Imagining the Fourth Dimension

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MN4KC_zlW4g

Here's where we start getting into some possible confusion because the same word can have many different meanings. When people say that "time" is the fourth dimension, what does that mean? The fourth dimension adds a way for the third dimension to change: this is obvious when we say "the third dimension is space without time".  But the entropy-driven "arrow of time" that people associate with this concept is obviously not spatial, because it behaves in ways that are different from the first three dimensions. This is why some people prefer to say that the fourth dimension is a "temporal" dimension, while the first three are spatial.

But the more we learn about "space-time" and general relativity, the more we realize that time is not just an arrow. The fourth dimension stretches, it bends, and quantum entanglement shows that it's possible for particles to make instantaneous connections within it, even for there to be causality in time's reverse direction! And as mind-blowing as this may be to fathom, the accepted definition for anti-matter is that it's matter which is moving "backwards in time".

This is why, with this project, I prefer to call the fourth dimension duration. I ask people to accept that "time" is a direction, not a dimension, in the same way that "up" or "forward" are directions rather than dimensions. Two opposing directions can be used to describe a spatial dimension, and "time" and "anti-time" are two words we can use to describe the fourth dimension. But they're not the only words! And this is important, because all we're really trying to do here is come up with words that describe the dimension which is at right angles to the third dimension.

Here's something important to remember: none of these dimensions exist in isolation. You can't make a 1D line without using points, you can't make a 2D plane without lines, you can't make a 3D space without planes, and you can't have a 4D duration without multiple planck frames of space. Saying "the fourth dimension is duration" makes no more sense than saying "the third dimension is depth", if when we say those phrases we're thinking you can have duration without space, or depth without length and width. Saying "the fourth dimension is space-time", then, at least acknowledges that the fourth dimension encompasses the dimensions from which it is constructed, and doesn't exist in isolation from the other dimensions. Let me say this again: it doesn't matter what label you put on the fourth dimension (or any additional dimension) as long as you're thinking about how the new dimension is somehow at right angles to the ones before: a rose by any other name still smells as sweet, to paraphrase Mr. Shakespeare.

So. Time is not really a dimension, but no matter what dimension you're examining the direction of "time" is a word we can use for tracking change from state to state. In Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, theoretical physicist Lee Smolin adds this comment: "Newton's concept of time was that it was absolute. It was like a metronome, which, as he said, ticks on absolutely, without regard to whether anything is happening in the universe or not ...This was the great insight of Einstein and it was the basis of his general theory of relativity: that time is created by the relationships of the changes that happen in the universe, and nothing else."

In "Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?" I insist that it makes no sense to say that the first three dimensions are spatial, and the fifth dimension and above are spatial or at very least "space-like," but then to say that the fourth dimension isn't spatial - if that were the case then the mental castle we're building here has a very rickety layer at the fourth dimension, and the whole structure is prone to crashing down.

Last entry, we talked about how it's really impossible for us to "see" the third dimension, because it takes a certain amount of time for the light from anything in the third dimension to reach our eye - and that's just as true for our hand in front of our face as it is for a star ten light years away. Saying that a third dimensional object has length, width and depth is a phrase we casually say, but we have to keep in mind that discussing a third dimensional object like a cube is the same as discussing dragons or flatlanders - a 3D cube is an idea which we can freely discuss, but without using the fourth dimension to view such an object, it's only a concept.

Likewise, persons who talk about tesseracts as being four-dimensional objects say that this is what the real fourth dimension is like, but what we're really talking about with a tesseract or any other n-dimensional shape is the same as a cube: it's an idea. In order for a tesseract to really exist, it has to have a duration within its dimension, and when we watch an animation of a rotating tesseract we are visualizing how that structure could rotate and change from state to state over time. Likewise, just as a cube represents a simple and idealized shape within the third dimension, but there are the limitless range of other shapes that can exist within the third dimension, the additional degree of freedom afforded by the fourth spatial dimension allows for an even larger number of other shapes which can exist within that dimension.

One word physicists use to describe the path an object takes within space-time is a world line. 

Another word for a fourth-dimensional shape, coined by author and futurist Bruce Sterling, is a spime. With my Imagining the Tenth Dimension project, I ask people to visualize themselves in the fourth dimension as a long undulating snake, which is a way to think about the data set that represents a person's "length" or "duration" within the fourth dimension, from conception to death. Do you see how that snake is a spime? Depending upon your point of view, though, that "snake" could be much blurrier than what we show in the animation: every day our bodies are exchanging atoms with the outside world, through the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink. A constant cycle of repairs and replacement means the spime representing a person from conception to death is a much more wide-ranging and interconnected shape than what we might first imagine.

One of the 26 songs attached to this project, called Change and Renewal, is about this idea. The first two verses go like this:

Every minute of every day
I keep changing, I keep changing
Nothing ever stays the same
All replacing, rearranging
Every cell that’s in me now
Was not the same when I was born
In an endless constant flow
Renewing when they’re old and worn

Every minute of every day
We are water, we are water
Swimming in an endless sea
Mothers, fathers, sons and daughters
Molecules of H-2-O
That move around and move between
In an endless constant flow
Connecting us in ways unseen

Let's finish off by thinking about the point-line-plane postulate again, which can be used to visualize any number of spatial dimensions. The trick I've suggested you start with each time is to think of a point that encompasses the entire dimension, then find a point that is "outside" of what that first point encompasses. So a one-dimensional point, in the largest version of its indeterminate state, occupies the entire length of a line, and some new point not found anywhere on that line allows us to visualize the second dimension. A two-dimensional point, in its largest version fills an entire plane, and a point not within that plane gets us to the third dimension. A third dimensional point at its largest version is like a single planck unit sized "slice" of the entire universe, and allows us to think about the possibility that Julian Barbour has pointed out - that each of those 3D "frames" allows for the instantaneous quantum connections often deemed as supremely mysterious and unfathomable. Having said that, though, we still have to decode the mystery of how we can have a physical world made out of objects that are not infinitely large within the third dimension, and this is why I say those quantum connections are at "right angles" to space-time.

So let's continue the point line plane postulate's logic into the fourth dimension. A 4D point at its largest version would encompass the universe not just in space, but in space-time: that point would reach from the beginning to the end of the universe, in the same way that a photon traveling at the speed of light would perceive itself to be simultaneously emitted from a distant star and arriving at an observer's retina - this is an important concept we looked at in Light Has No Speed. It also ties nicely to something Einstein said a number of times: there is a way of thinking about reality in which the separation between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

What's outside that largest possible 4D point we've just imagined? Well, if you are a person who has been trained to believe that free will is also nothing more than a stubbornly persistent illusion, you might well say "that's as far as we need to go". After all, if the universe was set in motion at the big bang and anything we do is an inevitable outcome based on what has come before, then the largest 4D point we can imagine accounts for all of that, from the beginning to the end, including the "Now" that each of us is observing at this very instant.

