Timelike Entanglement

Here's the opening paragraph from an article written by Lisa Zyga and published last week at physorg.com. The article is called Physicists Describe Method to Observe Timelike Entanglement:

In "ordinary" quantum entanglement, two particles possess properties that are inherently linked with each other, even though the particles may be spatially separated by a large distance. Now, physicists S. Jay Olson and Timothy C. Ralph from the University of Queensland have shown that it's possible to create entanglement between regions of spacetime that are separated in time but not in space, and then to convert the timelike entanglement into normal spacelike entanglement. They also discuss the possibility of using this timelike entanglement from the quantum vacuum for a process they call "teleportation in time."

Personally, I find the above idea much easier to assimilate when I look at my new diagram I've been showing you this month, here it is again:


The underlying idea of Timelike Entanglement speaks to many of the more mysterious connections we've explored with this project, in such blog entries as Evidence for Seeing the Future, Magnets and Morality, Time and Schizophrenia, Beer and Miracles, Entangled Neurons, and Entangled Awareness and OBEs.

Ultimately, if time is an illusion and our Probability Space is really Just Geometry, then the possibility of there being patterns of connectedness across time makes perfect sense. Richard Dawkins understood this very well, and his invented word "memes" has now become a much-used way of talking about these timeless patterns that can connect across millennia without losing any of their impact: as a geneticist, he was interested in the fact that this makes "memes" much more powerful than "genes". Here's what I said in my book about this:

The connection that a group of like-minded people share (whether it be families, special interest groups, corporate culture, religion, sports fans, that song or band whose lyrics seem to express our innermost thoughts… this could be a very long list) can be viewed as a set of memes which connect people, not only in the third and fourth dimension but across higher dimensions as well. In this way, memes can be shown to be even more influential than genes because of their ability to extend so powerfully across time. For example, the words of a Chinese philosopher from 3500 years ago can still have the power to establish “viruses of the mind” which infect new readers and spread from person to person. Influential thinkers such as Confucius or Socrates set into motion memes which can continue to have their full effect even to this day. Conversely, the unique set of genes belonging to Confucius or Socrates (if they are even in the world’s gene pool today), by now are so completely diluted as to be inconsequential.

The very next paragraph in my book talks about how "memes" are tied to The Quantum Observer that is within each of us, and that's the title of our next entry.

Till then, enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Top 100 Tenth Dimension Blogs - 2010 Report

Other reports on this blog:
. April 08 . May 08 . June 08 . July 08 . August 08 .
. September 08 . October 08 . November 08 . December 08 .
. Top 100 - 2008 Report . End of 1st Quarter 09 . May 09 .
. June 09 . July 09 . August 09 . September 09 . October 09 .
. November 09 . December 09 . Top 100 - 2009 Report .
. January 10 . February 10 . March 10 . April 10 . May 10 .
. June 10 . July 10 . August 10 . September 10 . October 10 .
. November 10 . December 10 .

Here we are at the end of 2010, with a quick recap of another exciting year for this project. Some of the highlights:

• The Imagining the Tenth Dimension website has now had over 6 million unique visitors, and almost 100 million hits since its launch.
• My YouTube channel is currently at over 15,000 subscribers, and we just passed the 350 mark for the number of videos I've posted there, which have been viewed a total of over four million times!
• As we saw in The 5th Dimensional Camera Project, a team of scientists at Oxford were introduced to my way of visualizing the extra dimensions by Anab Jain and Jon Ardern, and one of those scientists participated in a video explaining my concept of the fifth dimension as our "probability space".
• I was interviewed on live talk shows by Kelly Howell (Theatre of the Mind) and by Kerrace Alexander (BigFish Radio).
• In October I was invited by the amazingly energetic Dr. Mark Filippi of somaspace.org to attend the 2010 Coherence Conference, which took place at the University of Bridgeport. Unfortunately my schedule did not allow me to attend, but I did submit a five minute video to the conference which you can view at this link: Global Coherence.
  
• My company Talking Dog Studios continued to develop expertise in Augmented Reality, and created the AR experience Hollywood's Legendary Pictures used to announce their upcoming 2012 release of their re-launch of the Godzilla Franchise. Meanwhile, our Augmented Reality game ScavengAR Hunt, which can be played on iPhones and Android Phones, is continuing to develop a worldwide audience.
  
