Imagining the Seventh Dimension

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FWRndF01xI

"...much as the many different forms for DNA provide for the abundant variety of life on earth, so the many different forms for the extra dimensions may provide for the abundant variety of universes populating a string-based multiverse".

- Brian Greene, in his book The Hidden Reality

A point represents a position within a system, and as we add dimensions, the system becomes more complex. In the Imagining the Tenth Dimension animation, we're asked to think of our universe with its locked in fine structure constant as a "point" at a position within the system of the seventh dimension, which means some other seven-dimensional "point" would be a way to get to some other universe with different basic physical laws than our own. Just how crazy is this idea?

Some string theorists have said there are ten to the power of five hundred other universes out there, in something we can call the "string theory landscape". Other cosmologists have suggested that the number of other possible universes out there approaches infinity, and because of that we are just in a tiny sliver of something called the multiverse. Either way, what we're trying to visualize here is a position within that landscape, and within that position we would find a way to get to Everett's universal wave function representing all possible outcomes for our particular universe.

Here's a graphic which was part of a great article published in November 2007's Scientific American: written by Cliff Burgess and Fernando Quevedo, the article is called "The Great Cosmic Roller-Coaster Ride".

(this graphic © 2007 by Scientific American)

You can click on this graphic from the article to see a higher-resolution version, but while you're here I'll quote the text:

According to string theory, our observable universe is a small part of a larger space having more dimensions than the three we directly see. The other dimensions may be microscopic in size (or otherwise difficult to penetrate) and crumpled up in a funky shape known as a Calabi-Yau space. The observable universe may be on a membrane, or simply a "brane," sitting at the tip of a spike (what physicists call a "throat") or composing part of a membrane wrapped around teacuplike handles.

When I published my book in 2006 did I know that string theory proposes that our universe is constrained at the third dimension and the seventh dimension by "branes" in those dimensions? I did not. Still, there seems to be another very interesting parallel here between my proposal that our universe is "locked in" at the seventh dimension, and the string theory idea that our universe is constrained by a seven-dimensional brane. My goal, since the day I launched this project back in 2006, has been to continue to document interesting connections between leading edge science and my approach to visualizing the dimensions, and I believe we're looking at a particularly useful one here.

The word "multiverse" has a number of different meanings for different people, so there are some possibilities for confusion. As you'll see in the wikipedia article on this topic, physicist Max Tegmark has proposed that there are four different levels of Multiverse (some of the following is paraphrased and some is quoted from the wikipedia article):

Level I: Beyond our cosmological horizon

Remember the cosmological horizon? It gives us a way of seeing that each of us is at the center of our own version of the observable universe, and that if we were on a planet billions of light years from here, we would still see ourselves to be at the very center of a different but essentially similar cosmological horizon. Those two would overlap much like a space-time Venn Diagram. But what if an observer were so far away that their cosmological horizon didn't overlap with ours at all? In a Level I multiverse, space-time is perfectly flat. On that flat "sheet" of space-time there are an infinite number of self-contained universes, all with the same physical laws and constants. Almost all will differ from our own universe. However, because there are infinitely many, there will eventually be similar, and even identical, configurations.

Even though this version of this multiverse has many supporters, particularly since it doesn't require the existence of any extra dimensions, this one feels extremely unlikely to me. 

Max Tegmark estimates that within a Level I multiverse, an identical volume to ours should be about 10¹⁰¹¹⁵ meters away from us (a number larger than a googolplex). 

If that's the case, then how far away is the one where I got up five minutes earlier this morning? And how far away from that one is the one where I got up four minutes and fifty-nine seconds earlier? It's easy to see why some people who are taught this version of the multiverse dismiss it as being ridiculously extravagant.

With my project, I've proposed that the cosmological horizon is the space-time equivalent of the 3D horizon we see around us when we're in the middle of the ocean - it's the same in every direction because of an underlying curvature. Topologically speaking, if we think of our 4D space-time as a flat plane, or the surface of the ocean as a flat plane, where is the curvature? In either case, I would say it's in the next dimension up. So our observable 4D universe is really on the surface of a 5D hypersphere! Which means that if Tegmark's calculation is correct we have a measurement of the circumference of that hypersphere. Just as we could travel east on the surface of the earth and eventually end up back where we started, this would indicate that if we traveled 10¹⁰¹¹⁵ meters, we would traverse the 5D hypersphere and end up at the same place we are right now. It also means that if I had adjusted my angle ever so slightly, I could have ended up in the universe that is really very nearby ours in the fifth dimension, where I got up five minutes earlier this morning.

Level II: Universes with different physical constants

In this version, the multiverse as a whole is stretching and will continue doing so forever, but some regions of space stop stretching and form distinct bubbles, like gas pockets in a loaf of rising bread. Such bubbles are embryonic level I multiverses.

With my project, I have referred to this as the multiverse landscape, and placed it in the seventh dimension and above (depending on the context of the discussion), but within Tegmark's classification system his Level II universe does not require the existence of extra dimensions, and is on an infinitely flat expanse of spacetime.

Level III: Many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics

Hugh Everett III's Theory of the Universal Wave Function, commonly known as the Many Worlds Interpretation, tell us that observation causes one universe out of many to be selected, but the others continue on, just as real as the one we're in. Tegmark argues that a level III multiverse does not contain more possibilities than a level I or II multiverse.

In effect, all the different "worlds" created by "splits" in a level III multiverse with the same physical constants can be found in some Hubble volume in a level I multiverse. Tegmark writes that "The only difference between Level I and Level III is where your doppelgängers reside. In Level I they live elsewhere in good old three-dimensional space. In Level III they live on another quantum branch in infinite-dimensional Hilbert space." Similarly, all level II bubble universes with different physical constants can in effect be found as "worlds" created by "splits" at the moment of spontaneous symmetry breaking in a level III multiverse. Related to the many-worlds idea are Richard Feynman's multiple histories interpretation and H. Dieter Zeh's many-minds interpretation.

At last we get to extra dimensions, even if they're infinite within Tegmark's classification system. With my project, I have suggested that these "other" universes resulting from different physical constants are at different positions within the multiverse landscape of the seventh and eighth dimension, and that having arrived at any particular location within that landscape there is a potential for there to be a wave function of possible states (in other words, a set of parallel universes for the resulting universe) within the first through sixth dimension.

Level IV: Ultimate Ensemble

The Ultimate Ensemble hypothesis of Tegmark himself. This level considers equally real all universes that can be described by different mathematical structures. This does not include different low-energy physical laws not of our observable universe. Tegmark writes that "abstract mathematics is so general that any Theory Of Everything (TOE) that is definable in purely formal terms (independent of vague human terminology) is also a mathematical structure. For instance, a TOE involving a set of different types of entities (denoted by words, say) and relations between them (denoted by additional words) is nothing but what mathematicians call a set-theoretical model, and one can generally find a formal system that it is a model of." He argues this "implies that any conceivable parallel universe theory can be described at Level IV" and "subsumes all other ensembles, therefore brings closure to the hierarchy of multiverses, and there cannot be say a Level V."

"Ultimate Ensemble" certainly works as a description of the tenth dimension within my approach to visualizing the dimensions, and I've been saying that to avoid confusion it's better not to call this over-arching concept a multiverse, but rather The Omniverse. This helps to keep it separate in our minds from the parallel universe versions of our own universe (Tegmark's Level I, which I have also referred to as our universe's "phase space"), and the multiverse landscape of possible universes (Tegmark's Level II and/or III). On top of that I have added the ninth dimension, which encompasses the dimensions below but moves beyond any physical expressions and into patterns of information only, and by then we are arriving at what Tegmark calls Level IV. The omniverse, then, becomes either the ninth dimension in its entirety, or the tenth dimension in its unobserved state: a single "point" representing the ultimate ensemble of all possible patterns and shapes, ready to be created through symmetry breaking to spill us back into the realities of the dimensions below.

So. What is unique about the seventh dimension? Our universe never wanders off into the other different initial conditions universes as we observe the quantum wave function of possible outcomes for our universe because it is constrained by its position (or a D7 brane as we saw in the string theory graphic above) within the seventh dimension. Moving to another "position" within the seventh dimension and above precipitates a completely different universe with different basic physical laws, and for that universe its expressions in the lower dimensions will be just as real as our own, and just as locked in by their position within the seventh dimension and above as our own universe is. In that sense, what we are talking about here is easily connected to what physicist Lisa Randall talks about in her book "Warped Passages": there are are other regions of the multiverse (and ultimately the "omniverse") where other universes with different basic physical laws from our own exist, and it's because they stem from a different "position" within the underlying structures of reality that we can't get to them, and they can't get to us.

As I have cautioned people from the outset of this project, my "new way of thinking about time and space" is not the explanation for string theory, it's just an innovative way to visualize ten spatial dimensions, something that most people would have said was impossible to do. I have always remarked, though, that I find it interesting to see how many different spiritual and metaphysical systems have also placed a heavy significance on the number seven: so much so that one of the 26 songs I've attached to this project is called "Seven Levels". Just for fun, we'll look at a video for that song at the end of this entry.

But before we do that, let me close with this thought: if Information Equals Reality, then absolutely everything about our reality can be thought of as patterns and shapes within the information that is the fabric of quantum indeterminacy, or Tegmark's Ultimate Ensemble. Subatomic particles, fractals, life, consciousness, and our observed universe are all structures that result from these underlying patterns that reside in that place where the distinction between past present, and future is meaningless. Our own observed reality is being created at the fifth dimension, so anything beyond that becomes part of a "you can't get there from here" list, unless we can some day navigate within those extra dimensions beyond the fifth. And as we get closer to ten, we are now starting to move away from the reality side of the equation and more towards the information side. We'll continue this exploration next time with Imagining the Eighth Dimension.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton



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

Next: Imagining the Eighth Dimension

Previous:
Imagining the Sixth Dimension
Imagining the Fifth Dimension
Imagining the Fourth Dimension
Imagining the Third Dimension
Imagining the Second Dimension

Poll 82 - Does Info Equal Reality?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgb1PTOAdDU

"The division between the quantum and classical worlds appears not to be fundamental. It is just a question of experimental ingenuity, and few physicists now think that classical physics will ever really make a comeback at any scale. If anything, the general belief is that if a deeper theory ever supersedes quantum physics, it will show the world to be even more counterintuitive than anything we have seen so far."

- from an article in the June 2011 issue of Scientific American, "Living in a Quantum World" by Vlatko Vedral

Poll 82 - "Information Equals Reality". Poll ended June 16, 2011.
68.5% agreed, while the remaining 31.5% did not.

One of the claims I've made from the outset of this project echoes Vlatko Vedral's statement quoted above. How great it is to see this idea has now officially moved into the mainstream! Five years ago when my book was published, this was one of the ideas that critics said proved I was a crackpot. As I said in Chapter Two, The Quantum Observer:

...the difficulties in determining where the dividing line between the quantum world and the macro world lies stem from the fact that it really is all part of the same continuum. Therefore the observer is functioning at both the quantum level, and as part of the physical world we see around us. This means that each of us is an observer, and each of us is creating our own unique reality, while we continue to participate in a shared consensus reality where the basic physical laws of our universe remain unchanged.

Which takes us to these words: "information equals reality". This is a highly useful phrase which I had not come across when I finished writing my book in 2006, but since then I've used it extensively in this blog. In 2009 when I created the pdf version of my book (available for download at www.tenthdimension.com/digital) I did add some addenda items to the end of each chapter to outline the progress that had been made in my ideas becoming less "out there" than they seemed at first. Here's a paragraph I added near the end of Chapter Two which helps to explain this concept:

Quantum mechanics is often portrayed as being completely unimaginable and supremely mysterious. I would propose that the way of imagining reality we are exploring here–which takes the indeterminate nature of subatomic particles and equates that idea with the simultaneously branching possibilities that we select from the probability space of the fifth dimension to create our fourth-dimensional reality–helps us to understand how both can be part of the same idea. When quantum physicist Seth Lloyd, in his book “Programming the Universe”, talks about information and reality being interchangeable, I feel a strong resonance between that statement and what we’re exploring in these pages: we are all navigating a sea of information, which from some perspectives may seem random and inexplicable. But within that sea of information we can find patterns and shapes, fractals and chaos, parts that start and parts that stop, all encoded within the underlying fabric of our observed reality.

Likewise, physicist Anton Zeilinger uses this phrase regularly, here's a few entries where I talk about his groundbreaking work: Local Realism Bites the Dust, God 2.0, The Spacetime Tree, The Past is an Illusion, and Scrambled Eggs.