But what if you believe in free will? With this project, that's where we start to think about the Fifth Dimension.

Next: Imagining the Fifth Dimension

Previous:
Imagining the Third Dimension
Imagining the Second Dimension

Photons and Free Will

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABh5j2yA_mE

(or should I call this one "Photons and Phree Will"? Hey, I'm just a sucker for alliteration!)

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

This new video accompanies one of my favorite blog entries of 2010, Light Has No Speed. This one has already generated a lot of interest and discussion over at my YouTube channel.

We talked about one of the central ideas in the above entry last week in At Right Angles to Spacetime, where I showed you two intersecting arrows. Here's that diagram again, this time with a little more explanatory text added:

(you can click on the above picture for a higher resolution version)

Understanding that our reality is actually a continually evolving series of "points" in the fifth dimension, representing the intersection between the above two lines, is key to understanding my approach to visualizing the extra dimensions. Think about these ideas:

• From a photon's point of view, there is no space, no time. The "time" it takes for light from a distant star to reach our eye does not exist for a photon - from its perspective it took no time to reach us. In that sense, thinking of this photon's path is like thinking of the "long undulating snake" we think of in my project, or the "spime" concept that Bruce Sterling likes to talk about - it's a data-set that connects the past to the future, viewed from outside of spacetime.
• If that photon had not reached our eyes, it could have continued on into the future, traveling from that distant star many light years away with the light that from our perspective is already from many years ago: but even from the perspective of a photon coming from the very beginning of our universe traveling to the very end of our universe, this would still all happen simultaneously: for such a photon, the entire life of our universe would be one single event.
• This reveals the contradiction in believing in free will and believing that there is nothing beyond our 4D spacetime: from this photon's perspective, then, there is only one single past, one single future, and everything is inevitable: including the dogged insistence that the free will we believe we're experiencing is real, when in fact it's only an illusion.

But thinking of our spacetime universe as having only one path from its beginning to its end leaves us with no easy way of understanding non-locality or quantum entanglement: these effects seem mysterious, unfathomably weird. This "photon's perspective" we're talking about here doesn't have room for such "spooky actions" (as Einstein referred to them) to occur, and yet quantum theories have been confirmed through experimentation to a higher degree of accuracy than any other theory about the underlying structures of our reality.

In Time's Illusions, we talked about the two kinds of "now" that are shown in my above diagram, and we started a poll question to see which kind of "now" people think of as applying to our space-time reality. Then, with At Right Angles to Spacetime I started another poll question, asking if people agree with that blog's title as a definition of light.

Here's the kicker - in both cases, there's a third "all of the above" answer I should have provided, but chose not to because it would have been so easy for people to select it without thinking about the other options. That answer, as I hope I've made clear with my blog entries this month, is that our spacetime "now" is in the fifth dimension, not the fourth, so both versions of "now" are correct depending upon your perspective. And because both light and gravity push against each other to create our reality, whether you think one or the other is at right angles to spacetime also depends upon your frame of reference. As I've said before, it's the same with the third dimension - calling the directions added by the third dimension up/down, or forward/backward, or left/right, or whatever doesn't change what you're adding, because these are just labels that are defined by the frame of reference already established.

Likewise, what we call the additional degree of freedom afforded by the fifth dimension can change depending upon your frame of reference, or which of the two "now" arrows pictured in the above diagram, you choose to assign to the fourth dimension.We'll talk about how our reality is defined at the fifth dimension through constructive interference more next time, with Cymatics.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

The Long Undulating Snake

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKNJmrdA0Fg

(an amusing shot from the parody of Imagining the Tenth Dimension created by
CollegeHumor.com that we looked at last time, in "Ice Age in 4D")

One of the more well-known phrases from my original Imagining the Tenth Dimension animation is that when each of us thinks of ourselves as a shape in the fourth spatial dimension, we're more like a long undulating snake, a shape with a beginning, a middle and an end. I've talked before about futurist and science fiction writer Bruce Sterling who refers to this kind of fourth-dimensional information-set as a spime, and that's really the same concept.

In Suffering in the Multiverse, we took an extreme look at all of the universes that could be out there - not just in the parallel universes that result from chance and choice as per the proof published in 2007 by a team of scientists at Oxford under the direction of physicist David Deutsch, equating the quantum wave function with the different versions of our universe that result from chance and choice... but also in the multiverse landscape of all the 10 to the power of 500 potential universes that scientists like Brian Greene (who we just quoted in Does the Multiverse Really Exist?) are now beginning to say are just as real as the universe we find ourselves to be living within.

Then, in The Biocentric Universe Part 2, we looked at an amazing theory that shows how life creates time and the universe, and not the other way around. Does that sound crazy? Not when we think of ourselves from within the fifth dimension rather than the fourth.

Let's look at that "long undulating snake" visualization of ourselves within the fourth dimension. When you die, there will be one version of that shape which will represent the life you experienced from conception to death. But right now you are some place within that 4D shape, and there are many branches that lie before you. Those branches come from the fifth dimension, the dimension that Kaluza proved to Einstein is where our universe is defined, the dimension which the Holographic Universe theory says our universe is just a shadow of, the dimension where my project insists the "spooky" non-local nature of quantum mechanics makes sense when we realize that our 4D "line of time" is not continuous, because it's actually being created one planck frame at a time as our universe twists, turns and folds within our fifth dimensional probability space.

So, here you are at this very instant, someplace within that 4D shape. You can imagine that you have one long "tail" stretching from "now" back to conception, and then a "ray" of possible futures in the fifth dimension, making your shape more like a dandelion gone to seed than a "snake".

But it turns out that that's only half the story. As we've explored in blogs like The Past is an Illusion and Time in Either Direction, there are also an equally complex number of ways that you could have gotten to the "now" you're in at this instant, so in the fifth dimension you are really more like the very centre of the head of that dandelion gone to seed, forgetting about the stalk - there are branching, probabilistic versions of you that extend out into the past just as much as into the future.

Some people call this idea mind-blowing, I prefer to call it liberating. By understanding just how much freedom we each have at any particular "now" to navigate out of traps and negative loops, and visualizing the best-possible-versions of ourselves that already exist within the fifth dimension, we can head towards those goals. Think of the scientific evidence concerning the effectiveness of placebos and nocebos, and the burgeoning science of epigenetics (which shows that changes in attitude and lifestyle can change which genes are switched on or off): when you add those ideas in you can see just how intimately we are each involved in choosing one set of branches over another as we travel through our lives. This is not just about entering one parallel universe or another depending on whether I slept in an extra ten minutes this morning or not: this is about being fully engaged with the beautiful possibilities we have before us.

By understanding that the past is just as complex a structure as the future, we can start to visualize how such amazing theories as Lanza and Berman's Biocentric Universe make more sense - but all of this doesn't really start to gel until we start to imagine this "dandelion gone to seed" imagery from an even higher extra dimension, where all of those possible branches exist as a single point.

Then, finally, we've reached the purest expression of the concept that Einstein was thinking about when he said there is ultimately no distinction, no separation, between past, present and future.

But what about the law of the conservation of energy? How can there be all of these different versions of our universe without running out of energy? That law still stands: there is a certain total amount of energy within a particular version of each dimension, and that's one of the things that physicists use to calculate the amount of dark matter and dark energy that is affecting our particular universe. But each additional dimension multiplies the possibilities for the way that energy can be expressed. There are not nearly as many possible expressions of energy for our imaginary 2D flatlander as there are for us in the third dimension, for instance. And I really love the concept of digital physics because it tells us that ultimately, our reality is not based upon energy, but information. As MIT professor and quantum computing expert Seth Lloyd says in his mind-expanding book "Programming the Universe":

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

Information equals reality. And that long undulating snake imagery is really just another way of trying to get people to think about reality as information, because that is a liberating approach with far-reaching implications.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: The Flexi-Laws of Physics

Edit: The above blog entry was published in 2009. Here's a great entry published by physicist Sean Carroll in 2010 that gives a good explanation of how the laws of conservation of energy only apply locally. As our spacetime expands, so does the amount of available energy: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/02/22/energy-is-not-conserved/

Our Non-Local Universe

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBPBc4iZtro

Entanglement-at-a-distance does physically exist, in the sense that it has physically verifiable (and verified) consequences. Which proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that some of our most engrained notions about space and causality should be reconsidered.
- theoretical physicist Bernard d'Espagnat

(I've talked before about the underlying patterns of information that create our universe, and of ideas that connect us all together, and how much I like the term Richard Dawkins gave us for this concept: "memes". Memes, as ideas that instantaneously connect together "outside of spacetime" are a great example of thinking about our universe from a timeless perspective. I saw another great example of the kind of synchronicities that arise as people around the world think similar thoughts right after I finished writing today's blog entry. The above quote is from a blog entry posted just a few days ago by award-winning theoretical physicist Bernard d'Espagnat. Click here to read his blog entry in full, and you will see a great many parallels to the blog entry you're about to read.)

Principle of locality
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In physics, the principle of locality states that an object is influenced directly only by its immediate surroundings. Quantum mechanics predicts through Bell's inequality the direct violation of this principle. Experiments have shown that quantum mechanically entangled particles violate this principle: they have been shown to influence each other when physically separated by 18 km, thus the principle of locality is false.

As the above wikipedia definition clearly states, our universe is non-local, despite what our intuition might tell us as we look around at our world. Understanding that our 4D spacetime is really just a shadow of patterns that exist outside of time, within the fifth dimension and above (see The Holographic Universe) gives us a way to visualize how entangled particles can be connected in ways that seem impossible, and this also gives us a way to see how the Shamanistic viewpoint regarding hidden forces which are outside our physical domain makes sense in this context: it's all part of our non-local universe.

The above picture comes from the National Human Genome Research Institute website.

The National Institute of Health published an article recently about ground-breaking new DNA analysis procedures that look at the helix not as a sequential ladder, but as a 3D shape. To quote from the article:

The sequence of the 3 billion DNA base pairs that make up the human genome holds the answers to many questions pertaining to human development, health and disease. Consequently, much research aimed at understanding the genome has focused on establishing the information encoded by the linear order of DNA bases. In the new study, however, researchers focused on how those bases chemically interact with each other to coil and fold the DNA molecule into a variety of shapes.

"We often think of DNA as a string of letters on a computer screen and forget that this string of letters is a three-dimensional molecule. But shape really matters," said Dr. Margulies, who is an investigator in NHGRI's Genomic Technology Branch. "Proteins that influence biological function by binding to DNA recognize more than just the sequence of bases. These binding proteins also see the surface of the DNA molecule and are looking for a shape that allows a lock-and-key fit."

I've talked many times about Richard Dawkins and his "River Out of Eden" concept, thinking about genes as being shapes that are connected across time (or as I like to say, the fourth spatial dimension, since for us "time" is just one of the two possible directions in that dimension). When we've already been encouraged to think of a genome as being a fourth dimensional shape (or as Bruce Sterling likes to say, a "spime"), I have to admit I assumed that 3D analysis of DNA was already in place!

This all relates to trying to think about our reality as existing outside of spacetime - if you think of reality as being only a linear sequence of events relentlessly moving forward on our "arrow of time", you are missing an important part of the picture.

Discover Magazine put up an amusing article on their website a couple of weeks ago, called Twenty Things You Didn't Know About Time. The last two entries in particular caught my eye:

19 Time has not been around forever. Most scientists believe it was created along with the rest of the universe in the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago.

20 There may be an end of time. Three Spanish scientists posit that the observed acceleration of the expanding cosmos is an illusion caused by the slowing of time. According to their math, time may eventually stop, at which point everything will come to a standstill.

With my project, I insist that those two ideas are related - both "before" and "after" the beginning and end of our universe are the same state: but to understand that idea requires a perspective which is "outside" of time as we know it. One of my personal favorite blog entries about this idea is "Local Realism Bites the Dust", which you might want to check out.

Quantum physics tells us that our reality is connected together in ways that seem impossible: instantaneous effects with widely separated but entangled particles make no sense within our sequential physical world... unless you can embrace the idea that our universe is non-local. An article in the March issue of Scientific American, written by David Z. Albert and Rivka Galchen, offers an explanation of Bell's Theorem which arrives at this important concluding paragraph:

Researchers carried out experiments using entangled photons instead of electrons (which alters the angles to use but makes the experiment technically much less difficult) and found results that conformed with quantum mechanics’s predictions. And so by Bell’s theorem there must not be any determinate values carried by those photons. And because that contradicts EPR’s conclusion, the assumption that nature is local is also wrong. And so the universe we live in cannot be local.

Our non-local universe allows for connections that transcend the "now" that we are in at this instant, and that is not some kind of mystical mumbo jumbo, that is an accepted scientific fact. Since that idea can be used to explain so many of the other mysteries we've been exploring with this project (most recently in entries like Creativity and the Quantum Universe, The Shaman, and The Musician) only adds weight to this conclusion, as non-intuitive as it may seem.

Embrace your non-locality! And enjoy the journey.

Rob Bryanton

Next: Imagining the Omniverse - Addendum

We're Already Dead (But That's Okay)

A direct link to this video can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQMO1eyMRuM

"Option-itis"
Here's something I've said before: things become less interesting to us as the number of choices multiply. If, as I've proposed with this project, the sixth dimension includes every possible expression of the wave function for our universe, then it includes the version where I went crazy, shot up my town, died in a hail of bullets. Do I ever want to even witness that particular version of reality? No thank you!

Nine dimensions, three triads, enfolded into the tenth dimension
Last blog, we talked about how dimensions four through six can be called the "moral" triad. It's that narrowing down of possibilities, through the moral decisions I've made so far, that have created the fifth dimensional subset that I have access to from this "now" forward--and that will continue to be true for the rest of my life. If you are fully engaged with that process, what could be more exciting? Every instant we are observing new possibilities from a fantastically complex wave function that exists across the dimensions, but which are also uniquely defined by our own personal set of experiences.

Some people like to make fun of this idea, but this is essentially true: we are each creating a version of the universe through our role as quantum observers, and the path that each of us takes is unique. But we're each also participating in a consensual reality that has been created by the other people we share this reality with, which means their moral decisions are also part of my probability set. This is the hard part, because it means someone else can still choose to kill me, or they can do things that limit my access to possible futures I'd like to get to.

Thinking about Parallel Universes
Which takes us to the craziest part of this idea: each of us have already died through bad luck or bad choices made, that's just not the part of the multiverse that we're currently witnessing. Believe it or not, that's the idea that started this all for me back when I was seven, but it has taken me many years of thinking and reading to arrive at the conclusion that this crazy idea is supported by science!

I've written many times about the proof published by the Oxford University team under the direction of physicist David Deutsch, a proof which New Scientist magazine listed as one of the most important scientific stories of 2007: the bush-like branching structure of our quantum wave function, and the parallel universes that result from chance and choice for each of us are provably equivalent. This means the universe where I took five minutes longer to get out of bed this morning is part a different parallel universe, which is just as real as the one I'm currently witnessing, it just happens to not be the version I'm traveling within. Mind-boggling? You bet. But also, as it turns out, completely compatible with what I've been claiming since I first came up with this way of visualizing reality over twenty years ago.

I'm a Spime and So Are You
In the original tenth dimension animation, we imagined a person's body as if it were a spime: a four-dimensional object. In the animation, we said this:

If you were to see your body in the fourth dimension, you would be like a long undulating snake, with your embryonic self at one end and your deceased self at the other.

If there were only one possible timeline from the beginning to the end of a person's life, that would be the end of the discussion. But as we explored in my book and blog entries like The Spacetime Tree, I'm proposing that our reality actually comes from the probability space of the fifth dimension, and it's easy to envision the branching structures that result from chance and choice as being part of a tree-like structure in the fifth dimension.

Souls as Systems
With this project, we're imagining a person's "soul" not as a single self-contained unit, but rather as being a multi-layered system of memes, a "society of mind" across the dimensions. Now we're talking about a set of parallel universes where, in many of them, bad things have happened that resulted in our deaths: but since everyone reading this blog is alive and not dead (I presume), we know that those branching timelines are not part of the parallel universe we're each currently witnessing. Yikes! What does this all mean?

How unlikely is the "Now" we're each currently in?
In Randomness and the Missing 96%, we talked about the idea that dark matter and junk DNA might be telling us more than we realize about how unlikely our current reality really is. And if we add up all of the bad luck and deliberate actions of others that could have resulted in each of us being dead by now, don't we arrive at the same conclusion? When you consider how many situations exist within all of the possible parallel universes for our universe where events conspired to result in each of us dying, it really does seem like a marvelous thing that we get to experience this reality which must be way out on the edge of the bell curve, a highly unlikely universe where each of us have managed to survive... for now.

So now, let's think about that "long undulating snake" that is our body not just in the fourth, but in the fifth dimension. From conception to death, there is the actual 4D "line of time" we have followed, and (as the Deutsch team have proved) there is the bush-like branching structure of possible outcomes extending out from our current "now". So we have something like a dandelion gone to seed held in our minds, with a single stalk representing the past and a "ray" of possible futures at the head.

But what about that missing 96%? Does it factor into the equation here as well? If we're thinking about all of the many possible paths that we have traveled upon up until now which, in a multiverse of possible timelines must include those times when we've already died, we can see in the past a great many other branches which extended off from the main stalk and ended. In my book I said this:

For each of us, we will be able to remember moments of malicious, random, or foolish action that could have done us in. It’s hard to forget that moment where a large object falling or a silly risk taken might have resulted in our death if we had only been in a slightly different place and time. According to the worldview we’re exploring, all of those things did actually happen: that drunk driver you saw last year came over the hill and smashed into you head on, and now you’re dead.

Asking the Big Questions
This is a question people ask themselves all time: what happens to us when we die? One interesting proposal I saw recently suggested maybe whatever we expect to happen is exactly what does happen! If you believe there will be nothing, that's what you get. If you believe that you will be able to continue to watch this particular version of the universe and see what happens to your loved ones, that's what happens. If you believe you will be enfolded back into a white light of all patterns and frequencies, that's where you'll go. And so on! By the time we're "outside" of the arrow of time, there's no reason to assume that these options are mutually exclusive, either: free from the limitations of a physical body riding along an entropy-driven timeline, a person's awareness could explore every parallel universe simultaneously if that was what they wanted to do!

I've quoted from Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop before with his well-considered musings on what parts of the pattern that represents a person might continue on. Now here's a different way of thinking about this idea: if there is a fifth-dimensional spacetime tree of other possible timelines for our universe, and each of us has timelines where we've already died, then could it be that there are parts of our consciousness, the interlocking patterns that make up our "society of mind" that chose to jump on to our current timeline because they wanted to see what would have happened if they hadn't died? The old adage "once bitten, twice shy" takes on a whole new meaning - if there are tiny voices in my head saying "remember how I died last time I tried that!" then perhaps next time I will be less likely to take a silly risk.

My song "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep" is a meditation on the question of what happens to us when we die. To finish, here's a video of me sitting at my old piano singing that song.


A direct link to this video can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeClGTuhCy4

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

For related discussion of these ideas:
Unlikely Events and Timelessness
The Spacetime Tree
The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic
John August and The Nines

PS: Have each of us already died in other parts of the multiverse? That's one of our poll questions right now. And a few blog entries ago I mentioned a project called The Omniverse Almanac, some interesting fiction writing which explores a similar world of ideas, check it out!

Next: Time in 3 Dimensions

Changing Your Genes

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYnmqhm7BIU

(Update: some of the ideas in this entry are continued in another entry published one month later, Changing Your Genes Part 2)

In Crossing Your Arms to Change Your Trajectory, we talked about how it is surprisingly easy to modify your potential future paths by making adjustments in physical stance or mental attitude. In Local Realism Bites the Dust, we talked about the groundbreaking experiments being conducted by quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger and his team in Vienna, that are now proving that the only thing that is truly real is our observed "now": amazingly, everything else in the future and the past extending out from our constantly moving "now" is a probabilistic cloud. In entries like The Fifth Dimension is a Dangerous Idea, The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic, and Being More Fifth Dimensional, we've talked about what a powerful idea this is: if everything before and after "now" is only a probabilistic wave function, then we as observers have much more control over the information that becomes reality than the traditional viewpoint has led us to believe.

Genes, memes, and spimes: these are three powerful ways of visualizing the information that becomes our reality from a more timeless vantage point. As we discussed in entries like John Wheeler and Digital Physics, Boredom and Consciousness, and The Omniverse, physicist John Wheeler introduced us to the idea that not just the future but the past can be changed by observation, an idea that makes much more sense if we can accept the evidence of the Zeilinger experiments.

So, while we're not talking about magic here (my role as an observer can't change the force of gravity or the speed of light, or allow me to walk through walls or bring back the dead, and so on), there really are things about the past that we as quantum observers can change: and this is an idea which contradicts most of what we are taught. Most of us believe, for instance, that our genes are locked in by heredity, and as a randomized mixing of our parent's genetic material that occurred at conception, this is not something we have control over now.

Now click here to read about a new study indicating that we can turn genes on and off simply by altering our lifestyle and our mental attitude. Or read below for a few paragraphs from the article:

WASHINGTON (Reuters Life) - Comprehensive lifestyle changes including a better diet and more exercise can lead not only to a better physique, but also to swift and dramatic changes at the genetic level, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

In a small study, the researchers tracked 30 men with low-risk prostate cancer who decided against conventional medical treatment such as surgery and radiation or hormone therapy.

The men underwent three months of major lifestyle changes, including eating a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes and soy products, moderate exercise such as walking for half an hour a day, and an hour of daily stress management methods such as meditation.

As expected, they lost weight, lowered their blood pressure and saw other health improvements. But the researchers found more profound changes when they compared prostate biopsies taken before and after the lifestyle changes.

After the three months, the men had changes in activity in about 500 genes — including 48 that were turned on and 453 genes that were turned off.

The activity of disease-preventing genes increased while a number of disease-promoting genes, including those involved in prostate cancer and breast cancer, shut down, according to the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As I've said before, ideas that imply this level of control over our own reality have, up to now, often been ridiculed as quackery, so publication of the above report by the National Academy of Sciences is remarkable. My song "Positive Vibes" talks about similar ideas that the mainstream often ridicule: how much control do we really have over reality? Are we really able to affect changes in ourselves and others purely by sending out positive thoughts into the "ether"? Are we really able to affect our immune systems through positive visualization, or simply through the determined viewpoint of saying "I'm too busy to get sick"? Next blog, we'll talk about the daily parrying that, historically speaking, has indoctrinated us into thinking that such ideas are nonsense.


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

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Daily Parrying

Shadows of higher dimensions

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

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

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


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

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

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

Hypercubes and Plato's Cave

Edit: We've explored the visual ideas in this entry from a number of perspectives since it was published, here are some more recent entries:
Playing Games in Extra Dimensions
O is for Omniverse G to J
What's Around the Corner?
When's a Knot Not a Knot?
Imagining the Omniverse - Addendum
The Holographic Universe
Slices of Reality
Why Do We Need More Than 3 Dimensions?
Time in 3 Dimensions


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xN4DxdiFrs

One of the most common questions about this way of visualizing dimensions is whether the four dimensions of spacetime really are four spatial dimensions, or just three spatial plus one of time. I argue that for us "time" really is in the fourth spatial dimension which we, as creatures built from chemical reactions obeying the laws of entropy, are experiencing in a unique way. This relates closely to a phrase that is being uttered by many physicists nowadays: "time is an illusion". Saying that time is an illusion doesn't mean that we don't experience time from moment to moment, but rather it means that what we are experiencing as time is only a tiny window into a much greater underlying fabric, which ultimately encompasses the multiverse of all possible universes and quantum indeterminacy.

Hypercubes
The above youtube video shows what is commonly known as a four-dimensional cube: a hypercube, or tesseract. Before you click on the "play" button, we are not really "seeing" the hypercube, because a 4D object needs to be rotated for us to appreciate its higher dimensionality. In other words, without adding a time element to our appreciation of the shape shown in this animation, a significant part of what makes this a unique shape remains unseen.

In the above animation, we are looking on our computer screen at a flat 2D representation of a 3D shadow of a 4D object. Confused? If you go to the bottom of this blog entry there is another youtube movie, again showing a rotating hypercube. In this one, if you move your eyes so close to the monitor that your left eye sees the left half of the image and your other eye sees the right, your brain (with a bit of practice) can then merge those two halves into a stereoscopic visualization, from which you can get a hint of what we're really talking about here: "shadows" of a 4D shape being seen from the 3rd dimension.

Plato's Cave
Are you familiar with the allegory of Plato's Cave? It tells of some hypothetical people who spend their lives trapped in a cave, unable to see out into the real world, and all that they can surmise about reality is based upon the shadows cast upon the cave's walls as objects or people pass by the entrance to the cave. Trying to visualize higher dimensions is a similar exercise: our 3D reality is created by higher dimensional patterns, and what we witness from moment to moment, from day to day, from big bang to entropy and beyond those two extremes, is really just shadows of those higher-dimensional shapes and patterns. Ultimately, all of those shapes and patterns exist as potential within the underlying fabric of quantum indeterminacy.



Enjoy the journey,

Rob

For a more expanded version of this blog entry, click here.

Hypercubes and Plato's Cave +

Edit: We've explored the visual ideas in this entry from a number of perspectives since it was published, here are some more recent entries:
Playing Games in Extra Dimensions
O is for Omniverse G to J
What's Around the Corner?
When's a Knot Not a Knot?
Imagining the Omniverse - Addendum
The Holographic Universe
Slices of Reality
Why Do We Need More Than 3 Dimensions?
Time in 3 Dimensions


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xN4DxdiFrs

One of the most common questions about this way of visualizing dimensions is whether the four dimensions of spacetime really are four spatial dimensions, or just three spatial plus one of time. I argue that for us "time" really is in the fourth spatial dimension which we, as creatures built from chemical reactions obeying the laws of entropy, are experiencing in a unique way. This relates closely to a phrase that is being uttered by many physicists nowadays: "time is an illusion". Saying that time is an illusion doesn't mean that we don't experience time from moment to moment, but rather it means that what we are experiencing as time is only a tiny window into a much greater underlying fabric, which ultimately encompasses the multiverse of all possible universes and quantum indeterminacy.

Hypercubes
The above youtube video shows what is commonly known as a four-dimensional cube: a hypercube, or tesseract. Before you click on the "play" button, we are not really "seeing" the hypercube, because a 4D object needs to be rotated for us to appreciate its higher dimensionality. In other words, without adding a time element to our appreciation of the shape shown in this animation, a significant part of what makes this a unique shape remains unseen.

In the above animation, we are looking on our computer screen at a flat 2D representation of a 3D shadow of a 4D object. Confused? If you go to the bottom of this blog entry there is another youtube movie, again showing a rotating hypercube. In this one, if you move your eyes so close to the monitor that your left eye sees the left half of the image and your other eye sees the right, your brain (with a bit of practice) can then merge those two halves into a stereoscopic visualization, from which you can get a hint of what we're really talking about here: "shadows" of a 4D shape being seen from the 3rd dimension.

Plato's Cave
Are you familiar with the allegory of Plato's Cave? It tells of some hypothetical people who spend their lives trapped in a cave, unable to see out into the real world, and all that they can surmise about reality is based upon the shadows cast upon the cave's walls as objects or people pass by the entrance to the cave. Trying to visualize higher dimensions is a similar exercise: our 3D reality is created by higher dimensional patterns, and what we witness from moment to moment, from day to day, from big bang to entropy and beyond those two extremes, is really just shadows of those higher-dimensional shapes and patterns. Ultimately, all of those shapes and patterns exist as potential within the underlying fabric of quantum indeterminacy.

Spimes
When Bruce Sterling talks about "spimes", he is talking about data that can be attached to a 3D object along a 4D timeline that gives us a 4D shape - RFID tags attached to items from a store's inventory give the store a "spime" representing each object's history, its locations in time and space from manufacture to sale. When I talk about the "long undulating snake" representing a particular person's body from conception to death, that's really just another spime. And at any particular moment in time, the person I see in front of me or the pair of pants I see at Wal-Mart can be thought of as really just a 3D shadow being cast from the 4D spime representing that person or object.

This is why it makes so much sense to think of time as really being in the fourth spatial dimension. Physicists use phrases like "time reversal symmetry" and "closed timelike curves" to reveal more about the fourth dimension as just another spatial dimension that could be manipulated and navigated within. It's also important to realize that our experience of time, the fourth dimension, as being continuous is an illusion. Our fourth-dimensional line is actually being constructed one planck length at a time, and any attempt to look at the universe in finer intervals than that kicks us back out to that underlying fabric of quantum indeterminacy in its unobserved state, which I refer to as the tenth dimension.

Shadows of Higher Dimensions
Because we are made out of 3D atoms and molecules, each higher spatial dimension is increasingly difficult for us to visualize. Like the hypercube, we can look at other visualization tools that help us to imagine those higher dimensional shapes, and the Calabi-Yau manifold is a good example of that. Garrett Lisi's E8 rotation may well be another, as it contends that all of the forces and particles within our universe are derived from an 8 dimensional matrix. And of course, my 11-minute animation contends that my way of visualizing reality could be a way for us to imagine how our 3D physical reality is derived from vibrating superstrings in the ten dimensions: but as I have always tried to make clear, my unique way of imagining the dimensions is not the proof for superstrings, it just has many interesting tie-ins.

String theorists say that for us the fifth dimension and above are curled up down at the planck length. This is why my animation talks about the 2D creature on the mobius strip, twisting and turning in the dimensions above but from his experience he is just traveling in a straight line. We 3D creatures feel like we're traveling down a straight line of time in the fourth dimension, but that line is being constructed one planck length after another from probabilistic outcomes available to us as a result of chance and choice in the fifth dimension. Let me say that again: we are really twisting and turning in the fifth dimension, but we think we're traveling on a straight line in the fourth dimension. This can be related to Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, which says we are merely observing one state out of many possible states, all of which are contained within the quantum wavefunction: the many other versions of the universe where you and I made other choices continue to exist as potential within the multiverse. I'm proposing that those other outcomes are just different fifth-dimensional twists and turns.

"Time is an Illusion"
Now that a team of scientists at Oxford under the direction of physicist David Deutsch have published a proof equating the probabilistic outcomes at the quantum level with the parallel universes resulting from choice and chance out at the macro level (saying that both are equivalent and part of the same continuum from the quantum to the macro), what I'm portraying has more theoretical evidence to support it. The important insight that I'm adding here is that by realizing that the wavicles (simultaneous waves/particles) are in the fifth dimension, we tie in Kaluza's revelation about gravity and light in the fifth dimension, and we can see how those other parallel universes are just as real as our own but inaccessible/decoherent to the wave function for our own universe in its currently perceived state.

Many Worlds and many theories
What I'm portraying here is a way of visualizing the higher dimensions that ties together many different schools of thought: quantum mechanics and Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation are at the core, but there are many other possible tie-ins. String theorists say our universe is created by the interaction of a 3D brane and a 7D brane, my way of visualizing says that our 3D-universe-and-all-of-its-possible-timelines is locked in at the seventh dimension. Is our universe as we witness it just shadows of higher-dimensional holograms, a concept proposed by physicist Juan Maldacena as an extension to string theory? Whether our perceived reality is the shadows of superstrings, or a hologram, or an E8 rotation, or many other possible explanations, remains to be proved.

When physicists say that time is an illusion, they are saying that time as we experience it is just a shadow of what's really happening: just like the image of a hypercube being projected on a flat computer screen, we are looking at shadows cast by higher dimensional shapes as we go from instant to instant in our 3D universe.



Enjoy the journey,

Rob

Google, Memes and Randomness

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EXNWfX8sz8

Can you remember what life was like before Google? That's what this week's poll question is about:

2008 is the Tenth Anniversary of Google, our world's premium meme-tracker. How would you say Google has changed the way you interact with the information that is our reality?
- Better, more immersive
- Worse, more superficial
- No change from 10 years ago

As you can see, I am using language related to this project to ask a question whose answer might seem obvious to some, but the question is an important one: by the time information becomes so much easier to access, are we in danger of becoming a world of skimmers, flitting along the top peaks but rarely immersing ourselves in the deep valleys of that information?

Google helps us to settle questions that ten years ago might have been the source of endless debate, and surely debate can be a healthy exercise in the exploration of ideas. But the conversation-stopping moments that used to happen ("When was Paul McCartney born?" "Hmm, I used to know that, guess that brain cell's no longer kickin' in. No wait, was it... umm..." "Oh well, never mind...") have been replaced with a few deftly chosen keywords into the Google Search window and the answer is there for our perusal in 0.14 seconds.

But we're talking about much more than rock star trivia here. In fact, we're talking about all aspects of human knowledge, being revved up and churned through and exchanged at rates that would have been unfathomable a decade ago. In "Tens, Google, and the Expanding Universe" we played with ideas surrounding the expanding sea of information that Google gives us access to, and the interesting coincidence that 2008 is the tenth anniversary of both Google and the discovery that our universe's expansion is accelerating.

Order from Randomness
Starting from the quantum mechanics idea of Information Equals Reality, I have been talking about a random set of patterns encoded into the underlying quantum fabric of our reality, and how that randomness works as a satisfactory starting point for imagining the complexity of the universe we're in right now. Randomness is really not the interesting part of the story, though: what is interesting is that true randomness has to have pockets of order, parts where one state is preferred over another, and those pockets of order will have places where they begin and places where they end. Flipping a coin one hundred times will not give you endlessly repeating heads/tails/heads/tails outcomes, nor will it give you 50 heads outcomes followed by 50 tails outcomes, even though statistically speaking that is what we would expect our overall totals to be very near for such an exercise. Likewise, if the unobserved whole of quantum indeterminacy that our universe came from is truly random, then there must be pockets of grouping within that randomness. Calling those pockets the "big-picture memes" that caused our universe to be the one selected out of a multiverse of other universes is an idea I've been promoting... for more about the patterns that begin and end being what creates our probabilistic reality, please refer to my blog entries called "Everything" and "You Can't Get There From Here".

This leads us back to Google, and the thing that Google is so good at: keeping track of the memes of all shapes, sizes and durations that are part of the Information that is our Reality: memes are patterns in the information, and memes tend to rise and fall over time. In my last blog entry I talked about the Search Bar here at the top of my browser: if I type a single letter in I am immediately presented with 10 or so Suggestions, which tells me these are some of the memes that are most active at this moment for our culture. If I were to make note of the Suggestions that came up today, then perform the same check a week from now, a month from now, a year from now, and so on, what would I see? There would be some Suggestions that continue to be the same, and there would be some that were short-lived. Keeping a record of these lists would be like a mini time-capsule, and of course there are a number of efforts under way around the net to capture records like these so that we will be able to analyze and compare the changes that have happened in our Googleverse of information from years past and over the years to come as the web continues to develop.

I'm a Spime (and so are you)
Something as simple as writing down the 26 top Suggestions corresponding to the 26 letters of the alphabet gives us a rudimentary way to track some of the memes that rise and fall, and the shapes that would be created by the duration for a certain Suggestion over months or years is conceptually similar to the "long undulating snake" or Long Body we are imagining as ourselves across the fourth dimension, with our embryonic self at one and and our deceased self at the other. This also relates to the concept of Spimes that Bruce Sterling has been using to refer to physical objects that have been tracked so that they now have a defined and recallable shape across space and time.

How can we tell if a meme or a spime is the result of randomness, or deliberate manipulation? Whether or not you believe the patterns that created our universe are the result of randomness or the deliberate manipulation by a higher power, they are patterns nonetheless. The patterns of information that sustain across a period of time continue to be operated upon by other patterns in the future, and this concept is very connected to what Richard Dawkins is talking about with his description of the randomness that creates life and evolution: once something is no longer being acted upon by these processes, it ceases to have any further change.

Tracking the Changes
Which leads, finally, to one of my favorite phrases for this project: "that which ceases to change ceases to exist". Whether you are talking about the formation of our universe, the beginning of life, or the memes that rise and fall and Google helps us to track, that concept applies. Genes, memes, and spimes: each is a shape or a pattern across space and time. Those that cease to exist cannot be operated upon by patterns in the information that is our reality from that moment forward. Those that continue to exist can be combined together or modified, sometimes in ways that are improvements that allow them to continue in time still further for even more editing and manipulation, and sometimes in ways that will soon cause them to cease to exist: which is how a sea of information becomes a universe, how a primitive chemical reaction becomes a human being, and how a simple idea can become known throughout the world.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

PS: June 18 1942. But you probably already googled that if you were interested, didn't you? To finish this entry, a new video for one of the 26 songs from this project. This is about the dancing patterns of information that create our reality: "From the Corner of My Eye".


A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyP5jxFe5Po

Music and the Dance of Creativity

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


A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIMsoZd76a8

As a composer, I create things for a living. Some people say "oh, I'm not creative." I say "everybody's creative!". The above video is of me chatting with one of my favorite musicians, Jack Semple, about some of the ideas that surround this blog entry, and the ideas I explore in my book.

Creativity is the one thing each and every one of us do every moment of our lives: our conversations are unscripted, our actions unchoreographed, it's all one big creative improvisation. And the process of chance, choice, and circumstance that moves our universe from the big bang to the enfolded end is, at its root, a creative process as well.

Here are two things I have been saying with this project: "life is any process that becomes interested in what happens next"; and "that which ceases to change ceases to exist". In a previous blog entry called "How to Make a Universe" we imagined starting from quantum indeterminacy, selecting a starting point and a successive series of quantum frames which become the line of time for a particular universe. Keeping in mind that for our universe, each quantum frame is a particular "now" that is one planck length away from the next, we can see how the patterns in the Information that becomes our Reality can have groupings and interactions, and places that those resulting interference patterns and shapes begin and end. Whether we're talking about vibrating superstrings, memes, or life itself, the moment that something stops changing/vibrating/interacting as we move from one quantum frame to the next, the thing that is represented by those motions ceases to become part of the timeline being created: which brings to mind an eternal dance of creativity, both at the quantum level and out here at the physical level as we navigate on our fourth dimensional line of time through the fifth dimensional probability space available to us, which is curled up down at the planck length for each successive "now".

In his wonderful and enlightening book, "This is Your Brain on Music", Daniel Levitin (as a neuroscientist and former rock musician/engineer/producer) reveals some startling things about the dance of information that is encoded into music. According to Daniel, in the majority of the world's languages, the verb "to sing" also means "to dance" - which shows us how intimately tied together music and the physical expression of emotion are for we human beings. He also reveals that scans of neural activity in people who are listening to, performing, or even composing music reveal that this is not a primarily-right-brain function as many had surmised: in fact, activities involving music appear to trigger activity in almost all parts of the brain that have been studied in Dr. Levitin's research.

As a composer, of course, I admit to a strong bias towards any research that shows how magical and fully engaging music can be, and any time that I am asked to create a piece of music I marvel at music's power to connect emotions across space and time, to entrain people's heartbeat or breath, to cause them to move in a joyful way or become agitated and fearful. All of this ties in to the ideas that we have been talking about here: we are all patterns in time and space, memes and spimes that are interacting to create life as we know it.

We are also part of really big picture memes, which are patterns in the highest dimensions that have caused our universe as it exists to be the one that we're in, and saying this is not necessarily invoking higher spiritual powers: it is a simple statement of fact to say that our universe exists as one out of many possible universes within the multiverse, and the patterns that organized the information that became our reality are part of the creativity, the grouping and symmetry, that is innate within any pattern, be that random or guided.

There's a great Google Tech Talks video featuring Dr. Stuart Hameroff, who says that modern consciousness research has been exploring how every instant that the brain interacts and processes the incoming data from the external world can be thought of as a "frame" of consciousness, and this is being referred to by researchers as a "bing". According to their studies the average human being is operating at somewhere between 30 and 90 "bings" per second. In my field, this seems significant because the lowest note on a piano is at 28 cycles per second, and video in North America historically has been shown at 29.97 frames per second: both numbers being just on the bottom edge of that "bings per second" range. In other words, for human beings any repetitive pattern that is above 30 cycles per second tends to be perceived as being continuous (musical notes and quantum frames of time, for instance), and vibrations or patterns that repeat more slowly than that begin to be perceived as individual events.

In Imagining the Tenth Dimension, we're playing with ways of visualizing reality that encourage us to think about the really big picture of the underlying structures and patterns that contribute to the universe we live in. In terms of memes as being ideas that are connected across time and space, music is one of the most powerful and flexible tools we have at our disposal for helping us to see how it all fits together in the dance of vibrations and patterns that are part of our beautiful and creative universe. This is probably why one of the reviewers for my book described it as a "strangely 'musical' way of imagining superimposed dimensions".

Whether we're talking about quantum physics or creativity, it all seems to keep centering on our role as conscious observers: our "bings per second" rate shows why, for us, everything above about 30 cycles per second begins to blur together into continuous waves, while everything slower than that dividing line is perceived as individual events. In musical terms, sliding through those more and more separated events would take us through rhythms, note durations, phrases, repeating structures within a composition, entire musical pieces, the other times that same musical piece was performed, the other times in history that elements from within the piece were used, and the connections that those elements have to the big-picture memes that give those elements their emotional or physical connection, again and again throughout the history of our world.

To sing is to dance, to be alive is to be creative, and our universe itself is a creative process. There is a sliding scale of vibrations that can exist within our universe --with the fastest wavelength possible being at the planck length and the slowest being the single cycle from the big bang to the end of the universe-- and with our consciousness right at the center point of that set of vibrations.

Now, here is a version of one of the 26 songs attached to this project which explores that idea: "Big Bang to Entropy". A previous blog lists the lyrics: this is a new version of the song performed by Ron Scott. While our consciousness tends to think of vibrations slower than 30 cycles per second as individual events, it's fun (and perhaps mind-blowing) to also think about expanding our perception to think of those much longer repeating patterns as also being notes and songs, that we really could hear if only we slowed down and expanded our conscious perception of the universe.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Tens, Google and the Expanding Universe

Are we approaching some sort of global shift in consciousness, and could that be triggered from higher dimensions?

2008 will be the tenth anniversary of the surprising announcement that the expansion of our universe is accelerating, an idea that seems counter-intuitive: if our universe started from high energy/high order (the big bang) and is moving towards low energy/low order (maximum entropy), that implies the image of a clockwork toy that is winding down, and that image does not fit with a universe of accelerating expansion.

This month's Scientific American features a great article about "branes" and how the accelerating expansion of the universe may be proof of the existence of higher dimensions (I propose this as a possible explanation in my book as well). The article, by Cliff Burgess and Fernando Quevedo, is called "The Great Cosmic Roller-Coaster Ride": please check it out.

2008 is also the tenth anniversary of Google, the search engine that has changed the way we interact with information more than any other invention in the history of mankind. "Don't be evil" is their unofficial motto, and that's a great one: the power of Google to inform and guide the general public's impression of what ideas are important and what ideas are popular is immense, and the on-going war from get-rich-quick scammers and spammers who try to manipulate Google's search results for their own profit is a huge part of that story.

The Imagining the Tenth Dimension way of visualizing reality can be used to tie all these ideas together. "Information Equals Reality" has been the prime focus for my blog entries in the last few weeks: this basic idea from quantum physics shows us how "everything fits together", and the desire to find a unity within a diverse range of ideas is what this project is all about.

If Information Equals Reality, then absolutely everything about our reality can be thought of as patterns and shapes in the information that is the underlying fabric of quantum indeterminacy. Subatomic particles, fractals, life, consciousness, and our observed universe are all patterns that result from the flip-book of third-dimensional "now"s that we are stringing together from one frame of planck time after another.

In the Imagining the Tenth Dimension animation, sound is an important part of the information being conveyed: for instance, no matter what dimension we are exploring there is the arrow sound effect representing a particular point, a scrape indicating lines being constructed from joining one point to another, and the card-riffling sound effect to show that anything we think of as a continuous line is actually being constructed one point at a time, if we can only look close enough.

Burgess and Quevedo's article explains how our universe might be the result of the interactions of a three-dimensional brane with a seven-dimensional brane, with the ends of certain superstrings constrained by branes they are sliding around within. To use my flipbook analogy, then, we can see how the illusion of continuous reality that we are experiencing is actually a series of 3D states for our 3D universe interacting with a 3D brane, and each observed state is one planck length away from the next: each observed state can be thought of as a page in a gigantic cosmic flipbook. The flipbook from the big bang to "now" appears to be one specific set of flipbook pages (which we think of as the 4D line of time), but each "next available now" page that could possibly be selected for our flipbook comes from a fifth dimensional probability space, and the fifth dimension is where Kaluza proved our reality is defined. Every parallel universe that could have resulted from our big bang, whether it is observed or not, exists as a potential "flipbook" in the sixth dimension, and all of those possible states are locked together by the seventh-dimensional brane our universe is also interacting with.

The idea I advance of our universe's basic physical laws being a result of our specific "location" in the multiverse (as a "point" in the seventh dimension, or as a result of our interaction with a 7D brane), then, can be tied into this concept. As usual, though, I will take pains here to caution readers that I am not claiming my way of visualizing the dimensions is the explanation for string theory, any more than it is the explanation of Kabbalah, zero-point field theory, Japanese anime and videogame plots, metaphysics, or any of the other diverse range of belief systems which fans of the tenth dimension project keep pointing me towards as having interesting resonances with my way of visualizing reality.

From moment to moment, day to day, Google has been tracking the information that makes up our reality for almost ten years. Ideas that can be tracked across time and space are known as "memes", and physical objects that can be tracked across time and space are known as "spimes": which means that the flipbook of "now"s we have imagined from the big bang to today can be thought of as a spime that represents the story of our current universe from its inception... and that idea is a very powerful meme.

I've always marveled at the audacity of Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" button: the idea that out of all the information in the world, Google might be able to show you the very best link of all still seems like mysterious magic to me, and I admit to never wanting to use that button because I like to have choices. Still, the Google toolbar's Suggestions window is a great example of the accelerating information space we live in now: try typing in just the letters of the alphabet one after another into that window, and read the top ten suggestions (there's that number again!) that come up for each. This gives you a snapshot in time of what is important, what is talked about, what is the dominant set of memes within our culture right now. Both memes and spimes are multi-dimensional shapes, each with a beginning and an ending someplace out there in the timeless multiverse.

The feeling that we live in times that are accelerating towards something larger, as a result of the rapidly accelerating meme-space we live in, might be connected to the same higher-dimensional effects that are causing our universe to accelerate its expansion as well: I believe both are eventually going to be shown to be the result and the proof of higher dimensions in the information that is creating our reality.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton