it bears repeating - there's no reason for you to stop at the tenth dimension if you're not assigning any logical meaning to these dimensions. The point-line-plane postulate's logic says that you can use this approach to construct any number of spatial dimensions, not just ten.

But when we follow my presentation, moving up from our tangible world of three spatial dimensions, through the logical proposals that time is a direction within the fourth spatial dimension, and the fifth dimension holds the probabilistic quantum waves for our particular version of the universe, and up through the dimensions beyond any possible physical expressions to the place where everything is just patterns of information, the new degree of freedom afforded by each additional spatial dimension eventually reaches a point where we're thinking about the biggest picture of all.

For the people who follow the logic of my original presentation, this is often the moment where they feel like their minds have been blown wide open - because even if it seems contradictory at first, what we're really talking about here is that the tenth dimension, the ultimate ensemble, the omniverse, the omega (or whatever word you choose to use) is a point of indeterminate size: it's the ground state of perfect symmetry that simultaneously contains the potential for all other possible states, but only the potential. It's indeterminate. Which, people are startled to realize, means it's the same as the point that starts this whole presentation.

My twitter friend Jeff Hall (who describes himself as an "Alexander Technique teacher, existential philosopher, mathematician, spiritual person, oh... and IT professional" from the UK) recently pointed me towards a new BBC documentary called "What Happened Before the Big Bang". It features leading-edge speculations from a number of well-known cosmologists, but Jeff knew I would be particularly interested in this quote from Professor Sir Roger Penrose:

"When people asked me what happened before the big bang my normal answer would be to say 'well, you know, the word before, what does that mean? That's just some temporal concept. And if the big bang was a singularity in space-time, then that means the very notion of time loses its meaning at this so-called 'event' of the big bang... so it's meaningless to ask about before because there wasn't a before, that's the wrong kind of notion.'

And I would have gone along with this idea until I've had some different ideas more recently.

The present picture of the universe is that it starts with a big bang, and it ends with an indefinitely expanding, exponentially expanding universe... where in a remote future it cools off and there's not much left but photons.

Now, what I'm saying is that in this remote future, the photons have no way of keeping time, they don't have any mass. You need mass to make a clock. And you have to have a clock to measure the scale of the universe. So the universe loses track of how big it is, and this very expanded universe becomes equivalent to a big bang of another one.

So I'm saying that this, what we think of as our universe, is but one eon of a succession of eons, where this remotely expanding universe of each becomes the big bang of the next. So small and big become completely equivalent."

Wow! Isn't it amazing to see a leading-edge cosmologist saying he's come up with a new idea, and it turns out to be directly connected to what I've been promoting with my project? I'm going to end this blog entry with one of my 26 songs written for this project, this one was written in 2002 and it advances the same idea as Sir Roger has now advanced: that really the big bang is an illusion, and that "before" and "after" the existence of our universe is completely equivalent.

One might interpret Sir Roger's comment above to say that all universes happen one after another, sequentially in time. I think the more correct interpretation of this idea lies in the secret of "before" the universe and "after the universe being equivalent: so we are still, I believe, talking about universes which exist simultaneously, independent of each other, in the indeterminate place which is "outside the system" as Godel liked to say.

Still, how can (as Sir Roger says) small and big become completely equivalent?

When they both represent a point of indeterminate size.

Please remember this: as we discussed in One to the Power of Infinity, indeterminate is not the same as undefined. Indeterminate means all answers are equally true, while undefined means no meaning can be assigned. If the tenth dimension and the "zero" point we start from are both of indeterminate size, then they are equivalent.

Is it kind of a zen thought to say that thinking biggest and thinking smallest are the same thing? Sure it is! But this project is about much more than science or spirituality by themselves, and that's the power of this way of visualizing the dimensions. Thank you to tenth dimension fans around the world who have embraced this project, and enjoy the journey!

As promised here's that song, The Unseen Eye, to finish.


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

Rob Bryanton

P.S.: For more about why there is no "time" when all that's left is photons, please refer back to one of my more popular blog entries from the last few months, Light Has No Speed.
P.P.S: Terence McKenna suggested that there are historical evolutionary pressures that have caused us to be less able to perceive the extra dimensions. What do you think? We'll talk about this more next time in Psychedelics and Spacetime.

Polls Archive 53 - One to the Power of Infinity

Poll 53 - One squared (1^2) equals one. One to the power of three (1^3) equals one. What does one to the power of infinity equal? Poll ended November 29 2009. By far the most popular answer was "One", with 75.3%. "Infinity" was next, with 10.1%, "None of the Above" with 9.3%, and finally "Zero" with 5.3%.

Interesting! Let's look at the most popular answer first. The logic of this seems pretty simple, doesn't it? One multiplied by itself equals one. No matter how many times you multiply it by itself, the answer is one. Right? Right.

But here's the tricky part. Infinity is not a number. So multiplying one by itself an infinite number of times is different from one multiplied by itself a specific number of times. Does that mean the second-most popular answer is correct? Is the answer infinity?