• Several projects that claimed Imagining the Tenth Dimension as inspiration were released this year: Hipercubo, an iPhone game; Rift, an award-winning game prototype developed by Blake Maloof and his team at the Savannah College of Art and Design; Alexander's Time Illusion, a simple java game created to explore a concept we looked at in Time and Schizophrenia. Plus, Scope DJ, a well-known music producer from the Netherlands, released a track using samples of my voice.
• As a fun side project, in 2010 I released videos for five of my songs recorded over a decade ago with my good friends Bob Evans and Roberta Nichol: My Computer is My Friend, Crop Circles, Forty Below, Greetings from the Grids, and Gimme the News.
• Several of my video blogs were translated into Spanish and released on YouTube.
• O is for Omniverse, my followup book created in collaboration with visual artist Marilyn E. Robertson continues to be available at Omniverse.tv, and other Imagining the Tenth Dimension books, t-shirts, and DVDs are available at www.tenthdimension.com/store. Meanwhile, at www.tenthdimension.com/digital, various files are available for download, including high quality versions of the original animation, books in non-copy-protected pdf format, mp3s of various songs, and the audiobook version of Imagining the Tenth Dimension. The first two sections of the audiobook (the Preamble and the Introduction) are also posted on YouTube.
  

As we see up at the top here, I've been posting monthly reports with "top ten blogs of the month" and the latest top 26 blogs of all time for almost three years now, and at the end of 2008
and again at the end of 2009 I published a Top 100 Tenth Dimension list. I'd like to continue that tradition this year, so the list below is in the same format as last year's, showing the month the blog entry originates from. Also, just for interest's sake, I've put a number at the end of each line indicating the position that blog entry held in our 2009 report. Thank you tenth dimension fans for your support!


1. Jumping Jesus (October 09) (1)
2. What's Around the Corner? (October 09) (6)
3. Mandelbulbs (December 09) (41)
4. An Expanding 4D Sphere (August 09) (7)
5. Just Six Things: The I Ching (August 09) (8)
6. Roger Ebert on Quantum Reincarnation (August 09) (11)
7. Creativity and the Quantum Universe (February 09) (2)
8. The 5th-Dimensional Camera Project (May 10)
9. How to Time Travel (December 09) (97)
10. Light Has No Speed (September 10)
11. Vibrations and Fractals (April 10)
12. Poll 44 - The Biocentric Universe Theory (September 09) (9)
13. Dancing on the Timeline (February 10)
14. Our Universe Within the Omniverse (April 10)
15. Monkeys Love Metallica (January 10)
16. Magnets and Morality (April 10)
17. Consciousness in Frames per Second (December 09)
18. Poll 43 - Is the Multiverse Real? (August 09) (24)
19. Alien Mathematics (July 09) (13)
20. 10-10-10 Look Before You Leap (October 10)
21. Polls Archive 54 - Is Time Moving Faster? (March 10)
22. Seeing Time, Feeling Colors, Tasting Light (September 09) (22)
23. Simultaneous Inspiration (August 10)
24. When's a Knot Not a Knot (August 09) (15)
25. Flow (January 10)
26. The Quantum Solution to Time's Arrow (September 09) (18)
27. Beer and Miracles (September 09) (25)
28. Augmented Reality (January 09) (3)
29. You Are the Point (January 10)
30. Complexity from Simplicity (September 10)
31. The Big Bang is an Illusion (July 09) (21)
32. Poll 46 - Big Bang an Illusion? (September 09) (27)
33. Fourth Spatial Dimension 101 (April 10)
34. Norway's "Reverse Deja Vu" (August 09) (26)
35. Entangled Neurons (May 10)
36. The Holographic Universe (January 09) (4)
37. Three Becomes One (May 10)
38. Slices of Reality (January 09) (5)
39. Poll 45 - Conscious Computers (September 09) (33)
40. Time is in the Mind (December 09)
41. The Map and the Territory (August 09) (32)
42. The Long Undulating Snake (July 09) (31)
43. Placebos Becoming More Effective? (January 10)
44. The Fifth Dimension if Spooky (October 09) (38)
45. Playing Games in Extra Dimensions (January 10)
46. Alien Life and Sea Dragons (November 09) (89)
47. Our Universe as a Dodecahedron (May 10)
48. The Statistical Universe (September 09) (37)
49. Entangled Awareness and OBEs (May 10)
50. Suffering in the Multiverse (July 09) (35)
51. Ringing in the Brain (October 09) (47)
52. Our Universe as a Point (May 10)
53. Life is But a Dream (December 09)
54. I'm You From the Future (February 10)
55. The Flexi-Laws of Physics (July 09) (39)
56. What's South of the South Pole? (July 09) (44)
57. Poll 41 - Is Creativity a Quantum Process? (August 09) (40)
58. The Forest (April 10)
59. Poll 49 - Are We a 3D Sphere on a 4D Hypersphere? (November 09) (95)
60. Temporal Mass (October 09) (60)
61. The Biocentric Universe Part 2 (July 09) (46)
62. Nothing is Real (January 10)
63. Poll 48 - Amazing Psychic Readings (September 09) (49)
64. New Video - Magnets and Morality (October 10)
65. Theatre of the Mind (May 10)
66. Poll 65 to 68 - Thinking Big (October 10)
67. Holograms and Quanta (March 10)
68. Cymatics, Gravity and Light (September 10)
69. Tenth Dimension Books on Bit Torrent (July 09) (45)
70. Skhizein (January 10)
71. Constructive Interference and the Quantum Observer (September 10)
72. Vibrations (April 10)
73. Polls Archive 60 - Quantum and Macro a Continuum? (April 10)
74. Tenth Dimension on boingboing (August 09) (48)
75. O is for Omniverse - G to J (November 09) (96)
76. Quantum Suicide (October 09) (62)
77. News From the Future (May 09) (50)
78. Computers and Consciousness (June 09) (54)
79. Ice Age in 4D (July 09) (51)
80. Dark Flow (January 10)
81. Strength of Gravity, Speed of Light (March 10)
82. Love and Gravity (July 10)
83. Urban Garden Magazine (February 09) (10)
84. Coconut Carrying Octopus (December 09)
85. Nassim Haramein (June 09) (53)
86. Poll 42 - Does Twitter Connect or Distract? (August 09) (57)
87. Do Animals Have Souls? (June 09) (56)
88. New Animation - The Forest (October 10)
89. ExpandAR - Augmented Reality (February 10)
90. Changing Reality (May 10)
91. The Very Model of a Singularitarian (December 09)
92. Logic vs. Intuition (June 09) (58)
93. Jumping Jesus on YouTube (August 10)
94. We Start (August 10)
95. 3 Books That Could Change Your Life (February 10)
96. Surveillance (June 09) (59)
97. O is for Omniverse - A and B (November 09) (98)
98. Placebos and Biocentrism (September 10)
99. More Slices of Reality (February 10)
100. O is for Omniverse - C and D (November 09) (99)

