Where'd All the Dark Matter Go?

Here's a link to an article published at phys.org, entitled "Serious blow to dark matter theories? New study finds mysterious lack of dark matter in Sun's neighborhood". The following image and caption also accompanied the article:

This annotated artist’s impression shows the Milky Way galaxy. The blue halo of material surrounding the galaxy indicates the expected distribution of the mysterious dark matter. New measurements based on the movements of stars show that the amount of dark matter in this region around the Sun is far smaller than predicted and have indicated that there is no significant dark matter at all in our neighbourhood. The blue sphere centred on the Sun’s position shows the approximate size of the newly surveyed volume, but not its precise shape. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada

 The opening paragraph of the article pretty well sums it up, for more please follow the link:

(Phys.org) -- The most accurate study so far of the motions of stars in the Milky Way has found no evidence for dark matter in a large volume around the Sun. According to widely accepted theories, the solar neighbourhood was expected to be filled with dark matter, a mysterious invisible substance that can only be detected indirectly by the gravitational force it exerts. But a new study by a team of astronomers in Chile has found that these theories just do not fit the observational facts. This may mean that attempts to directly detect dark matter particles on Earth are unlikely to be successful.

And the final note appended to this article gives us this very specific information:

Theories predict that the average amount of dark matter in the Sun's part of the galaxy should be in the range 0.4-1.0 kilograms of dark matter in a volume the size of the Earth. The new measurements find 0.00±0.07 kilograms of dark matter in a volume the size of the Earth.

Hmm, quite the head scratcher! It's almost like the act of observing dark matter changes its nature, from something indeterminate and amorphous to something much more specific. Now what, what does that remind us of?

Does Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics allow for the possibility that observation causes something to not be observed? At first, this seems like a contradiction. But with this project we've talked often about how this logic works when applied to our physical reality: if all possible outcomes connected to "now" really do exist within the underlying quantum wave function, then observing one outcome doesn't mean the others somehow disappear, it only means that we're not observing them. By observing the version of the universe where I had an apple and half a protein bar for today's breakfast, it's now impossible for me to observe the version where I had bacon and eggs this morning.  But Everett's theory says that those "other" versions of the universe really do continue to exist even though we can't see them.

So what's unique about our solar system that would cause dark matter to disappear within our vicinity? Well, how about the fact that there are so many lifeforms actively engaged with the quantum wavefunction, not just passively observing random outcomes but sometimes actually choosing one path or another? Could such a concentration of observers be "adding focus", so to speak? Since the beginning of this project I've always maintained that dark matter will eventually be used to confirm the physical existence of the other universes that are "just around the corner in time", as I say in my song The Unseen Eye.

Think about this: the standard imagery used to describe gravity is to think of space-time as a flat rubber sheet, and to think about massive objects causing depressions in that sheet. And the standard description of the cosmological horizon is that no matter where an observer is in the universe, they will find themselves to be right at the center. So if I take these ideas and now think of our universe's fifth-dimensional probability space as a flat rubber sheet, here's what I'm visualizing: vast expanses of that sheet will lie undisturbed, as a superimposition of possible states. But here and there we'll see places where the sheet is distorted, and if we could observe the entire universe with the same degree of accuracy that the astronomers in the above article were able to achieve within the vicinity of our solar system, that would be our guide to finding the scattered locations throughout the universe where life has taken hold. And according to these new findings each of these distortions would be where there is less dark matter as a result of those concentrations of quantum observers!

Is this a flight of fancy, a conjecture, with no math to back it up? Of course! As always, please keep in mind this project is a creative exploration of ideas, food for thought being tossed out for other minds to munch on.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob

Next: New Video - We are All Quanta

Poll 85 - No Quantum/Classical Divide?

Poll 85: "Do you agree with this idea from the June '11 issue of Scientific American? The division between the quantum and classical worlds appears not to be fundamental...few physicists now think that classical physics will ever really make a comeback at any scale." Poll ended September 8, 2011. 71.2 % agreed, while 28.8% did not.

This has been an interesting metamorphosis: in 2006, when my book was published, a number of people criticized it for being so cavalier with taking the concepts of quantum mechanics and applying them to our "warm and wet" macro/classical world. What does Feynman's sum over histories have to do with the choices you and I make? How do the instantaneous connections of quantum entanglement relate to consciousness and life? These questions do not seem quite as far "out there" now as they did back then, and the burgeoning field of quantum biology is a great example of the kind of paradigm shift we're talking about here.

For more discussion about these ideas, here's a link to Poll 60, which back in March 2010 asked whether people accepted that the so-called "dividing line" between the quantum and macro world is a completely artificial construct. The results were similar: a very large majority agreed with this idea back then as well. I would also refer you to an entry from a couple of months ago called "We are All Quanta", in which I said this:

No matter where we end up, we need to acknowledge that quantum mechanics is the most successful theory of reality devised so far, so whatever Theory of Everything we're trying to get to, we should keep in mind the truth about the underlying quantum nature of the universe we're in.

Ultimately, we are all quanta. We are created by constructive interference, so saying that we're wavicles also works, but each of us is a unique pattern, and a subset of something larger.

Is Imagining the Tenth Dimension a Theory of Everything, a TOE? At best it points the way to where a theory might lie, which is why I prefer to call it a "new way of thinking".  But if classical physics is really destined to never "make a comeback", then it seems apparent that any self-respecting TOE has to acknowledge the underlying quantum nature of our reality, end of story.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton


Next: Poll 86 - Is it Impossible to See the Third Dimension?

Observers and Addictions

Last time, we looked at a recurring idea that comes from a number of different schools of thought: that there is a physical world, a world created by observation/participation, and an underlying realm of information. This time, let's look at one of those ideas more carefully: "a world created by observation/participation". In Imagining the Eighth Dimension, we mentioned a concept from a paper published by Lee Smolin and others at arxiv.org, which proposes that we can have a deeper understanding of general relativity if we accept that "different observers construct different spacetimes, which are observer-dependent slices of phase space". And with this project, we keep returning to Everett's idea that there is an unchanging "set of all possible states" or "phase space" which exists outside of spacetime, and that quantum mechanics makes the most sense when we understand that this is not a process of collapse we are talking about here, it is only a process of observation. Does that mean then that we, as quantum observers, are each creating our own reality? And if so, how much control do we have?

There's no question that each of us is at the center of the observed universe, and even though that might sound like a return to ancient thinking that the sun revolves around the earth, the cosmological horizon is real, and this fact would be just as true for an observer on the other side of our currently observed universe - they too would find themselves to be at the center of a space-time sphere, with their very own unique version of the cosmological horizon.

So here I am in a unique universe created through my participation as a quantum observer, which is part of a 5D probability space (as we discussed in Imagining the Fifth Dimension). Does that mean I'm a part of Wheeler's self-excited circuit, the universe observing itself? Does that make me part of a universal creative force, or as Einstein referred to it, "the Old One"? In fact, am I an aspect of God, observing some unique aspect of My creation? Or am I part of an underlying life force which creates pockets of negative entropy, pushing against the natural decline of the universe? These are all different ways of thinking about the same idea, use whichever one you're the most comfortable with if you feel so inclined. For me, the most important part of this discussion is not what label you place upon this process, but the fact that this way of visualizing our reality presents a strong argument for free will. Yes, there is ultimately only one underlying form, one underlying geometry, but you and I (and all living things) are within something much more interesting. We are each moving points within a fifth dimensional probability space, observing a shared consensus reality which connects us all together, but also each observing our own unique version of that space.

For persons trapped in negative loops of abuse or addiction, this is particularly important to understand. If free will is an illusion, then how can we hope to break out of these patterns? The fifth dimension shows the way. As I say in my song Addictive Personality:

Every day is a new day
Every day you’re back to one
And today can be the new day
When you say you’re finally done

Not all habits are bad, of course, and it's in our nature to be attracted to things that make us feel good. The addictions we're talking about here are the ones that are the opposite of the universal creative force, the ones that conspire to extinguish that "spark" of life which Schrödinger described. Each of us, with our free will, have to be the one to decide whether we're on the path we want to be on, and to recognize that we have the power to change that path if we choose to do so. Does that mean we're magical creatures, capable of changing anything about our reality? Does it mean a starving child in Africa can become rich and famous simply by thinking better thoughts? No. But it also means that we are not the powerless automatons that the hard determinists would have us believe ourselves to be, and that there is a constantly evolving "best possible version" of ourselves that already exists within our fifth dimensional probability space which we each have the potential to get to with the choices we're able to make.

Last entry, in Psychedelics and Surprises, we looked at an article published a few days ago in New Scientist, entitled Drug Hallucinations Look Real in the Brain.  The article talks about a new study which demonstrates that - as far as the brain is concerned - there is no difference between what a person sees with their eyes, and what a person sees when taking ayahuasca, a psychoactive drug used weekly by some Brazilian religious groups, and which we talked about in David Jay Brown and Psychedelics. The New Scientist article goes on to explain that ayahuasca shows good promise in the treatment of addiction, which reminded me of this interesting coincidence: as regular readers of this blog will know, I have lived in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan all my life.  My province was where some of the most leading edge research into the use of psychedelics to treat addiction was conducted back in the 50's and early 60's, until the new "war on drugs" made it impossible for that research to continue back then.

With my project, I have tried to promote drug-free ways of visualizing what's "outside" of our reality. As a person who has never taken psychedelics and has no plans to do so, I am fascinated by the possibility that having a deeper intuitive understanding of the extra dimensions might actually help someone dealing with addiction or depression. But as I've said before, I'm also grateful to psychedelic experts like David Jay Brown who have embraced this project as another way into a deeper understanding of reality and our participation within its construction.

Next: Duality and Consciousness

Previously in this series:
Wrapping it Up in the Tenth Dimension
Imagining the Ninth Dimension
Imagining the Eighth Dimension
Imagining the Seventh Dimension
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

Proof that Multiverse Equals Many Worlds

Here's a new paper announced at Cornell Universeity's arxiv.org which has just been published by two highly respected physicists: Leonard Susskind and Raphael Bousso. It confirms an idea I've been promoting for so long that it feels a little strange to me to see them discussing this as something new, but nonetheless this is exciting news. Over at MIT's Technology Review site, here's a link to an article published today about Bousso and Susskind's paper: it's titled Multiverse = Many Worlds, Say Physicists.

The illustration at left is shown in that article, no explanation is attached but the name of the picture is "Multiverse QM". QM, of course, is quantum mechanics, and as it turns out the illustration comes from page 22 of Bousso and Susskind's paper. The idea shown here, that our reality is constantly branching, and that those branches are causally interconnected in multiple ways, has always been an important part of my approach to visualizing the dimensions. 