Here's a link that reveals what mathematicians say about this thorny question. The correct answer, it turns out, is that one to the power of infinity is like dividing zero by zero: in both cases, the answer is "indeterminate".

It's worth noting here, though, that dividing zero by zero is not the same as dividing any other number by zero: the first is "indeterminate", the second is "undefined". What's the difference?

Indeterminate means all answers are possible. Here's a link to another mathforum.org discussion about this idea. It explains that the answer to one to the power of infinity could be one, could be infinity, could be undefined... it's indeterminate. One over zero, on the other hand is undefined only.

What's this all got to do with Imagining the Tenth Dimension? Because the zero we start from and the tenth dimension we end up with are indeterminate. Likewise, "before" and "after" the life of our universe is the same underlying state of indeterminacy.

Indeterminate is not the same as undefined, and that's an important distinction. As we've said recently in entries like You Are the Point, What's Around the Corner, and even last time in Strength of Gravity, Speed of Light, the underlying structures of our reality naturally balance everything out, to a place where all the simultaneous possibilities of that indeterminacy add up together into a big beautiful zero of perfect symmetry, where all answers are possible.

I like to call this underlying state the Omniverse. My followup book to Imagining the Tenth Dimension, O is for Omniverse, plays with these ideas in an unusual way, combining easily digestible poems with some stunning visuals created by Marilyn E. Robertson.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjR69ddBK78

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Poll 54 - Is Time Moving Faster?

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

Randomness and the missing 96 per cent

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBDaZiMF8jg

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

In blog entries like Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Dark Information and Dark Energy, Linelanders, and the LHC we've talked about the astonishingly large amount of the universe that appears to be "missing". In entries like Google, Memes, and Randomness and How to Make a Universe, we've talked about the idea that grouping and symmetry order could be what operates upon the information that becomes our reality to create the universe in which we live. And in blog entries like John Wheeler and Digital Physics, Making New Connections, and Changing Your Genes, we've talked about the quantum physics idea that parts of the past can be changed by our current observation, a fact that seems to defy our common-sense ideas of how the world works.

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!


A direct link to the above video "God 2.0" is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-Y4xseftgQ

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.

A direct link to this video for "Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLXhj7TK520

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".


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

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Unlikely Events and Timelessness

John Wheeler and Digital Physics

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgQavdF4OzI

We are participators in bringing into being not only the near and here but the far away and long ago. We are in this sense, participators in bringing about something of the universe in the distant past and if we have one explanation for what's happening in the distant past why should we need more? - Physicist John Archibald Wheeler, who died just three days ago at the age of 96

Last blog, we talked about the omniverse: what if this project had been called "Imagining the Omniverse"? The omniverse is a term coined to imagine all of the possible universes, all of the parallel universes resulting from chance and choice for each of those universes, all of the possible expressions of matter and energy which exist simultaneously within the underlying quantum fabric of reality.

As mind-boggling as that concept is to hold in our heads all at once, there is still another way of looking at all of this: our specific universe is reflective of big-picture-memes, ways of organizing that omniverse's information that becomes our reality. Calling that "God", or a Quantum Observer acting within an O-region, or just the random assortment of implicate patterns responsible for distilling out one version of reality over another, has much more to do with mindset than the actual processes that we are thinking about: and this is how we got to David Bohm's idea of implicate and explicate order being reflective of how our universe came to be part of just one of the many multiverses that exist within the omniverse.

Ever hear of "digital physics"? Look that term up in wikipedia. Experts such as Seth Lloyd, John Wheeler (quoted above), and David Deutsch, all of whom I have mentioned regularly in this blog, are listed as proponents of digital physics, which advances the same theory that I have been promoting here: our universe is reflective of patterns that exist within timelessness, and time as we experience it is an illusion, only a tiny slice out of what's really happening "out there". Digital Physics does not require there to be extra dimensions, but I believe it ties very nicely to what I've been talking about here: the idea that our universe is created one planck length after the next, with our fourth-dimensional "line of time" twisting and turning in the fifth dimension is the way into that discussion.

Comparisons between digital physics, the universe as a hologram, and the idea that we as observers could "reverse fine tune" our universe are all connected to the way of visualizing reality that I'm promoting here. There are clear echoes of The Matrix in all of this as well, which make some people assume I'm talking about science fiction here: but the tenth dimension meme continues to grow, as more and more people begin to see connections between their own ways of understanding reality and what's being discussed here.