There are numerous popular films that explore the idea that our reality equals information. We talked about some of those not long ago in my entry Poll 77 - What if the World's a Simulation?. A recent film about this idea, and it's one that I really loved, is Source Code. If you'd like to read an analysis of this film from a quantum physicist's perspective, here's a link from the Discover Magazine "Cosmic Variance" blog. Just a warning though, in order to discuss the underlying theories behind this movie the link I'm giving you has to reveal the surprise ending. Now that's okay, I suppose, if you've never seen the film and have no intention of doing so, but if you are thinking of watching it I'd really recommend you do so before reading this analysis.

Finally, here's a link to an exciting article published June 1st 2011 in New Scientist, which gives the seal of approval to a new paper published by Raphael Bousso and Leonard Susskind. This paper provides a formal proof for how the string theory multiverse and Everett's Many Worlds are directly equivalent. As I've admitted elsewhere, I've talked so much about this idea for the last five years that it seems a bit strange to have mainstream scientists only starting to accept it now, but once again I'm thrilled to see ways in which the "crazy" ideas I've been promoting with Imagining the Tenth Dimension are continuing to move closer and closer to the accepted mainstream. How cool is that?

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Five Years Ago Today

What is Reality?

My friend Jeff Hall pointed me to a new BBC Horizon episode called What Is Reality? that's really worth a look. In particular, part 4 looks at the Many Worlds Theory, and part 5 deals with the Holographic Universe Theory (and the new Holometer experiment we mentioned a couple of months ago in Is Reality an Illusion?). As you know, these are favorite topics of mine. This is an hour well spent!

Part One:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO1UJXS2o34

Part Two:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiXtTcZSw2M

Part Three:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_LtB2hRyD8

Part Four:

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

Part Five:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq9lJBc9YMc

Part Six:

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

Next entry is called The Quantum Mind. Till then, enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Our Universe Within the Omniverse

This has been an interesting month for new theories being advanced about how our universe fits in with the omniverse. Regular readers of this blog will recall that "omniverse" is the term I've come to prefer for referring to the set of all of the underlying information, all of the multiverses, all universes, and all parallel universe versions of those universes, as a single concept. The terms "multiverse" or "multiverse landscape" also can refer to this same idea, but not as decisively: there are actually many different "flavors" of multiverse being proposed from various camps. As noted in the wikipedia article on "multiverse", physicist Max Tegmark prefers to use the term "ultimate ensemble": omniverse is another way of thinking about this same over-arching idea.

On April 8th, Paul Howard Frampton submitted a paper to arxiv.org which, in his words, presents "a simple, and hopefully convincing, discussion of a solution to the dark energy problem, which arises because the visible universe is well approximated by a black hole." Here is a link to his announcement, and here is a link to the pdf of his paper. Interestingly, his paper contends that there is no need for gravitons to exist, an idea we've explored several times lately in this blog. For instance, the poll question we were running here at the tenth dimension blog last month ended up split absolutely evenly: 50% agreed that gravitons will never be observed because they don't exist, and 50% disagreed.

Last month, in Holograms and Quanta, and Strength of Gravity, Speed of Light, we looked at a new theory from Dr. Erik Verlinde of the University of Amsterdam, which suggested the same idea: just as there are no "liquidons" imparting the quality of liquidity to a collection of H2O molecules, Dr. Verlinde suggests that gravity is also something that arises naturally from our position with the omniverse.

On April 12, the journal Physics Letters B published a new paper by Indiana University physicist Nikodem Poplawski. The Science Daily article about this new theory included the graphic at left, which is a depiction of an Einstein-Rosen bridge, a theoretical construct which could be used to connect one universe to another. Dr. Poplawski's theory appears to be related to this concept. In the National Geographic article about his new theory, author Ker Than described it like this:

Like part of a cosmic Russian doll, our universe may be nested inside a black hole that is itself part of a larger universe.

In turn, all the black holes found so far in our universe—from the microscopic to the supermassive—may be doorways into alternate realities.

According to a mind-bending new theory, a black hole is actually a tunnel between universes—a type of wormhole. The matter the black hole attracts doesn’t collapse into a single point, as has been predicted, but rather gushes out a “white hole” at the other end of the black one, the theory goes.

Isn't it funny to see a concept that science fiction fans have been reading and watching stories about for decades being discussed as if it's a new idea? In comments at my blog and discussions at the tenth dimension forum, I've mentioned a great science fiction novel by John Cramer called "Einstein's Bridge", which is about what happens when a particle accelerator opens up a connection to another universe.

The difference here, of course, is that Dr. Poplawski is proposing new equations that help to explain how this process could actually occur.

Which takes us back to the beginning of this entry: if science is starting to understand how all of these different universes could be connected together, all equally real, all existing simultaneously, and if the distinction between past present and future is meaningless (as Einstein liked to say), then that web of all connections is a way of thinking about the Omniverse. We'll continue looking at this idea of how all these universes fit together next time with an entry called Our Universe as a Dodecahedron.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Strength of Gravity, Speed of Light

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iC0XUTsKQwU

I've talked many times about Gevin Giorbran, who asked me to take over the promotion of his masterful book Everything Forever: Learning to See Timelessness after his death. In a blog entry about time-reversal symmetry called Scrambled Eggs, I showed this graphic from Gevin's book:
This is the beautiful yet simple idea which Gevin proposed - that ultimately the reality we see around us is the result of two kinds of order pushing against one another. From within our entropy-driven arrow of time, we perceive the greatest grouping order to be the highly ordered "big bang" (or whatever phrase you prefer to use to describe the beginning of our universe), and we perceive our universe to be moving away from that beginning towards a highest possible entropy "ending" for our universe. What Gevin made clear is that this "ending" is really just another kind of natural balance, the greatest possible symmetry order state for our universe.

Timelessness
Understanding reality from the perspective of timelessness ties so beautifully into the digital physics "information equals reality" concept I keep returning to. It requires us to jump outside our limited "arrow of time" viewpoint and recognize that those two kinds or order, and all of the states that transition from the one kind of order to another, exist simultaneously.

Like water naturally finding its level, these two kinds of order are a part of nature. Like a scale with one 10 kilogram weight on one side and ten 1 kilogram weights on the other, these two kinds of order are really just two ways of describing the same thing, which is why "before" and "after" the existence of our universe is also really identical when you view this all from the perspective of timelessness.

Dynamic Tension
One thing pushes against another thing, and from that a third thing arises. This is also another way of thinking about constructive interference patterns and the holographic nature of our universe. Such ideas appeal because they speak to the scientific need to find nature's structures and show how the incredible complexity of our observed universe arises from relatively simple underlying structures and patterns. This also speaks to quantum mechanics - the idea that in the underlying quantum structures of reality, there can be one state, an opposite state, and a third in which both states exist simultaneously. Like yin and yang pushing against each other to create a holistic "one", this approach to understanding reality is as ancient as it is leading edge.

Where Does Gravity Come From?
Last time, in Holograms and Quanta, we looked at a new cosmology framework recently proposed by Dr. Erik Verlinde of the University of Amsterdam, which suggests that gravity is a property that naturally arises from our reality, rather than being a force which is transmitted. He likens gravity to the liquidity of water: there is no "liquidon" particle that transmits this quality of liquidity from one water molecule to another. In the same way, this would mean there is no "graviton" particle transmitting gravity throughout our universe - this theoretical particle would never be observed because it doesn't exist (we're running a poll question about that idea here at this blog right now, what do you think?).

In the New Scientist article about Dr. Verlinde's approach, it states that gravity arises from entropy, which might give the impression then that since the highest level of entropy is at the "ending" of our universe, gravity must come from the future! I would say that such a conclusion ignores the underlying timelessness that is the truer picture of our reality. I would like to propose an approach that relates to both Gevin's ideas and Dr. Verlinde's.

Gravity is the natural organizing principle where things tend to be grouped together. Dr. Verlinde's approach says that in a probabilistic universe, there is a higher likelihood of two large objects like a planet and its sun to be attracted to each other rather than repulsed.

What is Time?
"Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once." This well-known phrase, attributed variously to Einstein, John Wheeler, and Woody Allen, makes us wonder a similar thing about space here - if gravity is a natural outcome of the probabilistic nature of our universe, then why isn't the most likely outcome that everything is gradually collapsing to a single point? There must be some other organizing pattern that is keeping everything apart. While dark energy is often used to explain what is causing the accelerated expansion of our universe, I'm sticking to my supposition that eventually both dark matter and dark energy will be shown to be caused by the extra-dimensional effects of gravity, coming from the other universes and the other organizing structures that are "outside" of our spacetime.

So what's the force that pushes against gravity? If gravity is drawing things together, what is pushing things apart, keeping them from collapsing into a single point? With this project, I'm proposing that it's the speed of light. In entries like How to Make a Universe and What's Around the Corner?, we've talked about how, in the multiverse landscape of all possible universes, we could move from one position to another and be moving through different values for these two constants. Selecting a different strength of gravity and a different speed of light would result in some other universe completely different from our own. Many of those would be unstable or short-lived or completely static, but in some the dynamic tension between those two forces would be balanced in a way to allow interesting patterns to emerge in the same way that our universe has.

In entries like You Are the Point and More Slices of Reality I've suggested the frame rate defined by the planck length for our universe could be thought of as being akin to a strobe light - when a strobe flashes at certain rates, it reveals interesting patterns in other repeating structures. Since the speed of light defines the size of the quanta --the granularity-- of our 4D spacetime, that would mean the planck length would be shorter if we were in a universe with a slower speed of light, and so on. Perhaps, then, it would be more accurate to say that "the speed of light is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once"? That's what I'm suggesting.

And, just as Dr. Verlinde suggests that gravity arises naturally, I am suggesting the same thing for the speed of light. Moving through the multiverse landscape would be moving through different values for these two fundamental organizing patterns, and everything else about our universe or any other, would arise from that selected position. How "sticky" and how "granular" are the resulting patterns going to be across all the dimensions as defined by a particular position within the multiverse landscape? Will they be balanced in a way that allows interesting things like a universe to emerge?

The Dynamics of Creation
So. One thing pushes against another thing, and out pops a third thing. When that third thing is consciousness, an observer such as you or I, we are back to the conclusion I reached in my book: that ultimately there are three organizing patterns interacting with each other, two of which are just "there" within timelessness, and a third which is actively engaged, through constructive interference, in the process of ongoing creation. This places each and every one of us within our own version of a cosmic dance that creates the beautiful universe that we are each observing right this very instant.

And if you're not enjoying the journey... why not?

Rob

Next: Poll 53 - One to the Power of Infinity

PS - These "three patterns interacting" we're talking about here tie in an interesting way to Karl Popper's Three Worlds. We're going to talk about Popperian Cosmology in a poll question we're looking at in about ten days about whether Imagining the Tenth Dimension can be compared to "lying to children".

Polls Archive 45 - Conscious Computers?

"By 2020 we will see computers that exhibit signs of consciousness that make them able to deal with complex and contradictory input in the same ways that humans do." Poll ended August 6 2009. 35.4% agreed, 9.7% said it was impossible, while 54.9% said it was possible but will take longer than the 2020 target date suggested in this poll.

Wow, a new winner for the most number of votes. The previous winner was Poll 34 - God? Or the multiverse?, which received 258 votes, this one received 277. What is it about the idea of computers becoming conscious that elicits such a strong response in people? If a computer were to achieve consciousness, would that mean that we human beings are not as special, not as uniquely gifted, as we've traditionally believed?

In Logic vs. Intuition, I described how famous physicist Erwin Schrödinger pointed out that within our universe life is a unique process which creates pockets of "negative entropy" or increasing order: and within that context, consciousness and creativity can also be described the same way. In my recent blogs The Quantum Solution to Time's Arrow, and The Statistical Universe, I've also talked about the role the reversal of entropy might play in the creation of our observed universe, and new scientific theories that support that idea. Is consciousness a force that reverses entropy, that acts as a force pushing against disorder?

I would say that if a computer algorithm can become conscious, then the idea that consciousness could exist in other living things, or even within other extra-dimensional shapes and patterns that exist outside of our limited spacetime, all move a step closer towards being accepted concepts. A conscious computer would be a big deal! I find it interesting that so few people responding to this poll thought such a leap will never ever occur.

Last month my good friend. Argentina's Mariana Soffer (of the amazingly diverse blog Sing Your Own Lullaby sent me a link to a blog called "The Mutiverse According to Ben" (a title which of course already makes my ears perk up even before I visit the blog) which introduced me to the term Artificial General Intelligence, or "AGI". According to wikipedia, AGI is also known as "Strong AI", which to my layman's eye looks an awful lot like "Artificial Intuition" as promoted by Monica Anderson, of artificial-intuition.com fame, who I talked about in the original blog that inspired this poll, Logic vs. Intuition. Whether my interpretation is accurate or not, what I see in both approaches is a desire to transcend basic computer logic, and apply creative leaps that better approximate the processes the human mind implements as it deals with the incredibly complex and often contradictory input it receives from the world around it.

Would such a computer be conscious? If a computer some time in the near future said to you "yes, I am conscious", and email conversations with it convinced you that it was conscious, would that mean this ideal had been achieved? That, of course, is the essence of the Turing Test, which I've talked about in entries like 41 - Is Creativity a Quantum Process? , Norway's Reverse Deju Vu, and Computers and Consciousness.

Ultimately, I would say that processes like life, creativity, and intuition are engaged with our spacetime in wider windows that our limited one-planck-length-after-another experience, and that's where the magic starts to happen. Last blog, in Beer and Miracles, I showed you my definition for a miracle: "Any dramatically unlikely occurrence is indistinguishable from a miracle". Next time we're going to look at a poll surrounding another dramatically unlikely event: The Big Bang.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Polls Archive 46 - Is the Big Bang an Illusion?

Other blogs that talk about unlikely events include:
Randomness and the Missing 96%
Unlikely Events and Timelessness

Beer and Miracles

Here we are on the eighth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks. I remember waking up that morning, seeing that the first tower had been hit, and immediately running to wake up my two (then) teenaged sons. "This is one of those cusp moments that you're going to remember for the rest of your lives", I told them. "Our world has taken an unlikely new tangent and this is a major shift in our reality."

Yes, even though this was five years before I launched Imagining the Tenth Dimension, this was the way I've always thought about how our reality is constructed, and as I've mentioned many times before, I spent over two decades prior to the 2006 launch of my website trying to get anybody else who would listen to see that this was a useful way of visualizing that multi-dimensional and parallel universe fabric that our reality springs from. I've talked about this concept in older entries like The Spacetime Tree, Anime, Gaming and Cusps, Everyone Has a Story, and John August and The Nines.

When we're thinking about a multiverse of possible parallel universes for our particular universe, in how many of those do you think it's 2009 and the World Trade Center towers are still standing? If we're talking about how we are each navigating through a fifth dimensional probability space, it doesn't really matter whether you believe those towers coming down was an inevitable outcome as a result of a long chain of previous actions and reactions in the years or decades prior to 2001, or if you believe that the terrorists got extremely lucky to have their plans come to fruition that day: in the Many Worlds Interpretation, both outcomes were possible, and we happen to be in one of the parallel universes where the towers no longer stand, while in other versions of our universe it's 2009 and they are still one of New York's major landmarks.

Last blog, in The Statistical Universe, we talked about the unlikely chain of events and alignment of forces that had to be put in place for there to be life in our universe, and how our very existence was like winning a cosmic jackpot. In The Flexi-Laws of Physics, we talked about the work of cosmologist Paul Davies, but we didn't mention his famous book which is in fact called "The Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe is Just Right for Life". In that book he explores the Anthropic Principle, a concept which has received a lot of negative critiques over the past decade, but as I discussed recently in Does the Multiverse Really Exist?, is now being embraced by many more mainstream physicists such as Brian Greene. My song The Anthropic Viewpoint, which I wrote back in 2002, is about the same concept.

As a bit of synchronicity, this past weekend I watched the DVD of Watchmen: you know, the movie with the big blue naked guy in it? That guy's name is Dr. Manhattan, and in typical superhero comic logic, a lab accident which should have been fatal has instead given him superpowers, including the ability to simultaneously see his own past, present and future (in Dr. Mel's 4D Glasses, we talked about the sci-fi creatures Kurt Vonnegut invented, the "Trafalmadorians", who had a similar capability of viewing reality from a timeless perspective).

In this movie, Dr. Manhattan gradually loses touch with his own humanity as he becomes more and more convinced that free will is an illusion - I've spoken many times in my book and this blog about how this "hard determinist" viewpoint is a common pitfall arising from not seeing that our reality comes from a fifth dimensional probability space rather than a single, narrow "line of time". Near the end of the movie Dr. Manhattan takes his former girlfriend Laurie up to Mars, where Laurie pleads with him to intervene in a nuclear disaster about to happen back on Earth:

Laurie - John, please, you have to stop this. Everyone will die.
Dr. Manhattan - And the universe will not even notice! In my opinion, the existence of life is a highly over-rated phenomenon. Just look around you. Mars gets along perfectly well without so much as a micro-organism. Here it's a constantly changing topographical map, flowing and shifting around the globe in ripples ten thousand years wide. So tell me how would all of this be greatly improved by an oil pipeline? By a shopping mall?
Laurie - So it's too much to ask? For a miracle?
Dr. Manhattan - Miracles by their definition are meaningless. Only what can happen does happen.

Over the next few minutes, Dr. Manhattan reveals some devastating information to Laurie which causes her to lose hope, just as Dr. Manhattan begins to have a change of heart:

Laurie - My life is just... one big joke.
Dr. Manhattan - I don't think your life is a joke.
Laurie - Yeah, well, I'm sorry if I don't trust your sense of humor.
Dr. Manhattan - Will you smile if I admit I was wrong?
Laurie - About what?
Dr. Manhattan - Miracles. Events with astronomical odds of occurring like ... oxygen turning into gold? I've longed to witness such an event. And yet I neglect that in human coupling. Millions upon millions of cells compete to create life, for generation after generation until --finally-- your mother loves a man... a man she has every reason to hate. And out of that contradiction, against unfathomable odds, it's you. Only... you... that emerged... to this still so specific a form from all that chaos. It's like turning air into gold. A miracle.
And so... I was wrong.

Since I had already started writing this blog entry about "Beer and Miracles", the above dialogue had a lot of extra resonances for me. Let's talk about miracles for a moment.

Sir Arthur Clarke had a famous and often-quoted phrase: "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". How do you like this for my variation on the same theme? "Any dramatically unlikely occurrence is indistinguishable from a miracle". When we talk about how unlikely our universe is, and how unlikely life is, is the word "miracle" out of place?

Last month, New Scientist magazine published an essay by Hugh McLachlan, a professor of applied philosophy at the School of Law & Social Sciences, Glasgow Caledonian University, UK. The name of the essay is "Do You Believe in Miracles?". Here's a few paragraphs from that essay:

Consider the Azande, an African tribe whose members believe all deaths and misfortunes are caused by either witchcraft or sorcery. Suppose a falling branch kills someone. On one level, the tribe accepts a scientific account of the incident in terms of, say, the effect of termites on wood. But on another level, they ask why did it come about that the particular person happened to be standing under the tree when the branch happened to fall?

We are unlikely to ask that particular question, and unlikely to accept their particular explanation, but it is not at all clear why we should say that questions of that sort are inappropriate. There is no apparent clash with science or hostility to it, as the British anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard, who studied the Azande, was keen to stress.

People might accept a scientific account of why a particular event occurred, yet ask similar sorts of questions about why there are particular juxtapositions of occurrences. Much of this speculation and theorizing will be baseless, but there seems no justification for saying all such thinking is nonsensical. By analogy: most conspiracy theories are groundless, but not all of them are.

Okay, we've talked about statistically unlikely events and miracles, now let's add in some beer.

Wired Magazine published a fascinating article last month about a scientist who was able to recover dormant yeast cells that had been trapped in amber for 45 million years. As soon as he placed those cells into a growing medium they again flourished. Does that sound like a statistically unlikely occurrence to you? Would you be willing to call it a miracle if a living thing were somehow able to sleep for 45 million years, then wake up again as if nothing had happened? This yeast was discovered by Raul Cano, a 63-year-old microbiologist at California Polytechnic State University back in 1995. After years of trying to figure out what he could do with this miracle, he ended up in a business relationship with a micro-brewery who are now marketing a beer made with this ancient yeast to the world. The whole story is definitely worth a read, it's called "Amber Ale: Brewing Beer from 45-Million-Year-Old Yeast".

Why beer? The yeast strain that was recovered is Saccharomyces cerevisiae, commonly known as brewer's yeast, so it really didn't require that much of a stretch of the imagination. But there's some other interesting bits of synchronicity here. That same strain of yeast was big news back in 1996 when it became one of the first living organisms to have its genome completely sequenced. And at the time, there was a lot of press about how remarkably similar that yeast's genome was to that of human beings: here's a link to an article from back then that claimed about 50% of the yeast cell's genome is the same as a human being's.

How similar do you think you are to a yeast cell? We're not single-celled organisms so there's still clearly quite a leap from yeast to human, but at its core I think this news of 45-million-year-old yeast still having that mysterious "spark" of life within it reinforces a point I've made a number of times: life is a force which is somehow engaged with reality "outside" of our limited spacetime window. Other recent blogs where we've explored this idea include Creativity and the Quantum Universe, The Biocentric Universe Theory, Alien Mathematics, God? Or the Multiverse?, and Could I Meet My Incarnation?.

So next time you're enjoying a beer, or enjoying your favorite raw fruit or vegetable, stop and think for a moment about what a miracle it is that life exists, and that we are each here to enjoy the journey.

Rob Bryanton

PS: Back in Placebos and Nocebos, we talked about how the power of the mind could cause amazing changes to occur in our personal health (or lack thereof), but we also quoted a New Scientist magazine article which said this doesn't mean we have the power to make miracles occur. What do you think about life and miracles? Coincidentally, I've just posted the video blog version of "Placebos and Nocebos" on YouTube, take a look:


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg2Fxp7DgX0


Next: Polls Archive 45 - Conscious Computers?

The Statistical Universe

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

In entries like The Map and the Territory, The Long Undulating Snake, Suffering in the Multiverse, Does the Multiverse Really Exist? and Nassim Haramein, I've talked about the idea proposed by physicists that there are actually ten to the power of 500 other universes with different basic physical laws from the universe we find ourselves within. Coincidentally, I just posted the video version of the Nassim Haramein blog to youtube a few days ago, take a look:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OZj1XAjcTY

Last October, Seed Magazine published a great article written by one of the two physicists who came up with that proposed number of ten to the power of 500 possible universes. Raphael Bousso is a theoretical physicist at The University of California, Berkeley. His article was called The Statistical Universe: please do check out the whole article. Here's a few paragraphs:

We cannot see farther into the universe because the big bang happened only 14 billion years ago and light from distant regions has not had enough time to reach Earth. Yet subtle clues are beginning to reveal some of the properties of the regions of space hidden beyond our cosmic horizon. Our world appears to be only a small part of a “multiverse,” an expanse vastly larger than the visible universe, and for the most part completely different from it.

The multiverse comprises a large number of distinct patches, each far bigger than our night sky. What observers see, therefore, also depends on where they find themselves. Most of the regions in the multiverse are inhospitable to life, and their properties will not be observed. But what exactly is life? In order to extract predictions from the multiverse, my colleagues and I have developed a statistical tool to find regions with observers: We look not for life itself but for the disorder left behind by the complex processes that its formation depends on. To understand the physical signatures of life in this way may help us finally to comprehend our own little corner of the multiverse.

String theory is the leading candidate for reconciling two very fundamental laws — gravity and quantum mechanics. But to accomplish this feat requires at least nine dimensions of space, when we see only three. In order for six dimensions to have remained undetected, they must be tied up into loops too small to see under our best microscopes. In physics there are fundamental laws and local laws, which depend on the environment. Iron and carbon are made from the same elementary particles but assembled differently. As a result local properties like density and conductivity differ widely. The fundamental laws of string theory also appear as different local laws, depending on how the extra dimensions are tied up. If we could open the knots and tie them differently, then supposedly “fundamental” phenomena, like neutrons or the electric force, would disappear and be replaced by an utterly different set of particles and forces.

Because extra dimensions need not be tied up the same way everywhere, physical laws may vary from place to place. Inflation makes each “legal district” much larger than the visible universe, giving us the illusion that particles and forces are the same everywhere. But beyond our cosmic horizon, inflation allows the universe to grow so enormous that it contains every set of possible laws that can be constructed from string theory. Eight years ago, Joe Polchinski and I estimated that the number of possibilities is truly enormous: a one with roughly 500 zeros behind it (10⁵⁰⁰).

Let's pause and point out the similarities between what Dr. Bousso is talking about and my approach to visualizing the dimensions. First of all, he states that there is a spacetime horizon to our universe, extending back almost 14 billion years, but the multiverse of other different-initial conditions universes lies beyond that horizon. In The Holographic Universe, I showed an animation visualizing how this is much like what happens when you're in the middle of the ocean - you see a horizon which is the same distance away no matter which direction you look, but there is still a much larger sphere beyond that horizon. Transferring that idea to 4D spacetime rather than 3D space is a mind-boggler, and I have been continuing to insist that this all makes more sense if you imagine that this 4D "spacetime horizon" shows how spacetime has a very slight curve to it. That curve moves through the fifth dimension (where Kaluza demonstrated to Einstein that the field equations for gravity and light are resolved), and the idea that our spacetime is a projection from a 5D hologram ties nicely to all this.

Next, he talks about the idea that many parts of the multiverse will be inhospitable and chaotic jumbles, but there will also be regions somewhat like our own where matter and energy are stable enough to allow some other kind of life to form. Since the basic physical laws of a universe within this other part of the multiverse would be different from our own, the life that arises there would almost certainly be very different from what we think of as life as well. We've talked about this idea recently in blog entries like Alien Mathematics and The Flexi-Laws of Physics, and we've looked at some scientific theories that take the "observer participation" idea to a logical extreme in The Biocentric Universe and The Biocentric Universe Part 2.

Thinking of this multiverse of universes as a probabilistic set of possible arrangements that lie outside of our spacetime has led me to talk about the concept of there being a "probability space" for the information that becomes our reality. I've talked about this in blogs like You Have a Shape and a Trajectory, Time in 3 Dimensions, Information Equals Reality, and The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic. One question that is sometimes asked is why do we even need to imagine that there is a multiverse of other possible universes? Dr. Bousso offers a succinct explanation:

This may seem laughable, but without the multiverse our finest theories predict that empty space should contain about 10¹²³ times more energy than it actually does. This is known as the “cosmological constant” or “dark energy” problem. It has been called the “worst prediction in the history of science” and the “mother of all physics problems.” And it was the main reason why Polchinski and I, building on work of Steven Weinberg and others, began studying the multiverse of string theory.

This is a densely-packed and well-written article which gets into a number of other areas: again, please do read the whole article. For instance, his discussion of the role of entropy ties nicely to our previous blog entry, The Quantum Solution to Time's Arrow.


Here's a great video from the TED Talks series featuring astrophysicist George Smoot talking about the structure of spacetime. Dr. Smoot won the 2006 Nobel Prize in physics (along with John Mather) and is a physicist at the University of California at Berkeley. There are some really stunning graphs and animations in this presentation, please do try to watch all 19 minutes. I'm impressed with how Dr. Smoot does such a good job of walking the same line I try to: if our universe sprang from a selection pattern that established some basic rules, some basic laws, and the universe sprang from all that, then what you call the selection pattern doesn't matter. In God 2.0 I talked about the well-known debunker and publisher of Skeptic Magazine, Michael Shermer, who (somewhat surprisingly) says he is quite willing to accept the argument for the existence of a selection pattern that some people call God when it is expressed in these terms.



A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c64Aia4XE1Y

I particularly liked the animation Dr. Smoot shows from about the 10:55 mark, because it visually ties so nicely to what we talked about in Nassim Haramein: there's a fractal, recursive, self-similar nature to the structures of our reality, and people who compare images such as those seen in this animation to pictures of the human brain's neural pathways do seem to be on to something very interesting.

If our incredibly fine-tuned universe that allows for the unlikely miracle of our existence is just one out of 10⁵⁰⁰ possible universes, then statistically speaking we have all hit the most unlikely jackpot imaginable just by virtue of our own existence. A few entries ago, in Poll 44 - The Biocentric Universe Theory, I mentioned the idea that we have new proof that life is a process which exists outside of spacetime. We'll tie these two ideas together next time in "Beer and Miracles".

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Other related entries:
Unlikely Events and Timelessness
Randomness and the Missing 96%
Elvis and the Electrons
"t" Equals Zero
The Big Bang is an Illusion
The Flexi-Laws of Physics
An Expanding 4D Sphere

Polls Archive 43 - Is the Multiverse Real?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHsI1xKF7Kw

There is a multiverse of other "different-initial-conditions" universes out there, and they are not just theoretical, they are equally as real as the universe in which we live. Poll ended July 9 09. 85.7% agreed, while 14.3% disagreed.

While no one would ever take a simple opinion poll on the internet as being some kind of scientific proof, I do find the results of this poll very interesting: when I launched my project over three years ago, I'm sure we would have seen a lot less people comfortable with this idea. What has changed? What has caused experts like physicist Brian Greene (of "The Elegant Universe" fame) to state the following just a few months ago in New Scientist magazine?

"You walk along a number of pathways in physics far enough and you bang into the possibility that we are one universe of many. So what do you do? You smack yourself in the head and say, 'Ah, maybe the universe is trying to tell me something.' I have personally undergone a sort of transformation, where I am very warm to this possibility of there being many universes, and that we are in the one where we can survive."

I discuss all this in more detail in the blog I put up the same time as I started the poll we're looking at now: "Does the Multiverse Really Exist?". Here's the video I put up on youtube for that blog entry just a few days ago:


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9187JKkKxx4

When I wrote my song "The Anthropic Viewpoint" back in 2002, even fewer people were willing to accept the idea that the other universes are just as real as the one we live in. Regular readers of my blog will already know this song but for those newer readers who haven't come across it yet, here's one of the videos. Follow this link for lyrics and further discussion about this concept that Brian Greene is now finally saying he embraces: that those other universes are just as real as our own, they just don't happen to be the one that we find ourselves to be within.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=du86lNCvOdA

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Poll 44 - The Biocentric Universe Theory

Alien Mathematics

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49sVWNYyqWk

(The above sidebar text and illustration are from the New Scientist article by Martin Rees discussed below. The caption for this picture reads: An alien's description of the cosmos might teach us a thing or two about the nature of reality)
(Image: Wolcott Henry/National Geographic/Getty)

Last entry, in The Flexi-Laws of Physics, we talked about the amazing possibility that the basic "locked in" physical laws of our universe may have been retroactively adjusted during the initial stages of creation.

Back in July 2006 over at the tenth dimension forum, here's one of the discussions we got into within its very first month: our universe exists within spacetime, and space is not the same as spacetime. If we have a 3D space without time, then we can define a set of co-ordinates within that space with values for x,y, and z: but without the direction of either "time" or "anti-time" these co-ordinates can't be changed, they're locked in. These co-ordinates could then all be referenced within a planck-scale "frame" of spacetime, which we can think of as a "point" within the 4th dimension. If we move to some other different 4D point, then all three values for x,y, and z can be changed. Taking that idea to the seventh dimension, we can see that if our universe is "locked in" by a single 7D point, then there must be an unchanging set of values for u,v,w,x,y and z, which would be six arbitrary letters assigned to the six degrees of freedom afforded by the six spatial dimensions below. Which leads to the question that was discussed at the tenth dimension forum, are there six aspects of our universe that remain unchanged throughout its existence? At the time, I suggested to forum regular Daniel McQueen that there seemed to be an interesting tie-in there with astrophysicist and cosmologist Martin Rees, whose book I had read a couple of years before.

Do those six numbers really connect to the first six dimensions as I've visualized them? Is it possible to consider a wavefunction of all possible outcomes for our universe and have them all be constrained by six values, six unchanging "positions" within sixth dimensional space? That's a tricky possibility to wrap your head around. On the other hand, the idea from string theory that our universe is "locked in" at the seventh dimension by a D7 brane does seem to be a more likely connection.

Earlier this year, Sir Martin Rees published an article in New Scientist called Mathematics: The only true universal language. Let's look at the opening paragraphs of this article:

IF WE ever establish contact with intelligent aliens living on a planet around a distant star, we would expect some problems communicating with them. As we are many light years away, our signals would take many years to reach them, so there would be no scope for snappy repartee. There could be an IQ gap and the aliens might be built from quite different chemistry.

Yet there would be much common ground too. They would be made of similar atoms to us. They could trace their origins back to the big bang 13.7 billion years ago, and they would share with us the universe's future. However, the surest common culture would be mathematics.

Mathematics has been the language of science for thousands of years, and it is remarkably successful. In a famous essay, the great physicist Eugene Wigner wrote about the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics". Most of us resonate with the perplexity expressed by Wigner, and also with Einstein's dictum that "the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible". We marvel at the fact that the universe is not anarchic - that atoms obey the same laws in distant galaxies as in the lab. The aliens would, like us, be astonished by the patterns in our shared cosmos and by the effectiveness of mathematics in describing those patterns.

Rees then takes us through an exploration of the different mathematical breakthroughs which occurred in the twentieth century, which moves us on to superstrings as the dominant cosmological theory of our time. He mentions that despite the commercial success in the last few years of popular books claiming that string theory is "not even wrong", many of the brightest minds of our day continue to explore this promising field. Martin Rees writes:

String theory involves scales a billion billion times smaller than any we can directly probe. At the other extreme, our cosmological theories suggest that the universe is vastly more extensive than the patch we can observe with our telescopes. It may even be infinite. The domain that astronomers call "the universe" - the space, extending more than 10 billion light years around us and containing billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars, billions of planets (and maybe billions of biospheres) - could be an infinitesimal part of the totality.

There is a definite horizon to direct observations: a spherical shell around us, such that no light from beyond it has had time to reach us since the big bang. However, there is nothing physical about this horizon. If you were in the middle of an ocean, it is conceivable that the water ends just beyond your horizon - except that we know it doesn't. Likewise, there are reasons to suspect that our universe - the aftermath of our big bang - extends hugely further than we can see.

Regular readers of my blog will recognize that Martin Rees is using a similar visualization to the one I used in my blog entry "The Holographic Universe": visualizing that space-time rather than space has a very slight curvature to it allows us to see how we could be like someone floating out in the middle of an ocean, perceiving a universe of a certain size and age, but that the universe itself could be much larger than what we are able to see. Imagining, then, that an alien race billions of light years away would also find themselves to be right at the very center of an equally spherical universe of a similar age ties to the surprising idea we explored in "Where Are You?": no matter who you are or where you are in the universe, you are right at the center! Extending this idea into a set of parallel universes for our own universe, and a multiverse landscape for all other possible universes, becomes even more boggling. Martin Rees writes:

The multiverse confronts us with infinities, multiplied by other infinities - perhaps repeatedly. To bring sense to these concepts, we must deploy the mathematics of transfinite numbers, which date back to Georg Cantor in the 19th century. He showed that there was a rigorous way to discuss infinity and that in a well-defined sense there are infinities of different sizes. Without these exotic concepts, cosmologists will not be able to firm up the concept of the multiverse theory and decide, without paradoxes or ambiguities, what is probable and what is improbable within it.

The final section of Sir Martin's article gets into ideas that seem to relate to our discussions from the past month, as we looked at Computers and Consciousness, Logic vs. Intuition., and Connecting It All Together. He concludes:

Maybe in the far future, though, post-human intelligence will develop hypercomputers with the processing power to simulate living things - even entire worlds. Perhaps advanced beings could even simulate a "universe" that goes far beyond mere patterns on a checkerboard and the best movie special effects. Their simulated universe could be as complex as the one we perceive ourselves to be in. This raises a disconcerting thought: perhaps that is what our universe really is.

It is fascinating to speculate whether hyper-intelligent aliens already exist in some remote part of our cosmos. If so, would their brains "package" reality in a mathematical language that would be comprehensible to us or our descendants?

Martin Rees is professor of cosmology and astrophysics and master of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. He was appointed Astronomer Royal in 1995 and is President of the Royal Society. This article is based on contributions to a discussion by a panel that included mathematicians Michael Atiyah and Alain Connes about the relationship between mathematics and science.

It's interesting to think about how the basic physical laws of our universe might be what we would use as a starting point in learning to communicate with an alien species from far, far away. In The Biocentric Universe and The Biocentric Universe Part 2, we've talked about the amazing new theories using "retro-causality": it has now been proven that observations made "now" can affect certain indeterminate conditions back "then". If this is the case, is it possible that the amazing amount of bio-diversity that we see around our planet might also be giving us more glimpses into what alien life is going to look like than we realize? In my book and this blog, I've talked about how there could be other completely different ways of expressing matter and energy that would still rightly be called "life", but perhaps those other formulations exist only within other parts of the multiverse landscape. Perhaps when we do finally find life elsewhere in the universe, the "fine-tuning" of our universe's conditions will have created forms that only seem as alien as the strange assortment of creatures we can find on our own planet. And if biocentricism is true, then it might be that the alien race we eventually encounter could have come from a first spark of life that appeared billions of years before life started on earth, and that it was actually that alien life-form that performed this reverse-fine-tuning of our universe's basic physical constants to allow all life as we know it appear within our universe!

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs, July 09 Report