What is still notably missing from this new paper is the acceptance that these branches are occurring at the fifth dimension, where the field effects for gravity and light are resolved. Until that idea moves into the mainstream, there will still be disagreement as to the relevance of my approach to visualizing the extra dimensions... but this paper certainly helps my project's inch by inch progress from the lunatic fringe towards the accepted picture of the underlying "information equals reality" nature of our universe or any other.

Here's a few select paragraphs from the MIT article, please click on the following links to read the full article, read the arxiv.org posting, or download the pdf of the paper:

Today, Leonard Susskind at Stanford University in Palo Alto and Raphael Bousso at the University of California, Berkeley, put forward the idea that the multiverse and the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics are formally equivalent. But there is a caveat. The equivalence only holds if both quantum mechanics and the multiverse take special forms.

They call this new idea the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics.

That's something worth pondering for a moment. Bousso and Susskind are two of the world's leading string theorists (Susskind is credited as the father of the field), so their ideas have an impeccable pedigree.

...what this new approach does have is a satisfying simplicity-- it's neat and elegant that the many worlds and the multiverse are equivalent. William of Ockham would certainly be pleased and no doubt, many modern physicists will be too.

"A satisfying simplicity... neat and elegant": that's also what people like about my approach to visualizing the dimensions. I'm always excited when I see ways in which the ideas I arrived at through intuition and imagination are now being confirmed with proofs by great minds such as these. As I've said all along, I believe there's an underlying truth which connects these many schools of thought together, and today is an important step in that journey.

Are you enjoying the journey?

Rob Bryanton

Next: Poll 77 - What if the World's a Simulation?

Novelty

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_ANS2k97IM

Novelty. Is the desire for change the basic craving that drives life forward?


In his marvelous book "This is Your Brain on Music", Daniel Levitin makes the point that even eight month old babies have a well-developed sense of melody and rhythm, and enjoy predictable music (read "pop" music here if you like), but they are particularly likely to notice predictable music which then breaks out of the established mode of what their sense of melody will lead them to predict. Regular readers of this blog know that I became a grandfather last year, and little Cadence turned one last week. Whether you're playing peekaboo, or watching her laugh at a musical game where an established pattern is changed, you can see the joy she takes from moment to moment in what happens next.

This is a phrase I've used before in my book and my blog: "life is any process which is interested in what happens next". This applies so nicely to the idea of music as opposed to random noise: in fact, our brains tend to suppress noise, as we talked about in Ringing in the Brain. Sure, you could say music is noise, but it's noise that has been organized in certain ways: and most of us like music which has repeating patterns which allow us to predict at least somewhat what is going to happen next. But the most interesting music of all is the music which solidly sets up an expectation, and then takes us someplace else instead - that's the musical events that we remember, that's the music that we're more likely to fall in love with. This relates very easily to the memory-creation processes we discussed last year in Entangled Neurons.

"What happens next": we like novelty, we prefer pleasant surprises over boredom (and the ongoing popularity of horror films would indicate that a number of us crave any kind of surprises, pleasant or not!). In this blog we've talked a number of times about writer/philosopher/psychedelics activist Terence McKenna, who died in April 2000. His "Novelty Theory" (also known as "Timewave Zero") project suggested that our planet regularly sees repeating cycles of higher and lower novelty, but that we will be approaching a point in 2012 where the number of novelty events climbs exponentially, eventually causing some sort of a tipping point and transition to a new form of worldwide consciousness. This year we've been talking about how light is at right angles to spacetime - this exponential curve that McKenna (along with many others) envisions could be another way of thinking about a new quantum observer system which is at "right angles" to our current existence. How much more novel can we get than that?

This month, there was a New Scientist article written by Katharine Sanderson about a new experiment with the lofty goal of creating "Life, but Not as We Know It". The experiment is being conducted by a team at the University of Glasgow under the supervision of Lee Cronin. Here's a quote from Dr. Cronin that relates nicely to our discussion:

Stripped down to its barest essentials, life can be seen as a struggle against thermodynamics and its drive towards ever more featureless uniformity.

This is another way of phrasing Erwin Schrödinger's definition of life, which we looked at in entries like Conscious Computers and Logic vs Intuition: life is a unique process which creates "pockets of negative entropy". What is the opposite of life? It's the formless, shapeless state of maximum entropy. As living beings, we crave those surprising moments of synchronicity, the novelty of uncovering new connections, the promise of a new day... and people who lose that in their lives are moving towards death more quickly.

Life is what makes us more than just a set of thermodynamic chemical processes. Life is engaged with spacetime in a way that keeps it wanting to move forward in our 4D hyperspace, not just through its own life, but through nurturing the generations that come afterwards. And ultimately, life is part of patterns which exist outside the narrow limits of our 4D reality. This has been a running theme through a number of the 26 songs I attached to this project, including Burn the Candle Brightly, What Was Done Today, Change and Renewal, See No Future, Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, Connections, and Thankful.

Speaking of songs, I've talked before about how for me Imagining the Tenth Dimension really started out as a "concept album", a collection of songs about the nature of reality. Coming up, I'd like to show you some of the songs from a somewhat-related concept album I released way back in 1983: "Alcohol and Other Drugs".

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Changing Your Brain

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

I hear from people every day who say the tenth dimension animation has "blown their mind", or words to that effect. I also hear from people who say they've watched the video many times, and that it has changed the way they think about the world. Could my unique approach to visualizing the dimensions really be capable of re-wiring people's neurons?

This is not as far-fetched as you might think. In entries like Changing Your Genes and Changing Your Genes - part 2, we've looked at the startling research showing that changes in lifestyle and attitude can affect not just the way your own genes are expressed, but even what genes you pass on to your offspring. This news flies in the face of the standard twentieth century approach which taught us that the genetic hand of cards we'd been dealt was locked in at conception, putting us on a specific train track defined by whatever genes we had inherited from our parents.

In Placebos Becoming More Effective?, we looked at the difficulties the pharmaceutical industry is encountering, as the placebo effect appears to be becoming stronger over the last twenty years, to the point where even successful drugs such as Prozac (approved by the FDA in 1987), would have difficulty getting approval today. As it said in the Wired Magazine article about Placebos:

Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests. In many cases, these are the compounds that, in the late '90s, made Big Pharma more profitable than Big Oil. But if these same drugs were vetted now, the FDA might not approve some of them. Two comprehensive analyses of antidepressant trials have uncovered a dramatic increase in placebo response since the 1980s. One estimated that the so-called effect size (a measure of statistical significance) in placebo groups had nearly doubled over that time.

I've been suggesting that there could be something about these modern times that is re-wiring people's brains in ways to give them a feeling of greater control over their observed reality (see last entry, The Quantum Observer), and hence the enhanced placebo effect. What do you think is causing this shift?

With Changing Your Brain, part of what we're talking about here is the concept of neuroplasticity: the brain is very adaptable, constantly making new connections. There was a BBC article published last year about how singing rewires damaged brains that relates nicely to this discussion. And Science Daily recently published an article about a new study with far-reaching implications. The title of the article really says it all: Mindfulness Meditation Training Changes Brain Structure in Eight Weeks.

With all that in mind, let's return to my new diagram we've been looking at lately and do a little creative meditation on it. As I've said before, if you click on this image it takes you to a higher-resolution version. If you'd like, print the image out and follow along, or just do the following exercise in your mind.

1. In Einstein's view of the universe, gravity is pictured as a bending of the "rubber sheet" of our spacetime. If our "sheet" was a 2D plane, similar to the piece of paper you've printed your image out on, we'd see this bending as being through the 3rd dimension. But since the "rubber sheet" of our spacetime is four-dimensional, my assertion is that this shows us gravity comes from the 5th dimension.

2. In Light Has No Speed, we looked at physicist Peter Russell's persuasive argument for why, from a photon's point of view, it takes no time or distance for light from a distant star to reach our eye. We can help to visualize this by folding our piece of paper horizontally, so that the upper half and lower half of the image are now touching. Now, the vertical line representing "light" in this diagram has converged, so that any point on the line is in direct contact with any other point. From light's point of view, past, present and future are one and the same.

3. Stephen Hawking has said "there's another kind of time, at right angles to real time, in which the universe has no beginning or end". If our paper image represents 4D spacetime, then when we folded it we were folding it through a space which is at "right angles to spacetime": the fifth dimension, which would be where Hawking's "another kind of time" resides. Since, as Peter Russell says, a photon experiences itself traveling no distance in no time, and its birth and death are the same moment, this also leads me to say that "light is at right angles to spacetime".

4. Spread your paper out flat again. Now, fold the paper the other way, vertically, so that all points on the horizontal line are touching. This is the quantum point of view, where any particle can have an instantaneous effect on another, no matter how far apart they are from each other in the universe. But again, because these effects defy the logic of our observed reality, they are usually portrayed as being unimaginably strange. I would say that imagining how these effects come from the additional degree of freedom afforded by the fifth dimension shows how these "spooky" quantum effects occur.

5. So which is it? Which fold represents the fifth dimension? Well, they both do. And if there was a way to fold our paper so that both folds are happening simultaneously, in the same way that Schrödinger's Cat is both alive and dead, then we would be visualizing the fifth dimension: where Kaluza proved to Einstein that the field effects for gravity and light are resolved.

WHEN Max Planck came up with the notion of the quantum at the turn of the 20th century, he couldn't justify it. Nevertheless, the idea that energy couldn't be split infinitely many times - that there was an indivisible quantum of energy - was the only way he could fit the observed spectrum of radiation from a hot body to a mathematical law. This ruse was, he later said, "an act of despair".

- editorial from January 24 2011 edition of New Scientist Magazine

The predictions of quantum theory have not been contradicted by a single experimental observation, making it the most successful model of the universe ever to have been created. With it, we move from Planck's "act of despair" to a revolutionary understanding of the granular, non-continuous nature of our observed reality. This leads me to conclude that our "Now", despite the apparently smooth and seamless reality we see around us, is really a constantly evolving series of points in the fifth dimension, one planck frame after another.

Does that understanding change our brains? It certainly has changed mine. Next time, we're going to look at how language changes our brains: the entry will be called Language and the Mind.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

The Quantum Mind

There's a conference happening May 3rd to 7th this year, in Stockholm, Sweden, that looks like it will be very good to keep an eye on. Here's a link to a page promoting the event, which is called Toward a Science of Consciousness: Brain, Mind and Reality.

Toward a Science of Consciousness
Brain, Mind, Reality
May 3-7, 2011
Aula Magna Hall, Stockholm University
Stockholm, Sweden

Tuesday May 3

Plenary 1, 8:30 am to 10:40 am
Brain Electromagnetic Fields and Consciousness
McCormick D, Yale, Endogenous Electric Fields Guide Cortical Network Activity
Pockett S, Auckland, Electromagnetic Field Theory Of Consciousness: The Shape Of
Conscious Fields
McFadden J, Surrey, The Continuous Electromagnetic Information (CEMI) Field
Theory of Consciousness

Plenary 2, 11:10am to 12:30 pm
Time and Consciousness I
Atmanspacher H, Freiberg, Temporal Nonlocality In Bistable Perception
Gonzalez-Andino S, Geneva, Backward Time Referral in the Amygdala of Primates

Plenary 3, 2:00 pm to 4:10 pm
Consciousness and Reality I
Chopra D, Chopra Foundation Vedic Approaches To Consciousness And Reality
Mlodinow L, Pasadena, Grand Design
Zizzi P, Padua, Consciousness In The Early Universe

Wednesday May 4

Plenary 4, 8:30 am to 10:40 am
Transcranial Therapies
Wassermann E, NIH, Transcranial Stimulation and Consciousness
Snyder A, Sydney, Accessing Information Normally Beyond Conscious Awareness by
Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation
Tyler WJ, Arizona State, Transcranial Ultrasound Therapy for Brain Injury

Plenary 5, 11:10am to 12:30 pm
Neural correlates of consciousness I
Malach R., Weizman, Local Neuronal Ignitions And The Emergence Of Perceptual Awareness
Plenz D, NIH, Neuronal Avalanches, Coherence Potentials, And Cooperativity:
Dynamical Aspects That Define Mammalian Cortex

Plenary 6, 2:00 pm to 4:10 pm
Consciousness and Reality II
Kafatos M, Chapman, Consciousness and The Universe: Non-local, Entangled, Probabilistic and Complementary Reality
Kallio Tamminem K, Helsinki, Quantum physics and Eastern philosophy
Pylkkanen P, Helsinki, Bohmian view of consciousness and reality


Thursday May 5

Plenary 7, 8:30 am to 10:40 am
Varieties of Religious Experience
Beauregard M, Montreal, Neuroscience of Transcendent Experiences
Moreira-Almeida, A., Juiz De Fora, Differential Diagnosis Between Spiritual Experiences and Mental Disorders
Roberto, Padr. Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Sacred Plants of Amazonia

Plenary 8, 11:10am to 12:30 pm
Time and consciousness II
Bierman D, Amsterdam, Presentiment
Cerf M, NYU, Time effects in human cortical neuronal firings

Plenary 9, 2:00 pm to 4:10 pm
Quantum Biology I
KEYNOTE: Luc Montagnier, Nobel Laureate, Pasteur Institute, The Transfer of Biological
Information Through Electromagnetic Waves and Water.
Giuseppe Vitiello, Salerno, DNA: On the Wave of Coherence
Bernroider/Summerhammer, Salzburg, Quantum Properties in Ion Channel Proteins

THURSDAY EVENING
CONFERENCE DINNER CRUISE

Friday May 6

Plenary 10, 8:30 am to 10:40 am
Microtubules
Tuszynski JA., Edmonton, Information Processing Within Dendritic Cytoskeleton
Bandyopadhyay, A , NIMS, Tsukuba, Direct Experimental Evidence for Quantum
States in Microtubules and Topological Invariance
Tanzi R , Harvard, Zinc link between aBeta and microtubule instability in
Alzheimers disease

Plenary 11, 11:10am to 12:30 pm
KEYNOTE
Sir Roger Penrose
Oxford

Plenary 12, 2:00 pm to 4:10 pm
Neural correlates of consciousness II
Hesslow G, Lund, The Inner World As Simulated Interaction With The Environment
Ehrsson H, Karolinska, How We Come To Experience That We Own Our Body: The Cognitive
Neuroscience of Body Self-Perception
Ullen F, Karolinska, The Psychological Flow Experience: From Phenomenology to
Biological Correlates

Saturday May 7
Plenary 13, 8:30 am to 10:40 am
Anesthesia and consciousness
Hudetz A, Milwaukee, Anesthetics and Gamma Synchrony
Franks N, London, Molecular Actions of Anesthetics
Hameroff S, Tucson, Meyer-Overton Meets Quantum Physics

Plenary 14, 11:10 to 1:20 pm
End of life brain activity
Chawla L, GWU, Surges of Electroencephalogram Activity at the Time of Death. A
Case Series.
Van Lommel P. , Amsterdam, Nonlocal Consciousness: A Concept on the Continuity
of our Consciousness

There are also workshops in the days leading up to the event. This is huge! Leading edge research on the latest developments in understanding how quantum effects, once thought to be impossible to manifest in the "warm and wet" environment of living creatures, are a basic part of our experience of reality.

Here's another couple of links for you:

At the end of January, a great round table discussion featuring some of the experts who will be at the above conference occurred, go to the Philoctetes Center's Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination webpage and view the video. There are also some great comments on that page, including additional links provided by some of the participants in the round table discussion.

That same video is also on youtube at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEQeRBZcScY. Embedding has been disabled for the video so I can't paste it here, but there is some thoughtful and stimulating debate in this presentation, which is almost 107 minutes long. Enjoy the journey!

Next: Changing Your Brain

The Quantum Observer

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgw3Lv7R1w0

When Hugh Everett III first came up with his Many Worlds interpretation in 1957, he made an important distinction: when we observe one outcome or another, we are not really collapsing the quantum wave function, we are merely observing it in a particular state. The other potential states continue to exist, just as real as the one we're observing. Whether we call it "observing" or "collapsing" doesn't change what we see, but it can change the implications of whether there are actually other equally real parallel universe versions of our reality, or whether those parallel universes are just an imaginary outcome of a thought experiment.

Everett's thesis, despite support from John Wheeler (one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century) was met with indifference and in some cases derision from the physics community. So, instead of becoming a physicist upon his graduation, Everett took a job as a defense analyst with the Pentagon. Hugh Everett III has been credited with developing the infamous Cold War policy of Mutual Assured Destruction: the idea that if every nuclear power has enough atomic bombs to destroy the world, then no one should be tempted to start a war. Isn't it interesting to think about this policy, abbreviated appropriately enough as MAD, in the context of the Many Worlds Interpretation?

I've just come across a new book I'm going to order, pictured here, which is about this man's life: The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III: Multiple Universes, Mutual Assured Destruction, and the Meltdown of a Nuclear Family.

So. If each of us is observing the wave function of the universe in a particular state, we are each a unique Quantum Observer. Should that make each of us feel isolated, or connected? Gevin Giorbran called this the Quantum Isolation Problem. With my 2011 entries I've been showing a way of thinking about how our quantum world is connected to the fourth dimension, and our "duration" is in the fifth, but how really both are interchangeable: this means that which label you assign to any particular spatial dimension depends upon your frame of reference established by the previous ones.

Last time, in Timelike Entanglement, I quoted a paragraph from my book and mentioned that the next paragraph was about The Quantum Observer, a topic that comes up a number of times with this project. Here's that paragraph now:

A particular meme-set, when it is attached to a physical body, is the quantum observer for that person, collapsing the wave of possibilities along the arrow of time and experiencing life as we know it. However, since that set of memes can also be thought of as existing completely separately from a physical body, there are many other ramifications to this.

Some of those ramifications get quite metaphysical, but this time let's look at some new articles that have come out recently to show how the quantum world connects to the fourth dimension, birds as quantum observers, and life as a subset of a quantum wave function.

Here's a link to a paper published at Cornell University Library's arXiv.org demonstrating the math behind Quantum Mechanics in Four Dimensions. Then, check out this new article at New Scientist magazine, "Quantum States Last Longer in Birds' Eyes". It reveals that birds are able to maintain electrons in an entangled state longer at the back of their eyes than any scientist working in a lab under carefully controlled conditions has been able to do so far. The birds, it appears are able to use the information gleaned from these entangled electrons to aid in their navigation abilities.

Finally, Micheal Brooks published a wonderful summation of the many interpretations of what it means to be a quantum observer last week in New Scientist: the article is called "Quantum Reality: The Many Meanings of Life". Here's some paragraphs from that article:

A CENTURY, it seems, is not enough. One hundred years ago this year, the first world physics conference took place in Brussels, Belgium. The topic under discussion was how to deal with the strange new quantum theory and whether it would ever be possible to marry it to our everyday experience, leaving us with one coherent description of the world.

It is a question physicists are still wrestling with today. Quantum particles such as atoms and molecules have an uncanny ability to appear in two places at once, spin clockwise and anticlockwise at the same time, or instantaneously influence each other when they are half a universe apart. The thing is, we are made of atoms and molecules, and we can't do any of that. Why? "At what point does quantum mechanics cease to apply?" asks Harvey Brown, a philosopher of science at the University of Oxford.

Although an answer has yet to emerge, the struggle to come up with one is proving to be its own reward. It has, for instance, given birth to the new field of quantum information that has gained the attention of high-tech industries and government spies. It is giving us a new angle of attack on the problem of finding the ultimate theory of physics, and it might even tell us where the universe came from. Not bad for a pursuit that a quantum cynic - one Albert Einstein - dismissed as a "gentle pillow" that lulls good physicists to sleep.

Unfortunately for Einstein quantum theory has turned out to be a masterpiece. No experiment has ever disagreed with its predictions, and we can be confident that it is a good way to describe how the universe works on the smallest scales. Which leaves us with only one problem: what does it mean?

Physicists try to answer this with "interpretations" - philosophical speculations, fully compliant with experiments, of what lies beneath quantum theory. "There is a zoo of interpretations," says Vlatko Vedral, who divides his time between the University of Oxford and the Centre for Quantum Technologies in Singapore.

No other theory in science has so many different ways of looking at it. How so? And will any one win out over the others?

Take what is now known as the Copenhagen interpretation, for example, introduced by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. It says that any attempt to talk about an electron's location within an atom, for instance, is meaningless without making a measurement of it. Only when we interact with an electron by trying to observe it with a non-quantum, or "classical", device does it take on any attribute that we would call a physical property and therefore become part of reality.

Then there is the "many worlds" interpretation, where quantum strangeness is explained by everything having multiple existences in myriad parallel universes. Or you might prefer the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation, where quantum theory is considered incomplete: we are lacking some hidden properties that, if we knew them, would make sense of everything.

There are plenty more, such as the Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber interpretation, the transactional interpretation (which has particles travelling backwards in time), Roger Penrose's gravity-induced collapse interpretation, the modal interpretation... in the last 100 years, the quantum zoo has become a crowded and noisy place.

I liked this article because it points to a claim I've been making since my project began: that the Many Worlds Interpretation is seeing increasing acceptance from mainstream science. But as we've seen here, it's not the only game in town! Later on in the article, it offers further explanation for the rising popularity of Many Worlds.

Considering the nature of things on the scale of the universe has also provided Copenhagen's critics with ammunition. If the process of measurement by a classical observer is fundamental to creating the reality we observe, what performed the observations that brought the contents of the universe into existence? "You really need to have an observer outside the system to make sense - but there's nothing outside the universe by definition," says Brown.

That's why, Brown says, cosmologists now tend to be more sympathetic to an interpretation created in the late 1950s by Princeton University physicist Hugh Everett. His "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics says that reality is not bound to a concept of measurement.

Instead, the myriad different possibilities inherent in a quantum system each manifest in their own universe. David Deutsch, a physicist at the University of Oxford and the person who drew up the blueprint for the first quantum computer, says he can now only think of the computer's operation in terms of these multiple universes. To him, no other interpretation makes sense.

He and Brown both claim that many worlds is already gaining traction among cosmologists. Arguments from string theory, cosmology and observational astronomy have led some cosmologists to suggest we live in one of many universes. Last year, Anthony Aguirre of the University of California, Santa Cruz, Max Tegmark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and David Layzer of Harvard University laid out a scheme that ties together ideas from cosmology and many worlds (New Scientist, 28 August 2010, p 6).

I know it looks like I've quoted a lot here, but there's still much more to the full article and I invite you to follow the link and read the whole thing.

So, if we're each moving through a probability space of possible universes, are we causing reality to occur, or is reality simply happening to us as we helplessly observe one outcome after another? We'll return to this ongoing discussion of how much control do we really have as we navigate through the information that becomes reality, with an entry next week called Changing Your Brain. But right before that, let's look at this question: "What Is Reality?".

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

At Right Angles to Spacetime

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

This new video accompanies my blog entry You are a Point at the Center of Spacetime, published last August. Now I'd like to tie the ideas in this video to a blog entry that came a month later, called Light Has No Speed.

Last time, in Time's Illusions, we looked at two definitions of the word "now":

1. "Now" is what I see at this instant. This includes what I see when I look up at the stars: even though I know it took years for their light to reach me, their light is reaching me right "now".
2. "Now" is what's entangled with this very instant, and that's how the quantum world's instantaneous "spooky action at a distance" effects occur. "Now" is not what I see when I look at a star that's ten light years away, because the time it takes light to travel means that I won't be seeing what that star looks like "now" until ten years in the future.

Which of these agrees more with your definition of the word? Consider this:

A point in 3D space can, by virtue of it being of indeterminate size, be infinitesimally small (like the point we're most familiar with from geometry), or infinitely large, encompassing all of 3D space. In my book, and blog entries like The Flipbook Universe and What's Around the Corner, I've been asking people to imagine that this infinitely large "point" would be a "frame" of space (with no time), and each 3D frame is one planck length away from the next to create 4D spacetime.

A point in 4D spacetime can also be infinitesimally small (like the tip of my nose at 3 p.m. tomorrow afternoon, a very specific location in space and in time), or it can be infinitely large. What does an infinitely large point in spacetime encompass? In other words, which of the two "now"s listed above should we be thinking about here?

If I were to say that the infinitely large version of that point is the entire universe at 3 p.m. tomorrow afternoon, I would only have enlarged the space aspect: but I also need to enlarge the duration, the 4D element.

In Light Has No Speed, we looked at a presentation by physicist Peter Russell which explains that for a photon, there is no space and no time. From a photon's point of view, it travels instantaneously from a star 100 light years away to an observer such as you or I. So is our 4D point of infinite size like a photon, potentially encompassing all of our universe's timeline from its beginning to its end in one single instant?

Here's an additional clue from Mr. Russell to throw into this: for a photon, there is no non-locality, and the photon is "outside" of spacetime. So from the sounds of it our photon is not in the fourth dimension. Where is it then?

We know that non-locality is part of our universe, as it and other "spooky" quantum processes have been proven to exist beyond a doubt (we've talked about this in such entries as Our Non-Local Universe and Local Realism Bites the Dust). So is our 4D point in its largest state encompassing the "now" of non-locality? We've talked many times about how it's so easy for us to forget that the star we see in the sky is really not part of our "now" because of the time it took for the light to arrive here - looking at a star is looking back in time. The "now" of non-locality and quantum superposition allows for instantaneous correlations to occur at great distances, because our "now" is not what we see when we look into the sky.

Is it better, then, to think of our infinitely large 4D point that way: as encompassing the quantum world of instantaneous entanglement and non-locality?

Here's how I prefer to think about it - both definitions of "now" apply, because you and I are actually a point in the fifth dimension rather than the fourth. And just as trying to relegate "up/down" or "forward/backward" to a specific dimension within a 3D space makes sense only from a particular reference frame, thinking about these two versions of "now" makes more sense when we realize that our current "observation point" is in a frame of the fifth dimension, not the fourth. This is what Einstein came to believe as well: that our reality is defined at the fifth dimension, where the field equations for gravity and light are resolved.

Believing that our "now" is only in the fourth dimension leaves us thinking that the two arrows we're looking at here are not compatible. My diagram shows us how Peter Russell can say that light is not part of 4D spacetime, and light is not part of non-locality - because light is at right angles to spacetime.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next - Is Spacetime Flat or Curved?

Time's Illusions

Here's two new videos for you to look at today, both of them are quite short:


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxsu8BPK-S0

The above new video accompanies Alexander's Time Illusion Game, a blog entry from last August. I also published "Flow and the Now" in August, here's the video version for that one which I've posted to YouTube just a few days ago.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ev6Je9yJNE

These two videos tie together into a larger discussion of just what we mean when we say now. Here's a mental puzzle for you to consider: I am suggesting that there are really two "now"s that are at right angles to each other, but most of us tend to blur these two opposing concepts together in our minds.

Our reality is not continuous, and the seamless reality we believe we are observing is really a discrete series of "now"s that are each one planck frame apart from the next. That is the "illusion of time". Which of these two versions of "now" would you say are more correct?

1. "Now" is what I see at this instant. This includes what I see when I look up at the stars: even though I know it took years for their light to reach me, their light is reaching me right "now".
2. "Now" is what's entangled with this very instant, and that's how the quantum world's instantaneous "spooky action at a distance" effects occur. "Now" is not what I see when I look at a star that's ten light years away, because the time it takes light to travel means that I won't be seeing what that star looks like "now" until ten years in the future.

Which version of the word applies more for you? I've started a poll question here that lets you provide your answer. We're going to talk more about this question in the next few entries, as we get to my soon-to-be-released video that accompanies my blog entry "Light Has No Speed".

Are you enjoying the journey right "now"?

Rob Bryanton

Next: At Right Angles to Spacetime

Neurons and Extra Dimensions

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

This video accompanies a text blog entry from May of this year: "Entangled Neurons". In that entry I tied together research indicating that neurons and memory formation could be related to quantum effects with my own explanations of how "quantum spookiness" is easier to understand when we accept these effects occur "outside" of our spacetime.

"Tangential thinking" has been the theme of a number of blog entries this month. With this entry, we explore the idea that thinking itself could be connected to our extra-dimensional selves, and the parts of our awareness that are (to use Stephen Hawking's phrase) at "right angles to spacetime".

We'll continue this line of reasoning next time with Extra Dimensions and OBEs. In the meantime, here's a video on "Quantum Consciousness" which some fans of Imagining the Tenth Dimension will appreciate:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZC1aA47iZg

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Poll 71-73 - More Tangential Thinking

Poll 71
Poll 71: "In the June issue of Scientific American, it said this: 'A function of space plays the role of time. So even though the system as a whole is timeless, the individual pieces are not'. Do you agree with this statement?" Poll ended Sept 14 2010 73.3% were in agreement, while the remaining 26.7% were not.

It's interesting to me that this phrase was accepted by such a large percentage of visitors to this blog, while similar or related proposals in past poll questions have appeared to be more contentious. This dichotomy between thinking of time as a direction, a way of describing change from state, within a larger realm of timelessness is at the center of my approach to visualizing the dimensions. Last week, in Bees and Tangential Thinking, we talked about Stephen Hawking's proposal that there is another kind of time that is at "right angles" to our spacetime. I agree with that idea but again and again I'm confronted with people who are confused about time, spacetime, and how that relates to the fourth spatial dimension. The word "time" has many interpretations! This Scientific American quote that we looked at in this poll question is one way to ease people into the idea that time is a direction, not a dimension, and that time's opposite direction, anti-time, is just as valid within the underlying fabric of reality.

As I like to say, thinking of time without anti-time is like thinking of up without down or forward without backward: you need to consider the two opposing directions to be thinking about a spatial dimension, and thinking about what's beyond the fourth spatial dimension requires tangential thinking.

Poll 72
Poll 72: "Simulism: would you live your life any differently if you knew the reality you're seeing around is really just a gigantic virtual simulation?" Poll ended October 3 2010. 59.4% said yes, and 40.6% said no.

Another completely different example of tangential thinking. People love to play with these "nested Russian dolls" concepts: what if my reality is a dream of some other reality? What if our universe comes from a black hole in another universe, which comes from another black hole, and so on?

In my blog entry on Nassim Haramein, we looked at similar recursive ideas. As part of one of his presentations, Nassim shows clips from a couple of movies: the opening sequence of "Contact", and the ending of "Men in Black", both of which give us graphic ways of visualizing a universe that is embedded in other universes. I've remarked in my book and my blog that the "universe embedded in a rose in an abandoned parking lot" idea from Stephen King's Dark Tower series is another interesting fictional portrayal of this recursive/fractal idea.

But with Simulism, we're generally talking about something that is a more deliberate construct, as opposed to something that just "happened" as a result of the naturally occurring fabric of reality. In chapter four of my book I said this:

From the binary viewpoint, the tenth dimension becomes like the hugest computer memory in the world, containing every possible “0” and “1” that could be combined together to describe every possible universe. The “holodeck” of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame started out as a “simple” virtual reality simulator, but as the writers developed the series, its power appeared to grow to the point where entire universes could be created within its walls. How would a person’s life inside such a world be different from a life in the real world? The somewhat confusing Matrix Trilogy started out with the same clear and profound concept–our experience inside a system capable of simulating every aspect of reality would, to our senses, be indistinguishable from the experience of actual reality.

Which leads us back to the poll question: if you were shown incontrovertible proof today that you are living in a simulation, a virtual world, would you change the way you behaved? 59% said they would change. Fascinating! I want to know more, so a new poll question is running here now to ask people how they would change.

Poll 73
Poll 73: "It turns out that in a certain way the 'Geocentric Model' really was correct - in a very real sense, each of us is an observer at the exact center of our very own version of the space-time universe." Poll ended October 24, 2010. 85.3% agreed, and only 14.6% disagreed.

Think about this question in terms of the previous poll question. If you are an observer, piloting your focused consciousness attached to this collection of atoms and molecules that you call your body as you ride the entropy-driven arrow of time, how much control do you have?

The answer, I hope you'll agree, is more than most of us have been trained to believe. In Changing Reality, we looked at some of the new scientific evidence to support this idea. Here's the video for that entry:


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

Enjoy the journey!

Next: Polls Archive 53 to 73

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