John Wheeler was a strong believer in the anthropic principle, which ties into the Omniverse idea I talked about in the last blog entry as well. As his quote at the start of this blog entry reveals, he also liked to talk about the role of the quantum observer in a "self-excited circuit" that creates the reality we see around us from out of the background of quantum indeterminacy, and that is a fascinating discussion by itself. Here are some previous blog entries where I've talked about how John Wheeler's theories can be related to my way of visualizing reality:

Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains
Song 24 of 26 - See No Future
Song 15 of 26 - What Was Done Today
Song 11 of 26 - The Anthropic Viewpoint
Boredom and Consciousness

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Coming up next: The Flipbook Universe

Shadows of higher dimensions

I am a three-dimensional shadow
of my fourth-dimensional spime
which is selected from a fifth-dimensional wavefunction
of branching chance and choice, parallel universes of Everett's Many Worlds,

Which is a subset of a sixth-dimensional spacetime tree
created from all possible timelines
for our particular different-initial-conditions universe
which is confined within a seven-dimensional brane.

Other different expressions of matter/energy/information
can be found in the seventh/eighth/ninth dimensions
and the tenth dimension is the unobserved fabric of quantum indeterminacy,
where information waits as potential to create
the multiverse of all possible universes in the dimensions below.


Matter and energy, reality and information, everything fits together,
and my selfish genes and selfish memes make me as I am right now:
A three-dimensional shadow of my fourth-dimensional self.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

For more about how all these ideas fit together, check out the Tenth Dimension FAQ.

Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLXhj7TK520


Last week, in an entry called "Google, Memes, and Randomness" we talked about how something as complex as our universe and the multiverse of other universes really could spring from randomness. Now, here's a link to a fascinating article in yesterday's New York Times:
www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/science/15brain.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

This article includes a reference to the Boltzmann Brains conundrum: an idea that ties very nicely to some of the ideas we explore regularly in this blog. Let me try to sum up Boltzmann's idea: by the time we're imagining a fabric that includes every possible expression of matter and energy, that must mean there are many expressions which are not complete universes, but rather just fragmentary bits of order, and those fragmentary bits could be observed by something approximating a mind within each fragmentary universe. The disturbing idea this leads to is that within the multiverse of all possible universes there could be all these "brains" floating around (not physical brains of course, but this startling image helps to make the idea stick in our minds). This is all discussed in the above article, which also touches on some of the more metaphysical ramifications of all this.

To be clear, the Boltzmann Brain scenario is similar to the tale of Schrödinger’s Cat: it was originally offered as an extreme example of the absurd conclusions that might be drawn from applying quantum thinking to the macro world. The idea does have more power, though, when we accept the proof offered by a team of scientists at Oxford equating quantum probability states with our macro-world's probability states. Is it really such a great leap to imagine there could be organized systems representing an "observer" in many of those other universes within the infinite set of all possible universes?

Infinity or Infinities?
We keep returning to the concept of infinity with this project: some people like to think of infinity as being only one thing, and therefore they jump to the conclusion that I'm talking nonsense when my way of visualizing the dimensions uses phrases like "draw a line to yet another infinity". Here's a simple example of the same concept: the numbers following the sequence 1,2,3,4,5... extend out to infinity. But let's take any two of those numbers, 1 and 2 for instance: how many numbers are there between 1 and 2? There's 1.1, there's 1.2, there's 1.75689425... there are an infinite set of numbers between 1 and 2. Finding different ways to get to infinity is what this is all about: and as Michel from Norway recently reminded me in the tenth dimension forum, "two parallel lines meet at infinity".

Thinking of infinity as being the unobserved fabric of quantum indeterminacy shows a way to imagine how all those infinities connect together, and the parallel universes resulting from choice, chance and circumstance for our universe (as infinite as those branches appear to be) is still just one more subset of all the possible expressions of matter and energy, memes and spimes that we're playing with here.

Here's another way to describe the dimensions, which acknowledges that every single dimension extends out to its own version of infinity:

0 - a point of indeterminate size
In this way of imagining, 0 and 10 are very similar concepts - both are of indeterminate size. The common practice of referring to "0" as infinitely small isn't really correct then: a point on a graph can be any size we care to imagine it being because its size is not relevant, just its location. And to be clear, 0 is not a dimension, it's just where we start our description.

1 - a line created by a certain set of "points", extending to infinity
Start with a point, add a second point, join them together with a line. The line you have drawn is a line segment with those two points as its endpoints, but that line can be extended out in either direction to infinity

2 - a plane created by a certain set of 1D lines, extending to infinity
Draw a second line. As long as the second line is not directly on top of the first, those two lines are now part of an infinite plane that passes through those two lines.

3 - a space created by a certain set of 2D planes, extending to infinity
Any two planes that are not directly on top of each other become part of an infinite 3D space that passes through those two planes.

4 - a line created be a certain set of "3D points", extending to infinity
So 3 is our 3-dimensional space. What would "not directly on top of each other" be for 3D space? It would be 3D space in a different state. Look at your watch: let's call whatever time you see at the instant you looked "now", or the universe in one state, and we'll call that a point. Three o'clock tomorrow afternoon is another state, and we'll call that our second point. Joining those two points creates a line segment, and the ends of that line can be extended back to the Big Bang and forward to the end of the universe.

But as I've said many times here, the big bang is an illusion, it's better to think of it the way physicist Seth Lloyd describes it - the first binary yes/no that separates a particular universe out from the indeterminate background. So the fourth dimension can be thought of as a line that extends to infinity in either direction, and the big bang is just a point on that line, same with the "end" of the universe.