Our world is changing, and as it changes more and more people are becoming interested in this project. To everyone out there, I send you my best wishes and fond regards for the upcoming year. Enjoy the journey in 2011!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Living in a Simulation

Poll 65 to 68 - Thinking Big

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbJ4btYu6Ko

It's been a while since we paused to look at some of the poll questions here at the tenth dimension blog, let's do that today. If you're interested in some of the older poll questions, check out this link: Poll 1 to 52.

On my twitter page, I describe myself this way: "Rob is interested in thinking about the big picture of reality". That would be a common thread within these four poll questions we're looking at today: in various ways, they're all about "thinking big".


Poll 65
Poll 65: "Is there only one possible ending for our universe? 1. Yes, that's why everything is inevitable and free will is an illusion. 2. Yes, but randomness and free will provide many paths to get to that single ending. 3. No, there are many possible endings." (Poll ended June 2 2010) Only 12% said "Free will is an illusion, while a fairly even split chose the other two responses: 41.5% said "Randomness and free will provide many paths, and 46.5% said "No, there are many possible endings".

My pick from these choices would have been number two, which lost out to number three by a fairly narrow margin. I wonder how many people would have selected number two if blogger's poll function had allowed me to be as wordy as this?

2. There is only one possible final state which lies beyond the "ending" for our universe, and it's the same as just before the "beginning" of our universe: enfolded symmetry. But because there are many possible paths (or "world lines") that we can travel to get to that final state, it may appear from within our spacetime continuum that there is more than one possible "ending", even though that's ultimately not the case.

I would say the original version of answer number two sums this same idea up with less words, but since I myself have used the phrase "one of the many possible endings for our universe" in my original tenth dimension animation, I would be the first to admit that I haven't always made my position as clear as I could have on this topic. Related concepts were explored most recently in my new video for "Strength of Gravity, Speed of Light", which we discussed further in an entry from a few weeks ago called "Cymatics, Gravity and Light".


Poll 66
Poll 66: "The dodecahedron is a fundamental underlying shape to our reality." Poll ended June 18 2010. 61.9% agreed while 38.1% disagreed.

We're going to discuss this idea again next week in an entry called "Extra Dimensional Geometry", as we look at the just published video for a blog entry called "Our Universe as a Dodecahedron".

This question relates to a postulate put forth by Henri Poincaré in 1900 which became a famously difficult problem to solve, with a number of proofs being offered and then rejected throughout the twentieth century. The Poincaré Conjecture should now be more correctly referred to as the Poincaré Theorem since it was officially accepted in 2006 that Grigori Perelman had successfully solved the problem. This was a very big deal in the world of mathematics, although Grigori has refused to accept any of the accolades offered to him for his proof: as the most recent example on July 1st 2010, he turned down the million dollars that had been awarded to him by the Clay Mathematics Institute's Millennium Prize Project for his solution.

For more background about the above poll question, check out this link to an article on the Poincaré Dodecahedral Space.


Poll 67
Poll 67: "All memories are formed during fifth-dimensional branching in our spacetime tree." 73.6% agreed, while 26.4% did not. (Poll ended July 5 2010)

This poll question relates to a blog entry called Entangled Neurons, in which we looked at a new scientific study indicating that quantum entanglement is intrinsic to the process of memory creation. Regular readers of this blog will know that my project tries to get people to accept that quantum effects, often portrayed as being unimaginably strange, make more sense when we accept that they come from the additional degree of freedom offered by the fifth spatial dimension. Please go back and read Entangled Neurons, I don't have anything to add here other than I'm pleased to see that almost three quarters of the visitors to my blog were willing to accept my proposal here.



A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o87TkFOR_Js

Poll 68
Poll 68: "Now that some Oxford University scientists have shown support for Rob's concept of our reality coming from a 5th-dimensional probability space, we can see that this idea will one day be embraced by mainstream science." 85.1% agreed, 14.9% disagreed. (Poll ended July 22 2010)

Do the branching world-lines and parallel universes of Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation occur within the fifth dimension? That's the big idea my project has proposed. In the video for my blog entry The 5th-Dimensional Camera Project, we see Oxford's Dr. Simon Benjamin showing graphics very similar to the ones from my project: he talks about how our currently observed reality is derived from a branching tree-like structure in the fifth dimension, and those branches are the potential result of a combination of chance and choice. I'm grateful to Jon Ardern and Anab Jain, who showed Dr. Benjamin my original tenth dimension animation.

Is this the thin edge of the wedge? Will more mainstream scientists be starting to embrace my approach to visualizing the extra dimensions, because of the intuitive leaps it allows between previously compartmentalized realms of physics, cosmology and quantum mechanics? Only time will tell. But hey, if time really is an illusion then the world where this has happened already exists within my fifth-dimensional probability space, and all I have to do is find a way to get there!

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Global Coherence

Simultaneous Inspiration

We've talked many times about how we're each navigating through a fifth-dimensional probability space. We've also talked on a regular basis about the surprisingly enlightened Richard Dawkins concept of "memes": information patterns that connect together outside of the linear limits of space-time, an idea very easily relatable to ways of thinking about the additional degrees of freedom afforded by extra dimensions.

I don't want to make too big a deal out of this because coincidences happen, and designers have new ideas, new styles, new colors, that go in and out of fashion on a regular basis. But still, I couldn't let the interesting synchronicity that happened to me this morning pass by without making note of it : the September issues of these two magazines, both of which I subscribe to, arrived in my mailbox this morning, looking surprisingly alike, not just in design and color choice, but in the chosen message. Knowing the lead time that goes into getting magazines like these to the presses, the chances of one being a ripoff of the other's idea has to be virtually nil. Which leaves us with a concept I've talked about many times with this project: simultaneous inspiration. Is this an example of how there are patterns outside of spacetime which we are navigating within, which cause similar ideas to arise with no apparent connection across geography or shared communication? It's an interesting idea to consider.

Here's a couple of paragraphs from chapter five of my book ("Memes, Music, and Memory"), which relate to this discussion.

Dawkins also advanced the idea of the “meme” (rhymes with “team”), which would be an idea that desires itself to continue in the same way that a gene does. Ideas, belief systems, and unique points of view transfer themselves through word of mouth, the media, and so on. But the idea of the meme can also be stretched a bit to include more mysterious modes of transmission, where ideas seem to pop up simultaneously at geographically unrelated points. Sometimes it seems that an idea is just “ready to be born”, and that it may actually be somehow traveling across the dimensions without any visible mode of transmission, another demonstration of our non-local universe. For instance, could this be a way to explain the coincidences of inspiration in scientific research, where unconnected people on opposite sides of the planet sometimes come up with the same groundbreaking theory or invention?

What do you think? Are these two magazine covers pure coincidence, or an example of how ideas and inspiration are connected together for us outside of the limits of spacetime?

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: We Start

Are bees more sixth dimensional?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTtGcNk7Rhs

Six is an interesting number that we haven't talked about as much recently with this project. Coincidentally, last week we looked at Philip Zimbardo's The Secret Powers of Time, where he suggested that there are six possible ways for people to interface with time: awareness tends to be oriented towards positive or negative versions of past, present, or future.

With my approach to visualizing the dimensions, our universe has six dimensions to express all possible versions of itself, and all of that becomes a single "point" in the seventh dimension: we looked at this most recently in "Our Universe as a Point". A couple of years ago here at the Imagining the Tenth Dimension blog, in an entry called Time is a Direction, I had this to say about the number six:

"Do a google search on the words 'six directions' and you will see how deeply embedded that concept is into various spiritual/metaphysical systems. Do a google search on 'six dimensions' and you will find an interesting mix of musings about business/social connections (the six degrees of separation concept), geometry/physics, and other discussions about the nature of reality from the viewpoint of ancient spiritual systems."

In Three Becomes One, we looked at various geometric patterns that can be derived from the triangle, and the images we're looking at here come from the wikipedia article on hexagons, which are six-sided polygons. The image at left is a hexagram, created by superimposing two triangles. A six-sided hexagon appears in the middle of this shape, and can also be created if you draw new lines joining the six outer points of this shape.

As you'll see if you spend some time examining the different patterns shown above, the idea of triangles being pushed apart from a central point into a symmetrical pattern from which other shapes emerge can be seen time and again in these images, and of course all of this is old hat to fans of sacred geometry.

The six-sided hexagon is not just an abstract concept from your geometry class: it appears in nature as well. Here are some pictures demonstrating that.

First of all, one of the most obvious ones: the hexagons of a beehive's honeycomb. Then, the six-sided scutes of a turtle's carapace.

Next, at left we see a North polar hexagonal cloud feature on Saturn, discovered by Voyager 1 and confirmed in 2006 by Cassini; and at right we see naturally formed basalt columns from Giant's Causeway in Ireland.

Hexagons also appear in snowflakes, and even at the molecular level in various compounds.

In Are Animals and Kids More Fifth-Dimensional?, we discussed something that can be connected to The 5th-Dimensional Camera Project, which is a more recent entry looking at one of the central ideas to my project which has now received some support from scientists at Oxford University: the fifth dimension can be thought of as our probability space. The wave function of potential pasts and futures that connect to our "now" is a pattern in the fifth dimension which we are potentially connected to through chance and choice, Everett's Many Worlds.

Being able to see fifth-dimensionally, then, would be to see all the possible world lines that are causally connected to a particular instant of our spacetime universe. And someone who is more connected to the past and future through intuition, inspiration, creativity, deja vu, clairvoyance, and so on, could be said to have a more fifth-dimensional awareness.

Seeing sixth-dimensionally, on the other hand, would be seeing all the possible versions of the universe you are within, including the versions that are not causally connected - like the one where you pop out of existence here and reappear on the moon, or the one where it's 2010 and Michael Jackson is still alive. The sixth dimension is the complete Quantum Field for our unique universe, including those outcomes which we acknowledge must exist as possible versions, but which would take longer than the existence of the universe for us to observe. Can any living creatures see sixth-dimensionally?

Here's an article sent to me by my friend Ian Reclusado of the always interesting blog Reclusland. The article is called Honeybees are Found to Interact with Quantum Fields.

In this article, we see a fascinating theory proposed by Barbara Shipman, a mathematician at the University of Rochester. Dr. Shipman analyzed the complex dance patterns bees use to indicate the position of new sources of food to each other. She discovered that the geometric patterns the bees use in the dance made sense if they were analyzed using a "sixth dimensional flag manifold", an analysis method also useful in solving some of the mathematical problems that arise in dealing with quarks. Please read the entire article, it presents some amazing insights.

According to many sources there are now 30% less honeybees in the world than there were in 2006. Are bees more sixth-dimensional? Perhaps they are. Why, then, have bees been disappearing from our planet in record numbers for the last four years? That's an intriguing question, and the subject of a number of books that have come out in the last year, including Fruitless Fall, The Hive Detectives, and A World Without Bees. Are bees our sixth-dimensional canaries in a coalmine, warning us about environmental catastrophes that we need to avoid, and that in some sixth-dimensional versions of our universe, have already not avoided?

We'll continue this exploration next time as we talk about a new company exploring the world of connected ideas, who are using a honeybee as their logo: 6things.com .

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Changing Reality

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCJLRrFTX3Q

Edit: If you go to this link now you can listen to my conversation with Kerrace Alexander. We had a great chat (we talked for almost an hour and a half!) and she offered some wonderful insights. Thank you so much for having me on your show, Kerrace!


Tomorrow I'm going to be interviewed by Kerrace Alexander of Bigfish Strategies. Kerrace is the host of Bigfish Radio: to quote from her website, her program is "an interactive, live Internet talk-radio show that focuses on helping individuals learn to live and love without fear. This show features authors and Holistic Healing Arts practitioners of Cosmic Science, Metaphysics, Evolutionary Consciousness, Astrology, Spiritual Awakening, Ascension and Empowerment."

This seemed like a great opportunity for me to step back and look at what has happened with Imagining the Tenth Dimension since I launched it almost four years ago. The tenth dimension website has now had six million unique visitors and almost 100 million hits since July 2006! I'm continually amazed and thankful for the audience that keeps growing for this project.

Why, people have asked me, did I create this project?

I remember one of the very first negative comments I saw about Imagining the Tenth Dimension was from someone who said "I haven't read the book but it looks like this is yet another get-rich-quick scam from someone saying woo-woo, change your life with the power of the tenth dimension" (italics mine, but I feel sure they were imagining a spooky echo on those last words for added emphasis).

In my blog entry New Book Reviews at Amazon, one of the reviews I quoted was from Australia's Richard Ruff, who had this to say about my book:

In an easily readable style he has boldly taken us past the fourth dimension through to the tenth employing an understandable logic based on geometric considerations. There is no mind-boggling mathematics and there is a distinct absence of the crank/crackpot style; each step along the way is carefully developed in a sequential manner accompanied by readily understandable diagrams. Again, without being too technical, he correlates properties of the unfolding dimensions with predictions and outcomes of modern physics, especially quantum mechanics. Philosophical implications are explored along the way.

Thank you Richard for those kind words! I work hard with this blog and with this project to present these ideas without sensationalizing them. My willingness to talk about such a wide range of topics, including out-of-body experiences as we did last blog entry, ghosts, or predicting the future, does make it easy for mainstream scientists to dismiss my ideas if they wish. But with this project I've also talked often about serious theories and studies that tie into these discussions very easily: epigenetics, the doubled effectiveness of the placebo effect over the last few decades, the holographic universe theory, retro-causality and the biocentric universe theory: these are examples of the mind-blowing new concepts which I've been pleased to show to the many people who are fans of this project, and which show there is much more to our reality than the physical world of atoms and molecules that we see around us.

Up, Up and Away!
In The Fifth-Dimensional Camera Project, we looked at how my project's central idea -- that our reality, our "now" is really being created in the fifth dimension from a fifth-dimensional probability space -- was recently presented in a display created by Jon Ardern and Anab Jain and supervised by scientists from Oxford University. Near the end of my Theatre of the Mind interview with Kelly Howell, we talked about how this important idea of the fifth dimension was accepted by Einstein almost a century ago, and yet never seems to have entered mainstream consciousness: lots of people my age still think The Fifth Dimension is a pop group from the sixties, nothing more.

When talking with Kelly, I suggested that there could be reasons why this information has been suppressed: after all, this shows a way of understanding that free will is not an illusion, and it shows that we each have access to many more possibilities in our life than most of us have been led to believe. As I said in my article for Urban Garden Magazine, this could be why for those in power over the last century, and for those who have been trained to take a grim satisfaction in saying our existence in the universe means nothing, the Fifth Dimension is a Dangerous Idea.

But for a person who has no hope, or sees no way out of the negative loops they're currently stuck within, this project can represent an awakening: and I hear from people every day telling me that Imagining the Tenth Dimension has changed their life and the way they view the world!

As I've said before, The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic. I believe the fifth dimension represents a constantly changing probability space of multiple pasts and futures that are logically, causally connected to our "now", which is a planck-frame-sized point in the fifth dimension. That means there's already a version of "you" that exists within that probability space ten years from now who is living the most happy and fulfilled life possible. I believe, as Dr. Philip Zimbardo's studies revealed in The Time Paradox, that visualizing that person as already being part of your future can create a strong pull towards that "best possible you" that already exists. Next week, we're going to look at Dr. Vernon Woolf, who has some powerful visualization techniques for actually consulting with that "best possible you" to help you get there.

How Much Control Do We Have?
That's the gigantic question that became Chapter Nine of my book. It's really the trickiest part of this discussion: as we discussed in Beer and Miracles, there are already some stunningly unlikely things about our reality which could lead us to conclude that anything is possible. Recently I came across this uplifting video created by Bryan Walton, who has two websites: Oxygen for the Mind, and Dancing in the Mirror. You'll see that Bryan has lots of podcasts and web materials that relate to the ideas in the following video, as well as focusing on ways for people to remove stress from their lives.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfHjkKmmz0A

In this video Bryan arrives at a way of visualizing the fourth through sixth dimension as a probability- and intention-based manifold encompassing all possible pasts and futures for our universe: I'm pleased to see him advancing this idea since it is central to my own project as well. We've talked a number of times about this in my book and in such entries as Time in Three Dimensions, The Forest, You Are the Point, and What's Around the Corner?.

My animation shows that the quantum wave function for our universe can be thought of as having three dimensions (four through six), just as space has three dimensions (one through three). This can be extended even further by the time we're in a third "triad" that encompasses the Information Equals Reality paradigm and the multiverse landscape of possible universes that can be accessed via the seventh through ninth dimension. We'll talk about a number of different approaches to understanding reality that connect to this idea next time in Three Becomes One.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Forty Below

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzAmOfq8dSs

Last time, in Greetings from the Grids, we talked about the supposition that growing up on the wide open expanse of the prairies might affect a person's point of view. Another of the things that is remarkable about the prairies is that it's not unusual to have periods of extreme cold in the wintertime. Have you ever experienced forty below? Fahrenheit or Celsius, doesn't matter, it just happens that the two temperature systems cross over each other at this point. There does seem to be some kind of a dividing line as you approach minus forty, it's a whole different kind of cold and it's really hard to convey just how different it is to someone who hasn't personlly experienced it. In entries like Anime Gaming and Cusps and Seeing the Big Picture 3, we've talked about how there are moments in each of our lives where important branches take place within our probability space. Without getting too melodramatic about it, every time you go out in forty below you are dealing with weather conditions that could kill you if you're not careful or unlucky, and it's not a good idea to ignore those possible cusps that are all around you when you deal with extreme weather conditions such as these.

So: other than showing you the lyrics to this song and having you watch the above video, I want to make one important point: just because it was fun to add to the visuals, I put in some shots of dogs out in the cold. The fact of the matter is, at forty below exposed flesh freezes in minutes, and much faster than that if there's any wind, so conscientious pet owners do not leave any but the most furry of their furry friends out in this bitter cold for longer than it takes them to do their business and get back inside.

Does adversity build character? Does what fails to kill you make you stronger? Or do you have to be a little bit crazy to want to live in a place where the temperature actually hits this extreme? Hard to say, could be a mixture of all three. Here's the lyrics to this song, lovingly assembled from a lifetime of observation of this intense slice of life on the prairies:

Forty Below
- words and music by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

When it's forty below, snow sounds like styrofoam
It squeaks beneath your boots, high and chirpy
When it's forty below, Fahrenheit and Celsius become one and the same
It's just too damn cold, everyone agrees completely on this one

When it's forty below, your gob freezes in mid-air
Makes a round little marble that rolls across a frozen snowbank
When it's forty below, you go outside grim and fierce, a warrior
Or stay huddled inside, defeated by wind and temperature

Oh, and the frost on your front window turns thick as a blanket
A fuzzy white candy coating, can't scrape it away
And dogs'll soon start walking on three legs, switching
To keep whichever foot's coldest up close to their furry little bellies

When it's forty below, sound gets brighter
A distant jet sounds like fabric endlessly tearing and tearing
When it's 40 below, your car feels like a stranger's, your wheel stiffens
Anything plastic's probably gonna shatter

When it's forty below, jumpers carry lifeblood
From one vehicle to the next, red to red, black to ground
When it's forty below,the test of your samaritan spirit comes
When a perfect stranger in a parking lot asks if you've got cables

Yeah, and out on the highway, unless you're a fool
You've got a candle and a cup and some matches
A bit of candy and a shovel, all packed away in your trunk
Insurance for some terrible day of reckoning that could come...

When it's forty below
When it's forty below
When it's forty below
When it's forty below.


I hope you enjoyed this song, which I performed "live-to-tape" with my friends Bob Evans and Roberta Nichol back in 1997. Just a reminder, this is just one of a ten-song collection of songs we performed back then, if you'd like to purchase these ten songs as high-quality mp3s it's only five dollars for the whole collection, go to the Tenth Dimension Digital Items store if you're interested. And while you're there, check out the O is for Omniverse pdf, which we've reduced to $10 as a special for the month of February.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Gimme the News

Greetings from the Grids

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmErRRezTk0

Over the next couple of weeks we're going to be looking at other videos from this collection of songs performed by myself, Bob Evans, and Roberta Nichol, which we started looking at with my song Crop Circles. Just a reminder, these songs are available for download as a ten-song package at the Tenth Dimension Digital Items store if you're interested in owning high-quality mp3s of these recordings.

Greetings from the Grids presents a romanticized vision of the system of gravel roads found throughout the southern half of my home province of Saskatchewan. This grid system was originally laid out two miles apart north and south and one mile east and west, but not all of the roads are developed, and of course sometimes geographical irregularities like valleys or rivers keep the system from continuing uninterrupted. But nonetheless, there really are large sections of land that are, as the song says, "carved up like a checkerboard".

At the 1:12 mark in the above video, and again towards the end of the piece, I superimpose an aerial photograph of Saskatchewan over the sky. When I look at the checkerboard pattern defined by these grid roads, I start thinking about Digital Physics and how, when you look at the underlying structures of our universe, information equals reality: but hey, maybe that's just me!

Greetings from the Grids harkens back to the old prairie mythology that there's something different about people who grow up out here on the prairies. For the last six years my company Talking Dog Studios had the good fortune to be doing the sound and music for the most popular Canadian-produced scripted series of all time, Corner Gas. I've played this clip from the pilot episode before, but it ties in so nicely here that it's worth viewing again:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Veu-Cm7aHMw

I imagine that every place on the planet has groups of people who have lived there all their lives and feel that the unique qualities of their surroundings have affected their point of view: and I'm certainly not suggesting that the prairie point of view is superior to these others, only that it might be different.

In Saskatchewan, there's lots of different geographies, but many people across Canada know us only for the wide swatch of extremely flat prairie through which the Trans-Canada Highway happens to connect us to our neighboring provinces. This opening scene of the very first episode of Corner Gas plays with some of the beliefs that have sprung up around that extraordinary flatness:

Brent: Hey Hank! This guy says Saskatchewan is flat!
Hank: How do you mean?
Brent: Topographically, I guess. Says there's nothin' to see.
Hank: There's lots to see. Nothin' to block your view.

Craig Northey's theme song for the show continues the discussion with this old prairie joke:

You can tell me that your dog ran away
Then tell me that it took three days

Does growing up on the wide-open prairies somehow change your point of view? Greetings from the Grids was written and performed in 1997, nine years before Imagining the Tenth Dimension was published. But as I've mentioned before, this way of visualizing reality was something I developed in the early 80's, so even when I'm not specifically talking about our probability space of "next possible outcomes" coming from the fifth dimension, or the relationship between the observer and the observed in the wave function of our universe, it's always been something in the back of my mind. I'm hoping that the Tenth Dimension graphics I've overlaid on the prairie scenes in the above video help to show some of those underlying connections. Here are the lyrics to the song:

Greetings from the Grids
- words and music by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

I come from the land of grid roads
Of endless flat prairie, carved up like a checkerboard
Every square a mile on a side, love to go out for a drive
And that's the land of grid roads

I come from the land of grid roads
Of people changed wholly by livin' on a checkerboard
The next decision you can make, is always just a mile away
I love the land of grid roads

The prairie makes you different
And those gravel grids do too
Five thousand feet away from here
You can switch to something new
Or proceed straight on forever
The choice is up to you
The prairie makes you different, yeah
It's in your point of view

And I come from the land of grid roads
Of people made holy by livin' on a checkerboard
When we look out we can see all those possibilities
That's how it is with grid roads
It keeps you hoppin', on your toes, keeps you steerin', goodness knows
You're in the land of grid roads
And that's the land of grid roads
I love the land --- of grid roads.


Another part of the prairie mythos is that our long cold winters have generated a disproportionate number of excellent musicians - not wanting to go outside when it's bitterly cold has encouraged many to stay at home and practice their instrument. Statistically speaking, I have no idea if that's really true or not. There are certainly a disproportionate number of professional hockey players from Saskatchewan when you realize that our population is only a million, but that stands to reason since so many small towns here still have hockey rinks. Next, we'll be looking at another Rob Bob and Roberta song that examines the extreme side of our winters - that scary part of the year when the temperature hits Forty Below.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

PS - As an amusing bit of synchronicity, I opened this morning's paper to read the front page news that my city has just adopted a new slogan that obviously ties into the wide open possibilities I'm talking about in the above entry. The new slogan is "Regina: Infinite Horizons". Cool!

I'm You From the Future

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.ucbcomedy.com/videos/play/2235

Last week, in Noein, we looked at a Japanese anime series that took its plot ideas from Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics and the many branching parallel universes that result from that. Of course, this easily relates to my project and we have talked about traveling through this "probability space" as I sometimes call it from a number of perspectives.

I've been noticing a lot of TV commercials lately that show a version of this idea: a person sees themselves right there beside themselves, but in slightly different circumstances as a result of some good or bad decision they've made - just last night, for instance, I saw a Nicorettes commercial where a guy in the bar sees himself right there in the room but he's smoking: so the guy pulls out his Nicorettes and the "other" version of himself disappears. I thought I'd go out on the net and post a few of these new commercials as part of this entry, but didn't have any success finding them. I was then thinking about a much older ad that might be the grandaddy of all these, the "who are you?" "I'm you from the future, retired and living the good life because you invested your money wisely" series of commercials, which have gone on to be widely satirized. I tried to find one of those commercials and ended up with the above amusing piece from the Upright Citizen's Brigade, which I thought was fun to watch even though by now we're completely off the rails of any serious discussion!

For a more scientific exploration of these ideas, check out How to Time Travel. I also recently came across a couple of great blogs from physicist Sean Carroll: 11 Rules for Time Travelers, and in honor of the beginning of its final season this week, a discussion of the different kinds of time travel used in LOST.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob

Next: Crop Circles

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