5 - a plane created by a certain set of 4D timelines, extending to infinity
5 is our "probability space", or "spacetime tree" as some have described it in the tenth dimension forum. The "bush-like branching structure" of the David Deutsch team's recent proof is equivalent to this, which means this occurs at both the quantum and the macro level. So: take one timeline that could extend forward or back from this moment (this "now", as we called it), then think of another alternate version that could also occur from that same "now", and those two lines define an infinite plane that passes through any versions of our spacetime that are logically consistent with our current "now".

6 - a space created by a certain set of 5D planes, extending to infinity
Stay with me now: the spacetime tree for our particular "now" doesn't include a version of the universe where it's 2008 and Kurt Cobain is still alive. That would be a different fifth-dimensional "plane". Imagining that other "Kurt alive" plane along with the "Kurt dead" plane that we find ourselves to be in, then, is the same conceptual leap as imagining one 2D plane and another different 2D plane, and extrapolating how 3D space is derived from that.

Why do we say "certain set of timeline branches", then? Here's why: the version of the 6th dimension that our current timeline is/must be part of is still constrained by the basic physical laws that are unique to our universe. No amount of choice, chance, and circumstance, at either the quantum or the macro level, moves us to a universe where the laws are different, and that is what we mean by a "certain set" of timelines in this context.

Could there be more than one version of the big bang that this infinite observed/unobserved sixth-dimensional structure passes through on its way out to infinity? Certainly, but only to the extent that there are always random fluctuations, quantum outcomes, small decisions made that in the big picture do not affect things for our overall universe to the point that its existence is no longer possible. But the 6th dimension, like the other dimensions, is an infinity. That infinity encompasses all the possible "beginnings" and "endings" for our particular universe, and it includes all of the possible paths that are not available to us from our current position in spacetime but which are still constrained by our basic physical laws. The idea proposed by physicists like John Wheeler of "reverse fine tuning" of our universe through quantum observation was discussed in my blog entry "Boredom and Consciousness", and this gives us a way to imagine how our current universe really could have multiple slightly-different-versions of the Big Bang within its 6D space.

7 - a line created be a certain set of "6D points", extending to infinity
Take the 6th dimensional structure we've just imagined, that is a point in the seventh dimension. Take the structure representing all possible outcomes for some other universe that has different basic physical laws, that is a different point in the seventh dimension. The line that passes through those two points extends to infinity in either direction.

8 - a plane created by a certain set of 7D lines, extending to infinity
Now think of the seventh dimensional line that passes through the point representing our universe, and the point representing another universe where the value for gravity is different. That line extends out to infinity in either direction, but it doesn't pass through universes where some other constant varies. To get to the infinite plane that passes through those two different lines takes us to the 8th dimension.

9 - a space created by a certain set of 8D planes, extending to infinity
The 9th dimension is the way you get from one of those planes we've just imagined to another, and the space that passes through those planes may not, as I've said many time before, be able to actually express any physical realities itself - at that point we are dealing only with the "information" side of the "information equals reality" concept. But once again, there is a timeless unobserved infinity that this 9th dimension stretches out to. Imagining the 9th dimension, then, as being filled with "Boltzmann Brains", each being an observer of some fragmentary organized bit of information/reality, is what the above New York Times article is referring to. In my book and this project, I have preferred to imagine the 9th dimension as being the place where "big picture memes" are found: organized patterns that have the potential to generate one kind of reality over another in the dimensions below.

10 - 9D as a point of indeterminate size, everything as potential only
Ten, then is the infinite unobserved quantum fabric. Attempting to observe any aspect of this collapses us into some or all of the dimensions below.

Our poll question ending soon is about Google and the way it has changed the way we interact wth information. If Information Equals Reality, then that is a very big question indeed for all of us as Boltzmann Brains floating in our perceived reality.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

PS Two other blog entries that work through a way to imagine our hierarchy of dimensions are "You Can't Get There From Here" and "How to Make a Universe". Now, for fun, here's a new video created by Ryan Hill, for my song "Big Bang to Entropy".


A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-atlgyfQkOc

You Can't Get There From Here

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koB-FUEjJq8


A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIDUgreT9_8


One of the things people like about this way of imagining the dimensions is that it shows how the higher dimensions are the same as the lower ones, and how each dimension that is added follows the same logical hierarchy. While there’s no question that our particular vantage point within the dimensions (as 3D creatures traveling down a 4D line of time) gives those other dimensions their defining characteristics, that has more to do with our unique point of view than it does with the idea that the higher dimensions are not to be thought of in the same way as the lower.

For our reality, there are two things that seem locked in – 3D space is the most obvious one, and some people believe that that is the only thing that is real, even to the extent of dismissing the first and second dimension as being impossible to conceive of outside of their participation within 3D. The other “locked in” aspect to our reality is the basic physical laws, or fine structure constants as they’re sometimes referred to. String theorists are saying that our reality is created by the interactions of a 3D brane with a 7D brane, which is interesting to me because in the way of imagining reality we’re exploring here, the seventh dimension would be where the basic physical laws of our universe are locked in.

There are many ways I have described how each dimension relates to the others. This time, we’re going to use the idea of “You Can’t Get There From Here”. The full statement of this idea would be “You Can’t Get There From Here Without Moving Through the Next Dimension Up”, which isn’t quite as catchy, and doesn’t even have a pronounceable acronym: “YCGTFHWMTTNDU”, or “yacugget-fwimmit-tindoo”. Oh well!

The basic idea for dimensions is that they should be able to be represented on a graph: this is easy to visualize for the lower dimensions, but for our 3D minds becomes more abstract with each dimension we add. So, representing a 2D system with values for (X,Y) is easy to do on graph paper. Representing a 3D system with values for (X,Y,Z) with a 3D graph is still something we can easily get our minds around. Representing a seven dimensional graph, though, with values for (T,U,V,W,X,Y,Z) is not something our brains are wired for, but the concept remains the same: each additional dimension must add an additional degree of freedom for what is being represented, or it isn’t a new dimension. Another way of saying this, then, is You Can’t Get There From Here. Let’s work through each dimension and see how that idea applies.

We’ll start with a one-dimensional line. How do we get to a different one-dimensional line? You Can’t Get There From Here without moving through the second dimension.

Now we’re on a 2D plane. How do we get to a different 2D plane? You Can’t There From Here without moving through the third dimension.

Now we’re in a 3D space. Regardless of whether you believe that time is the next dimension up, or just a quality that’s overlaid on 3D space to create spacetime, it’s still clear that if we want to get to a different 3D space (the one where your arm is up rather than your arm is down, as a very simple example), you have to move through time to get there. By accepting that time really is the fourth dimension, we can see how the metaphor continues: you can’t get from one 3D space to another without moving through the next dimension up.

At this point, those who believe time is not a full spatial dimension will say things stop making sense. If everything that follows from here didn’t also have so many other strong connections to what we know about our reality, I believe their arguments would hold more weight: but still, to be fair to those critics, I’ll pause here and acknowledge that some people do not believe that time is a full spatial dimension which we, as 3D creatures built from chemical processes that obey the thermodynamic laws of entropy, are experiencing in a uniquely limited way. Still with me? Then let’s proceed.

Now we’re in a 4D timeline. Let’s say it’s exactly noon right now, and as per the example I just gave, I've just raised my right arm. How do I get to the version of that 4D timeline where it’s noon and I didn’t raise my arm? Well, that’s impossible. If it’s noon I’ve either raised my arm or I haven’t, end of story. So that other version of reality is now on the “You Can’t Get There From Here” list for my 4D reality: that is, unless I was to move through the fifth dimension.

The fifth dimension is something I have been referring to as “Probability Space”. I believe it’s also directly connected to what David Deutsch’s team at Oxford have proven: the “bush-like branching structure” of possible outcomes that exist at both the quantum and the macro level are, as I have always proposed with this project, directly equivalent. The fifth dimension would be where quantum fields can be simultaneously perceived as waves and particles, and where it could be noon and I would simultaneously have raised and not raised my arm. I think it’s interesting that Kaluza proved and Einstein eventually agreed that the field equations for gravity and light work out in the fifth dimension, and that string theorists have said the fifth dimension is invisible to us because it’s “curled up” down at the planck length, because that’s what I’m proposing here as well: our 4D line of time is being created one unit of planck time after the next, from the available choices of the fifth dimensional Probability Space we are twisting and turning within. Our 4D spacetime is being created from the fifth dimension.

What’s on the “You Can’t There From Here” list for our version of the fifth dimension then? As freewheeling as the fifth dimension might sound, it's still a Probability Space, and the reason the Next Available Choice for our 4D line of time doesn’t suddenly move us to some other completely different version of our universe (where the moon is no longer in the sky or I’m circling Mars) is because there are only certain states available to us within the Probability Space of the fifth dimension. So, no matter how much I exercise my free will of putting my arm up or putting my arm down at noon today, the bush-like branching structure of available fifth dimensional choices for noon today don’t include the version of reality where 9/11 didn’t happen, or dinosaurs aren’t extinct. You Can’t Get There From Here: unless you move through the sixth dimension.

So now we’re in the sixth dimension, where every choice made and not made can exist simultaneously, even the ones that were not available from our position within the probability space of the fifth dimension. Surely this is as far as we need to go? What’s next on the You Can’t Get There From Here list? This is where that fine structure constant comes in. No amount of quantum indeterminacy, choice, or probability within our sixth dimensional frame allows us to move to a universe where our basic physical laws are different. To move to one of those universes, then, requires us to move through the seventh dimension.

Welcome to the seventh dimension! Now we’re moving from one universe to another, each universe having its own unique value for gravity, its own value for the speed of light, its own values for its fine structure constant. Each “point” in the seventh dimension contains within it its own unique version of the dimensions below, from the sixth down to the first. Those six dimensions, when you’re within them, would seem just as real as our own, but no amount of quantum indeterminacy or choice would ever allow matter or energy from within that sixth dimensional construct to interact with the other universes (including our own), because of that basic You Can’t Get There From Here rule. Physicists call this “decoherence”, and that’s the same concept. And again, the idea that part of our universe is constrained within a 7D brane seems like a very interesting tie-in here.

What’s left to imagine now? How about universes that don’t rely upon one specific value for each of their fine structure constants? Those would be impossible to get to without entering the eighth dimension. And how would we move from one of those incredibly strange (and most likely unstable) universes to another? By moving through the ninth dimension.

It may seem that I’m moving too fast here, or trying to skip past some of the higher dimensions. Other ways of imagining the higher dimensions do indeed seem easier to follow when you start from the tenth and work your way down to the first, but that’s not the concept we’re playing with here right now. So let’s continue: what could be on the “You Can’t Get There From Here” list for the ninth dimension? By now we’ve included all possible universes, all possible expressions of matter and energy, all possible ways of organizing the “Information Equals Reality” concept from quantum physics that I’ve talked about in this blog many times now.

So, the only thing that’s left is the Singularity: the enfolded whole where we perceive absolutely every possible state simultaneously: that’s the only thing You Can’t Get To from the ninth dimension without entering the tenth dimension. This is the timelessness that Gevin Giorbran describes so well, and this is the unobserved quantum fields that physicists tell us our reality springs from. Attempting to observe absolutely any aspect of those fields immediately pops us out of that overall indeterminate state and into at least some part of the dimensions below.

For a version of imagining these dimensions that starts from the tenth and works its way down to the first dimension, that’s a whole different blog entry, which I call “How To Make a Universe”.

To finish this entry, I'd like to play one of the 26 songs from this project, which explores the "You Can't Get There From Here" concept a little more as it relates to our version of spacetime and the currently available probability space: "What Was Done Today".

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton


A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmbbTkgij-Y

Information Equals Reality

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-bAAZRp82M

How does music (or any other artform) communicate universal ideas?

Here are quotes from two quantum physics experts who would probably be surprised to hear me insist that they are providing the answer to that question.

"...quantum physics requires us to abandon the distinction between information and reality."
- Anton Zeilinger, professor of physics at the University of Vienna, from the book "What We Believe But Cannot Prove"

"The conventional history of the universe pays great attention to energy: How much is there? Where is it? What is it doing? By contrast, in the story of the universe told in this book, the primary actor in the physical history of the universe is information. Ultimately, information and energy play complimentary roles in the universe: Energy makes physical systems do things. Information tells them what to do."
- MIT Professor and quantum computing expert Seth Lloyd, from his book "Programming the Universe".

I'm going to deal with my question about artforms and how this all ties in to my way of imagining the dimensions, but first I'd like to work through some steps... so please bear with me here.

One of the commonly-leveled objections against any theories requiring there to be additional dimensions past spacetime is that those dimensions are not observable, and so there is no way to verify any predictions made by such theories: this is one of the central themes of Lee Smolin's book "The Trouble With Physics".

Quantum mechanics, then, is the golden child of science from the past one hundred years - because it makes predictions and paints a picture of reality which, although often portrayed as unimaginably strange, has stood the test of time: quantum effects are observable and verifiable, and all without the need to theorize the existence of additional dimensions.

But this is where it starts for me: because I've been proposing that quantum mechanics shows us that we are not actually on a limited one-dimensional line of time. Instead, observable phenomena such as quantum interference patterns, and demonstrations of entanglement of widely separated particles shows us that we are actually in a fifth dimensional probability space, where our fourth-dimensional reality twists, turns, and folds without us being aware of it, just as the two-dimensional Flatlander on the mobius strip is unaware of his motions in the higher dimensions.

The question of whether our reality is created in the fifth dimension or the fourth has been the subject of this week's poll here at the tenth dimension blog. What do you think? Way back in 1919, Kaluza proposed this idea to Einstein - that the field equations for gravity and light could be united if they were calculated in the fifth dimension. Einstein ruminated on Kaluza's radical idea for two years, and then gave it his full endorsement. If Einstein believed our reality originates in the fifth dimension, why is this not common knowledge for the general public?

With "E=mc squared", Einstein firmly established in our minds the equivalence between energy and matter, and how our universe is just an interplay between those two states. Now, experts like Anton Zeilinger and Seth Lloyd are telling us we can take a step even further back: our reality is just an expression of the information encoded within the underlying fabric of quantum fields.

Okay, information equals reality, and we're in the fifth dimension rather than the fourth. If we can accept those ideas, then where does that lead us?

I'm proposing that this is the key to understanding how our currently observed reality is a pattern within the multiverse of all possible universes. If there is a data set out there that could represent every possible timeline for our universe and for all other possible universes, then each of us is navigating through that data set. And with the recently published proof from David Deutsch's team at Oxford, we have a way to see how that is just as true at the quantum level as it is for us at the physical level, as each of us navigates through the available paths of our fifth-dimensional data set though choice, chance, and the actions of others.

But I take all this even further: if our reality is information, then like any other data set there are many ways of analyzing that data. Richard Dawkins showed us how we can think of our genes as a "river out of Eden": a continuous pattern of information conveyed from generation to generation back to the primordial beginning of life. He also introduced us to the concept of memes: ideas that are transmitted across time and space. Imagining memes within the information vs. reality paradigm is an important part of the ideas I play with in my book: and the concept of memes is how we get to the question of how music and art communicate emotion.

Memes connect emotions and ideas across time and space: so the song you loved when you were 18 will still have an emotional connection for you when you're 40. But memes are not just learned, they are deeper than that, because they are part of our shared experience as human beings. This is how we communicate to each other through body language: a joyful physical presence or a depressed stance are part of the tools that any actor or dancer uses to express emotion, and these are memes that work across time and space. But we're not just talking about human beings here: this is how we can recognize emotions in the vocalizations of other living creatures - the rising question of a cat asking for food, the pained yelp of a dog who has been kicked, the sorrowful keening of a mother bear who has lost her child, are part of the same vocabulary of memes that allow us to recognize whether a piece of music is happy or sad, energetic or peaceful. The connection between blues phrasing, in terms of melodic shape and timing, to the speech of someone expressing the same emotions, is an easily recognized example of how both are part of the same meme-set. And the fact that the vocalizations of other non-mammal creatures are much harder for us to recognize the emotion within (is that frog's croak happy or sad? I'm not sure) shows us how near or far we are from other creatures not just with our shared genes, but with our shared memes as well.

We can use that same vocabulary to move ourselves to different trajectories within our probability space. Try this one: imagine a warm ball of energy starting at the base of your spine, gradually working its way up your back, making you sit up straighter, creating a radiant glow out through your shoulders and the top of your head that opens your eyes wider and makes you feel more alert. Do you feel it? It really is that simple to change your energy, because it's all just information. Think about this: just standing up straighter, you might say, improves your body mass index (my son the med student will say "not really", but he's the one who said this to me as a joke, and I still think it's a useful idea)!

Metaphysical ideas of auras and vibrations, energy transference, entrainment (or "like attracts like") are all part of this picture as well. If information equals reality, all we are talking about is recognizing the patterns that are encoded within that information.

Here, now, is one of the more tongue in cheek songs from the collection of 26 songs attached to this project, whose lyrics are printed at the end of the book: try to imagine this one with Spinal Tap performing the verses and oh, I don't know, Jimmy Buffett performing the choruses. The song is called "What I Feel For You".




And here are the lyrics:

WHAT I FEEL FOR YOU
words and music (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

Much greater minds than mine
Have tried to figure out
The secrets of the universe
And what it’s all about
Masters of the abstract
Seekers of the spell
That fits it all together
I know the quest so well

But it all keeps coming back
No matter what I do
The only thing that’s real for me
Is what I feel for you

And what I feel for you
Is what makes me carry on
My world would be so pointless
My reality so wrong
The secret gears and levers
That spin behind the scenes
To make what’s here before us
Must only do one thing

Cause it all keeps coming back…


Much greater minds than mine
Have tried to figure out
The secrets of the universe
And what it’s all about
Masters of the abstract
Seekers of the spell
That fits it all together
I know the quest so well

But it all keeps coming back
No matter what I do
The only thing that’s real for me
Is what I feel for you
The only thing that’s real for me
Is what I feel for you

Some of the previously discussed songs from this project that touch on similar ideas include Everything Fits Together, Connections, Big Bang to Entropy, and Change and Renewal (these song titles are hotlinked to previous blog entries featuring those songs). Or some of the videos created for those songs are below.









Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Evidence of Parallel Universes

Click here for a great new article confirming what I have been saying for many years: quantum indeterminacy and the branching possibilities of choice, chance, and circumstance (which I propose are in the fifth dimension) are both tied together. Or let me sum up with the closing two paragraphs from the article, which is entitled "Parallel Universes Exist - Study":

According to quantum mechanics, unobserved particles are described by "wave functions" representing a set of multiple "probable" states. When an observer makes a measurement, the particle then settles down into one of these multiple options.

The Oxford team, led by Dr David Deutsch, showed mathematically that the bush-like branching structure created by the universe splitting into parallel versions of itself can explain the probabilistic nature of quantum outcomes.

As an interesting coincidence, I have had the following song from my book stuck in my head for the last few days. It gets into the idea that even though those parallel universes are decoherent and inaccessible to our own, there still might be ways that we can sense their existence. The song is called From the Corner of My Eye.



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2f8IBDXv_xI

FROM THE CORNER OF MY EYE
words and music (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

From the corner of my eye, I saw it
Thought I caught a glimpse at the edge of sight
Just a tiny inkling
Very hard to see
A flutter like a thousand wings in flight

In a corner of my mind, I questioned
How could there be more than this world of ours
Just a trick of vision
Disorder of the mind?
A pattern of tiny twirling stars
At the corner of my eye

From the corner of my eye
I saw the dance and spin
Of other worlds within
Such a mystery
From the corner of my eye
Hidden in the folds
Those other worlds untold
How can it be

In a corner of my heart, I felt it
There’s so many worlds that we cannot see
Just around a corner
Hard for us to turn
Angels dancing endlessly
At the corner of our eyes

From the corner of my eye
I saw the dance and spin
Of other worlds within
Such a mystery
From the corner of my eye
Hidden in the folds
Those other worlds untold
How can it be

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Just Ten Things

Here's the current results from the previous poll, gang: 35% say I'm talking about physics stuff, 21% say this is about spirituality, and at almost half, 42% say it's both. Fantastic! This is the important thing to keep in mind: even though we're all talking about the same thing, each of us has their unique point of view, and in some cases that point of view has been designed to disallow the existence of other conflicting points of view. So what? We've known that all along, that's the way life is.

So here we are in the fifth dimension (this is a fact physicists have known about since Kaluza proved it in 1919, but for some reason the established media have not been inclined to promote this information: more about the "conspiracy theories" meme in a bit). We are being drawn forward by the future towards absolute zero: not the sad place where everything becomes meaningless, but rather the place where all the positive and negative spins of our probability-space world reassemble back into one, and everything fits together.

Why is the fifth dimension such a dangerous idea? Because there are moral questions that have to be answered. If you are going to admit that all we really are is a sea of information (which many people on this planet like to think of as the Mind of God), chosen from the unobserved reality that quantum mechanics calls indeterminacy, then there are moral questions that have to be answered. Selfish memes and selfish genes point the way for us to see how the patterns that connect us from the beginning to the end of our universe have to include each of us taking some personal responsibility for the creation of good within the world in which we live.

Which leads to the question of whether science preferring to suppress anything to do with spirituality might have more to do with the funding that comes from an old boys network who remain right where they are as long as the rest of the planet doesn't find out what they've been up to and how easy it would have been to stop them if we had only known. As the global village becomes aware of itself, we become a more enlightened and caring world, and that's what the web is starting to do for us all right this very moment in spacetime.

Is it a good thing that the Divas currently in trouble (Lohan, Spears, Hilton etc.) are being monitored so closely that we could actually save their lives instead of letting them self-destruct as some of their predecessors before them did? This is one of the ways that we can see the more enlightened viewpoint is steadily gaining ground. By the time we realize that we are all just different aspects of the same quantum observer, we see how we could be part of the same recurring patterns, created by the opposing organizing forces of symmetry and order, as explained so well by Gevin Giorbran, over at EverythingForever.com.

Still, let's not be mistaken here. There are a growing number of scientists who are seeing parts of the same image I portray at Imagining the Tenth Dimension: everything fits together at zero. Zero is the mind of God viewed in its entirety: no wonder zero has had such a rough ride down through the millenia! The idea that everything ends at an Omega point that is "outside the system" relates to what Gödel was talking about with his incompleteness theorems. Within that omega, gravity determines the amount of grouping, and the speed of light's planck length defines the framing chosen from probability space that defines our particular universe, with its unchanging gravity and its restrictions against faster-than-light travel.

Gravity, then, can easily be thought of as the probability of something continuing to be here an instant from now, based upon the sum over histories paths that got that object to where it is right now. Gevin suggests that at the quantum realm this is also a form of inertia: the more locked in by the overall consensual reality a particular pattern is, the harder it is for free will to make a difference to it. That's why no amount of free will can change the force of gravity, and the multiverse of possibilities that surround us in the fifth dimension is an easy way for us to imagine not just the "bent 4D spacetime" of gravity, but the hidden forces of dark matter as well.

Popular culture and philosophy/spirituality show us the ways that a "big picture" enlightened view is completely compatible with cosmology and quantum mechanics: but that has more to do with the Joseph-Campbell-sized simple truths that everyone knows, which leads some people to belittle the worth of those ideas. Once we understand that ideas are just a part of meme-space, which is just as real as the physical space we see around us right now, we see how easy it is to make a change to some things that up to now may have seemed insurmountable. And you see the ways in which we're all connected together and are co-operating with each other, and the ways that some of us think they disagree with the consensual reality they're in when in the really big picture they couldn't possibly disagree. After all, according to my framework for discussion, we're all just a point in the seventh dimension.

Here's a link to an upcoming article from next week's issue of Newsweek about exciting new experiments showing how the future really can influence the present. The secret of life is about being interested in what happens next. Once you understand that reality and information are interchangeable, you understand what the ancient mystics have known all along: time is an illusion, and everything fits together at zero. Terence McKenna definitely got it right.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

The Unseen Eye

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.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob