Something from Nothing

In October 2012 New Scientist Magazine published a special issue that was devoted to this burning question - "what is reality?".

Having published a video called "Imagining the 'Zeroth' Dimension" in late August, there were definitely some quotes from that issue that caught my eye:

"These are very difficult issues," says philosopher of science James Ladyman of the University of Bristol, UK, "but it might be less misleading to say that the universe is made of maths than to say it is made of matter."

Difficult indeed. What does it mean to say that the universe is "made of mathematics"? An obvious starting point is to ask what mathematics is made of. The late physicist John Wheeler said that the "basis of all mathematics is 0 = 0". All mathematical structures can be derived from something called "the empty set", the set that contains no elements. Say this set corresponds to zero; you can then define the number 1 as the set that contains only the empty set, 2 as the set containing the sets corresponding to 0 and 1, and so on. Keep nesting the nothingness like invisible Russian dolls and eventually all of mathematics appears. Mathematician Ian Stewart of the University of Warwick, UK, calls this "the dreadful secret of mathematics: it's all based on nothing" (New Scientist, 19 November 2011, p 44). Reality may come down to mathematics, but mathematics comes down to nothing at all.

  - from the article "Reality: Is Everything Made of Numbers?", by writer and New Scientist consultant Amanda Gefter

So a question that is often asked is how do we get "something" from the "nothing" of the unobserved quantum fabric?

According to prevailing wisdom, a quantum particle such as an electron or photon can only be properly described as a mathematical entity known as a wave function. Wave functions can exist as "superpositions" of many states at once. A photon, for instance, can circulate in two different directions around an optical fibre; or an electron can simultaneously spin clockwise and anticlockwise or be in two positions at once.

When any attempt is made to observe these simultaneous existences, however, something odd happens: we see only one. How do many possibilities become one physical reality?

This is the central question in quantum mechanics...

  - from the article "Reality: How Does Consciousness Fit In?", by writer and New Scientist consultant Michael Brooks

If reality is ultimately math, and math is ultimately derived from "nothing", or zero, then this quote from Jan Westerhoff can have a very interesting interpretation.

In our search for foundations, we have gone round in a circle, from the mind, via various components of matter, back to the mind - or, in the case of the Copenhagen interpretation, from the macroscopic to the microscopic, and then back to the macroscopic. But this just means that nothing is fundamental, in the same way there is no first or last stop on London Underground's Circle Line. The moral to draw from the reductionist scenario seems to be that either what is fundamental is not material, or that nothing at all is fundamental.

- from the article "Reality: Is Matter Real?", by Jan Westerhoff, a philosopher at the University of Durham and the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, both in the UK

Which takes us back to Imagining the "Zeroth" Dimension, and the lovely mind flip that Gevin Giorbran described for us - if everything is ultimately derived from an underlying symmetry state, and a universe such as ours is derived from a breaking of that symmetry, then that can lead us to a way of imagining how there is an underlying "nothing" of all possibilities in perfect balance, and zero becomes the biggest number of all. Please watch this video for more on this fascinating idea.

 
A direct link to the above video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emlcwyvnsg0

Imagining the Sixth Dimension

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdnhKE95AqM

"...cosmology is simpler in one important respect: once the starting point is specified, the outcome is in broad terms predictable. All large patches of the universe that start off the same way end up statistically similar. In contrast, if the Earth's history were re-run, it could end up with a quite different biosphere."

- Cosmologist Martin Rees, from his book Just Six Numbers, the Deep Forces that Shape the Universe

What's the difference between the fifth dimension and the sixth dimension? With this approach to visualizing the dimensions, that question comes up a lot. After all, if the fifth dimension includes every possible state for the universe which can be connected to the "now" any one of us are currently observing, why do we need to talk about anything beyond that?

Let's pull out a piece of paper and ponder this question further.

First of all, put a dot near one edge of the paper, and label it "the big bang". Likewise, place a dot near some other edge of the paper, and label it "the end of the universe". Finally, draw a line that passes through those two points, and place a point somewhere near the middle of that line, which we'll label "you".

Okay, if that middle point represents "you" right now, then let's place another point nearby but not on the line we've just drawn. Do you see how this point could represent some other version of "you", such as the one where a childhood accident completely changed your life, or even just the version of "you" that got bored with this blog entry and stopped reading ten seconds ago? There would be a new line which extends from the big bang and passes through this alternate version of you, and each of those could be thought of as a one-dimensional line: but the only way the line for version "one" and the line for version "two" could be considered simultaneously is if we were to consider the 2D "plane" of the paper we were drawing on. In fact, we could place another point earlier on one of the lines and say that it represents your moment of conception, and then imagine a "ray" of possible lines representing all of the versions of "you" that could possibly have existed from your moment of conception onwards, and they could all be contained within this 2D plane.

Now let's think of a different point, but in this case let's imagine that it's floating a few inches above the paper. Perhaps this new point represents the version of the universe where dinosaurs never became extinct, which would mean that "you" as we know you wouldn't even exist on that line! We can imagine a one-dimensional line that passes through the big bang point on the paper and this new point. We can imagine a different 2D plane that passes through our first or second line and this new "dinosaurs" line. But here's something important about what we've been visualizing: the only way we can consider all three lines at the same time is by using the third dimension.

I hope it's obvious by now that the point-line-postulate tells us the logic we've just used to think about the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd dimension is directly translatable to the 4th, 5th, and 6th. Which means that with a piece of paper and a bit of imagination, we've already visualized the first six dimensions of our reality!

But wait, some critics might be thinking. Wasn't it arbitrary for me to place the "dinosaurs" line outside the plane of my paper? Couldn't I just have easily placed a point at the center of the paper, called it the big bang, then imagined that all around the outside edge of the paper were points representing all the different universes that could have resulted from the initial conditions that created our unique universe with its locked-in fine structure constant? And you may be surprised to hear that I'm willing to agree with that statement. From the initial conditions of our universe, we can get to any of the possible universes which the Many Worlds Interpretation tells us really exist, just as real as the one we're currently observing. From anywhere else beyond the big bang though, we're already seeing a paring away of possibilities - when one version of the universe is observed, the other universes are not, and causality shows us that this renders some of those other universes permanently inaccessible from that point forward on our entropy-driven "line of time".

How would you or I get to the universe where it's this point in time which we call the twenty-first century, but dinosaurs never became extinct? Everett's theory tells us that a version of the universe must exist where dinosaurs are living and dying right "now", and those dinosaurs are observing all the different versions of the universe where they still exist. So why can't you or I get there from here? In other words, if everything is probabilistic outcomes, why does it appear that there is zero possibility that the "next possible now" for us might include this "dinosaurs" world line?

The answer is: there is a missing degree of freedom. If you and I were within the sixth dimension rather than the fifth, then we would be able to leap across these different world lines, and get to those other versions of the universe which are not causally connected to the one we're in right "now". As we said last time, this is because "you and I are ants, not flies". Every instant that we observe is one planck frame beyond the instant before, which gives us the impression that the fifth dimension is compactified, or curled up on itself. If the fourth dimension is like the straight line of a garden hose stretched out on the ground, the fifth dimension is like an ant walking inside that hose, while a fly inside that hose would be able to flit from one location to another without having to worry about fifth dimensional causality.

Phase Space
What we're talking about with the sixth dimension, then, is the phase space of the set of parallel universes resulting from our universe's unique initial conditions. A phase space, to quote wikipedia, is "a space in which all possible states of a system are represented, with each possible state of the system corresponding to one unique point in the phase space."

Hugh Everett III's Theory of the Universal Wave Function is a way of thinking about the phase space of our universe as defined by quantum mechanics and the Schrödinger Equation. The prevailing opinion about this wave function back when Everett published his theory in 1957 was known as the Copenhagen Interpretation,  which said that an observer collapses this wave function of all possibilities into just one version, purely through the act of observation. Everett proclaimed this idea to be ridiculous: how could a single observer collapse the wave function of an entire universe? That was the accepted interpretation amongst most quantum physicists of the time, though, and resistance to abandoning that opinion was one of the reasons why it took so many decades for Everett's theory to become more accepted. But within the last ten years or so, more and more people have moved to the idea that his interpretation really is the more elegant one: the phase space of all possible outcomes continues to exist, and you or I are not collapsing the wave function, we are merely observing it in one state out of the many potential versions we could have observed.

Let's sum all this up: Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation says there is a wave function which encompasses every possible state for our universe, and I'm saying that's the sixth dimension. But because we're in the fifth dimension, choosing from a set of causally related outcomes that are available to us one planck frame after another, there are versions of the universe which have nothing to do with us - like the version where I died in a car crash yesterday, or the version where dinosaurs never became extinct. Likewise, the version where I decided to rob a bank yesterday must exist, but with my free will I chose not to observe that universe. All of those "other" universes have nothing to do with the universe I'm observing, even though I can acknowledge their existence within the sixth dimension.

What's Outside Our Phase Space?
Thinking back to that piece of paper we started from there are a few other ideas we can glean from this. First of all, that first and second point we drew, representing the beginning and end of the universe, can be joined with a line. But more properly, what we're talking about then is a "line segment". A true "line" would pass through those two points and extend past the edge of our paper and out towards infinity in either direction. This gives us a way to think about about how both "before" and "after" our universe is the same thing: a return to an underlying state which is outside the system representing all possible versions of our unique universe. Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll makes a similar claim in his recent book "From Eternity to Here".

But wait, there's that word again: "system". In my original animation, I described the "point" we start from as being something that indicates a position within a system. As we just saw, a "phase space" includes all possible versions of a system, with each possible state of the system corresponding to one unique point within the phase space. So we can extend our analogy here to think of our paper as being on an endless landscape covered with other papers, none of them touching, many of them widely separated from each other, each of them representing other universes or "systems" with other initial conditions and basic physical laws: the multiverse landscape. And within some of those other systems would be creatures sufficiently advanced to be able to look around and wonder how they ended up in a universe where the laws of physics appear to have been uniquely fine-tuned in a way to allow their universe to exist.

This idea is known as the Anthropic Principle. As I say in my song "The Anthropic Viewpoint":

If there’s other worlds then we’ve just missed ‘em
No way to know what’s outside our system
We’re like goldfish livin in a bowl
What’s beyond it we can never know
All we can do is theorize
Cause we can never… get outside, outside

In the anthropic viewpoint
The reason we’re here is because we’re here
And if it were impossible
Then we wouldn’t be

Coincidentally, as we talk about the sixth dimension, it's interesting to note that cosmologist Martin Rees has told us only six basic physical constants need to be defined to create our unique universe: check out his book Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces that Shape the Universe for more about these concepts. It's also interesting to note that string theory predicts there could be ten to the power of five hundred other universes out there in the multiverse landscape, each with its own unique physical laws.

So we can't get to those other universes, those other systems, from the sixth-dimensional phase space representing our universe. Why not? Because we haven't achieved that degree of freedom yet within our approach to visualizing the dimensions. Which of course, will lead us to our next entry: Imagining the Seventh Dimension.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

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

Imagining the Second Dimension

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s1-UR3D21s

Let's go back to basics.

The most important thing to remember as we're talking about these ten dimensions is that they're spatial dimensions. Some people get confused by that word, "spatial" because they think it's intended to only apply to the third dimension: the length, width and depth of the "space" we see around us. In fact, some physicists do prefer to use the term "space-like" when talking about the extra dimensions. No question, when you take a three-dimensional space and add an additional "right angle" to it, you are entering a realm which is difficult for us to picture, and it certainly behaves in ways that are beyond the limitations of 3D space: that's what Imagining the Tenth Dimension is all about.


Likewise, some people have difficulty with discussing the first and second dimension. "How can something with no depth even exist?", they ask. It is a bit of a mind-bender! We start with a point that has no size and no dimension. We make a second point some place else, and the line that passes through those points is a representation of the first dimension. If you can imagine a third point that isn't on the line you've just created, you have a way of thinking about the second dimension: a line passing through this new point and the old line defines a plane. But if the lines you're thinking about are like pencil lines, which already have a length, width and depth, then you're really not visualizing the right thing. Do you know what I mean by that?

If I say "imagine you're on a boat in the middle of the ocean", and you say "I don't own a boat and I hate the water", what does that prove? The concept of boats and oceans doesn't change whether you're willing to imagine them or not. Likewise, if I say "imagine something that has length and width and no depth", and you say "I refuse to imagine that because something that has no depth can't exist", where have we gotten? Nowhere. But does refusing to discuss an idea mean the idea doesn't exist? Of course not! We can have a perfectly good discussion about dragons, which don't appear to exist in our world, because dragons are an idea which we are capable of describing and thinking about.

Same goes for the second dimension. It's not part of our 3D world, it's something separate, but it's still something we can think about and talk about. In "What Would a Flatlander Really See?", we looked at the imaginary 2D creatures invented by Edwin Abbott for a book he published way back in 1884: "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions".  Could Flatlanders really exist? Perhaps no more than dragons. But we can have a perfectly good discussion about the idea of Flatlanders, and what it would be like to live in a world that has length and width, but no depth. What would it be like to look around you within that world, where all you can make out is lines all within the same plane? That is a mind-bending exercise, good food for thought regardless of whether it would really be possible for some kind or awareness to exist within such a ridiculously limited frame of reference or not.

Over the next nine entries, we're going to look at each of the dimensions from the second all the way up to the tenth, and see what kind of a mental castle we can build for ourselves, one brick at a time. Along the way, I want you to keep reminding yourself about something called the "point-line-plane postulate", which uses the same kind of logic as the "line/branch/fold" of the Imagining the Tenth Dimension project. This postulate is the accepted method used to imagine any number of spatial dimensions, using the same repeating pattern:

0 - a Point: Whatever spatial dimension you're currently thinking about, imagine a geometric point within that dimension. Remember, when we say this point has "no size", what we really mean it that the point's size is indeterminate. "Indeterminate" means that any and all sizes you care to imagine, from the infinitely large to the infinitesimally small, are true for that point. Let's say that this is a point within "dimension x".

1 - a Line: From the current dimension you're examining, find another point not within that dimension. An easy way to do that is to imagine the first point at its largest possible size within the constraints of its own dimension, and then ask where a different point would be that isn't encompassed by that first point in its infinitely large state. Once you've found a second point, draw a line through both points, and now call what you're looking at "dimension x+1".

2 - a Plane: Again, think of both of those points encompassing their largest possible version within the constraints of the current dimension, and find a point that isn't part of what those two points are encompassing. Now you're thinking about "dimension x+2".

This logic can start from any spatial dimension, and it can be repeated infinitely: that is, once you've imagined "dimension x+2" you can rename it "dimension x" and repeat the pattern as many times as you want. Here's an important thing to remember: if we're not assigning any meaning to the dimensions we're visualizing, there's no reason to stop at ten. However, with this project, by the time we've arrived at the tenth dimension, we do find a way to say that we have arrived at the most all-encompassing version of the information that becomes reality, or the underlying symmetry state from which our universe or any other patterns emerge through the breaking of that symmetry.

And I do hope you'll enjoy the journey as we work our way through this logical presentation, one step after another.

Rob Bryanton

Next: Imagining the Third Dimension

Poll 75 - Waves, Curves and Frames

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSqU4ypIPNw


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVkdfJ9PkRQ

Poll 75: "Before" our universe and 'after' our universe are both the same thing - the indeterminate state of enfolded symmetry. Likewise, this is what we get to when we try to view smaller than or 'between the frames' of our planck-unit-sized slices of spacetime."
Poll ended December 12 2010. 79.1 % agreed, while 20.9% did not.

Last week we looked at my new video for "Is Spacetime Flat or Curved?". Really, this poll question is about the same idea: I support the scientific viewpoint which says that our universe is not really infinite. Rather, it's finite but unbounded.

Let me try to sum up my position again here.

3D is space without time. We can't move within space without using the fourth dimension, so whenever we talk about moving through space we're really talking about moving through spacetime. Some physicists say our spacetime is absolutely flat, and some of those physicists use that as a way of saying that if you could travel far enough you would get to the Earth that is just like ours and see another "you" who did something different when they got up this morning.

I say that's counter-intuitive, but I also understand why it receives some support because it places the "you" who did something different this morning in another universe that is equally deterministic to our own, where you believe you chose one action or another this morning with your free will, but in fact you're in the one single universe where you were predestined to make the choice you made, and we each live in a grim universe where we really have no control over what we're going to do or what's going to happen to us.

Coincidentally, the cover story of the New Scientist magazine that just arrived in my mailbox was about free will. Here's a video they published about the discussion of whether free will is an illusion:


Some scientists who support the idea of there being a slight curvature to our space time use this analogy: if our observable universe were the size of a quarter, the entire finite but unbounded universe of our spacetime would be the size of planet Earth! This is a good way to visualize the scale, but when we do so we have to remember that we're talking about 4D spacetime, rather than a 3D physical object like a planetary sphere.

Here's where that slight curvature of our spacetime takes me in my thinking. To me it makes more sense to say that if we travelled through our 4D "finite but unbounded" spacetime universe with its slight curvature, we'd eventually end up travelling through the absolute zero, the enfolded symmetry that's "outside" our system and after an additional 13.7 billion year journey, end up right where we are now: right here and right now. But if we had adjusted our trajectory ever so slightly in the fifth dimension, we'd have reached the parallel universe where we got up and did something different today.

So I would say that other universe is directly adjacent to ours, and the choices that we make with our free will are us navigating through our fifth dimensional probability space, with a combination of our choices, the actions of others, and random outcomes.

By the way, I posted a link to the above New Scientist video on my facebook page, and it generated lots of spirited discussion. Here's a link to the many dozens of comments posted there.

I'm very pleased that 79% of the visitors to this blog were willing to support this idea, that the quantum wavefunction of our universe includes a "null" point where everything cancels out, and not only is that both "before" and "after" the life of our universe, it's the explanation for why it's impossible for there to be anything smaller than a planck length: because that ultra-small measurement takes us to exactly the same place that the ultra-large measurement of our entire universe from its beginning to its end as a single data-set takes us to: the point of indeterminate size.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Mobius Strip Roller Coaster!

Thinking Biggest

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When they both represent a point of indeterminate size.

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

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

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


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

Rob Bryanton

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

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

Strength of Gravity, Speed of Light

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rob

Next: Poll 53 - One to the Power of Infinity

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

Polls Archive 31-What's Before and After?

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

"Physicist Sean Carroll says our universe is a temporary deviation from symmetry. This means that "before" the beginning and "after" the end of our universe, then, is really the exact same state: enfolded symmetry." Poll ended January 13 2009. 70% agreed, while the rest disagreed.

I've talked many times about Gevin Giorbran's amazing book, Everything Forever - Learning to See Timelessness. The fact that Gevin is no longer with us but asked me to take over the promotion of his book since his death has nothing to do with my mentioning it here: as I've been saying since I first came across Gevin's work a couple of years ago, his is a groundbreaking text about the nature of the multiverse, and he provides us with remarkable insights into understanding the underlying enfolded symmetry state that our universe both comes from and is headed towards.

Gevin's work dovetailed very nicely with the logical way of visualizing the ten spatial dimensions I've shown to the world with my project, and Gevin was even so kind as to devote a few pages of his book towards describing how well he thought our two approaches fit together. In the almost three years since my book was published, I have been using this blog and the tenth dimension forum to catalog the many advances that have happened in the work of theoretical physicists that appear to be moving us towards the same understanding that Gevin and I had been talking about when we wrote our books. In fact, I've been doing this not just with science, but with a great many other subjects, including ancient spirituality, mysticism, and philosophy, and it's been remarkable to see how many of these threads can be pulled together.

On the science front there are many theories out there as to the mysteries of dark matter, dark energy, gravity, the multiverse, extra dimensions, and so on. When I see a viewpoint that has resonances with what Gevin and I pointed towards, I promote it. Does that mean that I'm picking and choosing, and when I come across a new theory that might oppose the direction Gevin and I were heading in, I generally don't report it? Of course! In the same way, a scientist who is adamantly convinced that there are no extra dimensions is more likely to pursue theories which exist only within the four dimensions of spacetime.

Which brings us to physicist Sean Carroll, whose work I paid tribute to in a blog entry called "Time in Either Direction":

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0j8oYNFFbw

I also talked about Sean's ideas in my entry "Scrambled Eggs"...

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFZVd_Ez23g

...and in my blog entry "The Big Bang and the Big Pie".

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiP12-u2GYY

Our poll question we're looking at here is about a theory which Scientific American attributed to Sean Carroll, but his theories are easily connected to an idea that has been promoted by myself, and by Gevin Giorbran. I would sum the idea up like this: there is a way of thinking about the fabric of reality which is outside of spacetime, in a place where the wave function of all outcomes for our universe happens simultaneously (as we mentioned last blog entry, physicist Tim Palmer has just published a paper where he calls this idea "the invariant set"). Once you have that image in your mind, it becomes possible to visualize how our universe is a temporary deviation from an underlying symmetry state, which exists both "before" and "after" our universe, in a state that is "outside" of space-time.

Here's a link to a powerpoint presentation from Dr. Carroll in which he talks about the nature of time and space and how a universe as unlikely as our own could spring from the multiverse: http://preposterousuniverse.com/talks/time-colloq-07/. Sean Carroll is also a regular contributor to the science blog Cosmic Variance, a good place for lively discussions, check it out.

Notice how Sean calls his site "preposterousuniverse.com"? Let's finish with a song of mine about our highly unlikely universe: "The Anthropic Viewpoint":

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfe_3bEH-jE
Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Polls Archive 32 - Is Time a Direction?

We Start With a Point

A direct link to this video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=MPl9Ofv88Yk

One of the most unfair criticisms I hear about this project is that it somehow misuses or misunderstands the term "dimensions". In "What Would a Linelander Really See?", we talked about how the definition of dimensions that this project uses is aligned with the most basic definition of dimensions as found in wikipedia. What I want people to understand is that the extra dimensions physicists are describing are still spatial dimensions (or, as some physicists call them, "space-like dimensions"), and my way of visualizing the dimensions builds from that premise. Here's an easily-related concept from wikipedia: the point-line-plane postulate.

Point-line-plane postulate
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The point-line-plane postulate in geometry is a collective of three assumptions (axioms) that are the basis for Euclidean geometry in three or more dimensions.

1. Unique Line Assumption
There is exactly one line passing through two distinct points.

2. Number Line Assumption
Every line is a set of points which can be put into a one-to-one correspondence with the real numbers. Any point can correspond with 0 (zero) and any other point can correspond with 1 (one).

3. Dimension Assumption
Given a line in a plane, there exists at least one point in the plane that is not on the line. Given a plane in space, there exists at least one point in space that is not in the plane.

I've added the italics on "three or more dimensions" for emphasis, as that sums up the game we're playing here: using what we know about the first three dimensions, we can continue to stack one dimension upon another using the same logic.

Here's one more idea for you to consider - in You are Me and We are All Together, we talked about renowned physicist Richard Feynman's proposal that the reason all electrons are absolutely identical is because there is really just one electron in the universe, whizzing back and forth within timelessness, and the trillions of electrons we see around us are just multiple copies of that same electron as it completes its journey back and forth from the beginning to the end of time. Why are all electrons identical? If you look up "point particle" you'll see that electrons are described as "point-like particles", which means they actually have no size and no dimension - just like the point with which we start our tenth dimension animation.

So this time around, let's think back to the original animation and review how this way of visualizing the extra dimensions relates to "points" that are moving within the dimensions, and how we can start from our first three dimensions with which we're so familiar to imagine the extra dimensions beyond spacetime.


We Start With a Point

We start with a point at position zero
Then, we can imagine a second point
and create a line segment with these two points at the end
We can imagine a line passing through these two points
extending to infinity in either direction.

Adding all of the possible values together
on either side of the point we started from
creates a perfect symmetry
which adds back up to where we started:
Zero, a point of indeterminate size.

This will be true
no matter where you start
or how many dimensions you're imagining
Because each new dimension adds two more directions
and they will always head towards infinity in either direction.
But what do we mean by infinity?

Infinity is a tricky word. Is there more than one infinity?
Or is it more correct to say that there are many ways to get to infinity?
If I start counting 0,1,2,3... and so on,
there's no end to the numbers that I could count.
If I start counting 0,2,4,6,8... and so on,
there's also no end to the numbers that I could count.
If I start dividing any number in half, and half again, and half again,
there's no end to the number of times I could keep dividing that number in half.
Each is a way to get to infinity.

Are each of the infinities we just imagined a different size?
We should always keep reminding ourselves - Infinity is Not a Number
So even though one infinite set can be a subset of another infinite set
(which means that saying one version of infinity is larger than another
does have a certain usefulness in helping to imagine all this)
ultimately all infinities are the same size,
because all infinities are of indeterminate size
Just like the point we started from.

Let's imagine that first and second point again.
They could have been anywhere, in any dimension
And there would be an infinite number of points
on the line that passes through those 2 points
But even though there are an infinite number of points on that line,
there could still be another point that we could imagine that's not on that line
No matter where we place that additional point, we'll now have to think of not a line
But a plane, and that plane will extend to infinity in both of the new directions we just added

Again, this new point could have been anywhere
As long as it isn't on the line we started from
But no matter where we place it the plane we're creating
is still just a subset of all possible planes
And no matter what plane we imagine, we can still add an additional point
That is not on that plane and requires us to add an additional dimension
Again, with two new directions that extend both ways to infinity

This cycle can be repeated endlessly -
define a system, add a point that isn't within that system
add a dimension for that new point to be within
which adds two new opposing directions that each extend to infinity
in either of those two new directions.

For the first few dimensions, this is easy to imagine with graphs and arrays -
we can imagine a two-dimensional data set, a two-dimensional array (x,y)
with values for two different co-ordinates:
X on one axis, Y on the other, simple to draw on a piece of paper.

But this gets harder to picture as the number of dimensions climb:
So while we can easily define a seven-dimensional array with seven different co-ordinates,
Visualizing the graph that could represent such an array
is not an easy thing for our 3D sensibilities to accomplish.

So...
If we're trying to visualize our reality as coming from extra dimensions
it's helpful for us to keep imagining what new degree of freedom
each new dimension is adding.
The "point-line-plane postulate's" idea of using a current dimension
to define a line,
the next dimension up to define a plane
and the dimension above that to define a space created
by those potential lines and potential planes
Is a way for us to keep visualizing
past what we as 3D creatures
are used to thinking about.


We're going to continue talking about these ideas next time, with an entry called "You are a Point Within the Omniverse". In it, we're going to go back to the idea that the omniverse is an enfolded symmetry state, which we can think of as a perfectly balanced zero. But one of the ideas we haven't talked about much is how that symmetry state is always ready to fall out of balance and create a universe - it's like a pencil balanced on its tip, always ready to fall one way or another and create a new pattern in the information that becomes our reality or any other.

To finish, a song sung for me by Ron Scott, one of the 26 songs attached to this project. This one is about the mysterious spark of life and consciousness, a point moving within the omniverse. The song is called "Burn the Candle Brightly".


A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=Ydru-VYfybU

That's all for now. Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: A Point within the Omniverse

Imagining the Omniverse

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=V6D3CgF8_qk

Frank Wilczek, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics, has just published a new book on the latest thinking in physics and cosmology called "Lightness of Being". To quote from the recent review of this book in New Scientist Magazine:

...if the Higgs boson is not responsible for most of the mass around us, what is? The answer, Wilczek tells us, is empty space.

Still, the idea that all familiar mass - our desks, chairs, bodies - comes from energy crystallized out of nothing is rather mind-bending. And it leads Wilczek to wonder...is space and time themselves a condensate that similarly crystallized from nothingness in the earliest moments of the big bang?

Again and again, new revelations come from the scientific community that confirm the basic ideas I've been putting forth - that there is a place where everything fits together, where every state exists simultaneously outside of our 4D spacetime, an enfolded zero or "nothing", and that is where our universe or any other comes from. As Wilczek suggests, and I have been saying as well, this is also where the missing 96% of our universe, the dark matter and dark energy which pervade our reality, comes from as well.

So this time around, I'd like to continue with ideas introduced in my previous blog, "Dreaming of Electric Sheep".


Here we are, out in timelessness, the underlying fabric that is "outside the system": the place where past, present and future have no meaning. This is the perfectly balanced symmetry state that physicists talk about as being where our universe comes from - and the phrase they commonly use is that our universe came about as a result of the breaking of that symmetry. As we mentioned in "The Big Bang and the Big Pie", the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics is about to be awarded to scientists who described the mechanism for how our universe spontaneously arose from this broken symmetry. Symmetry-breaking is often used to explain why our universe is composed mainly of matter rather than antimatter, and the fact that our universe is so far out of balance in this way is often described as being one of the major unexplained mysteries of modern science.

What does symmetry mean, exactly? It means that things are balanced. Every possibility has an opposite possibility. Every plus has a minus. What may not be immediately evident about symmetry, though, is that when you take all of those positives and negatives contained within perfect symmetry and add them together, you end up with a big, beautiful number - zero.

Zero, then, is not empty, it's full - full of every other possibility, perfectly balanced and assembled in that underlying symmetry that our universe or any other universe comes from - zero is where it all starts, and zero is where it all ends. Because it's the source of everything else, that zero has many names in many different ways of thinking - but right now, let's call that zero the "omniverse".

What happens within this omniverse, this zero, when things become out of balance? Most of the time, the results are quite inconsequential, and balance is soon restored. Down at the quantum level, physicist John Wheeler described how there's a constantly bubbling chaos, a random noise of particles and energy that continually pop in and out of existence - a "quantum foam", as he called it, and this quantum foam continues to be part of the background for our universe or any other.

But as we travel around within all the different variations contained within this zero--this underlying set of all possible states where past, present and future all exist simultaneously--occasionally we'll come across a surprisingly large deviation, where the information that is contained within this zero is pushed in a very interesting way in one direction or another, creating a large move away from the perfect balance of where we started. Here's something amazing then: from this perspective, out here within the timeless background of the omniverse, when we look at one of these interesting deviations we're looking at the entire life of a universe as one simultaneous shape. This could be a universe where nothing much ever happens, or it could be a universe that quickly flies apart into maximum entropy. It could be our universe, with its unique values for gravity and the speed of light; or it could be some other universe with a completely different value for its fine structure constant. It could even just be an interesting pattern of information, an idea, that doesn't actually coalesce into a universe at all! Still, no matter what we're looking at, it's something that defines a shape that represents a break from symmetry at one extreme, and a return to symmetry at the other.

Now let's think about this in terms of our own universe. That break from symmetry, from down here in spacetime, looks in one direction to be our highly ordered big bang, and in the other direction looks to be the end of the universe. Right at this very instant, we're someplace within that shape, and all of the other possible positions within that shape represent all of the possible timelines that could have or will have occurred for our universe right from one edge of its existence, right from one edge of this shape, to the other.

(And what's "before" the big bang, and "after" the end of our universe"? Thinking about timelessness, we can see that both are the same thing - in either case, we're talking about being back within that beautiful enfolded "zero", that perfectly balanced symmetry, the omniverse.)

But still, what does all this have to do with something as complex as our own universe? What would cause a larger, more complex deviation to occur? There needs to be some sort of logical pattern, an ordered causality that moves from one state to another, creating steps that allow us to move further and further away from the balancing point. For our own universe, that logical causality happens because our universe is constrained by a set of locked-in physical laws that allow these different states to be stacked upon each other, moving us far away from that underlying perfectly balanced symmetry state, all the way out to that very first yes/no selection pattern that quantum computing expert Seth Lloyd invites us to think of as the beginning of our universe.

Here's a way to think about that: let's dive right into that forest of all possible states for all possible universes contained within the omniverse. No matter where we begin, the most likely result is that the place we start to observe will appear to be random information, and we won't be able to see very far at all. But as we move around and look at this data from different angles and starting positions, every now and then we'll see places where the "trees" within our forest happen to align, and we'll be able to see further, or we'll see coherent patterns. For something as complex as our own universe, we're talking about an exceedingly unlikely set of alignments to take place within the data: but because we're talking about underlying selection patterns that exist outside of time and space, the word "unlikely" ceases to have much meaning. No matter how unlikely a pattern might be, if it's a pattern that could possibly exist at all, then that pattern already exists within the timeless background of the omniverse.

Let's go back to that perfectly balanced zero that we started from. We can think of this as a vast plain representing every possible expression of matter, energy, and information. That "quantum foam" we talked about, then, is really the quantum equivalent of a series of coin tosses: tiny little deviations one way or the other, particles and antiparticles, waveforms that are pushing towards the positive or the negative. Baby universes that quickly pop in and out of existence, then, would be (on a much larger scale, or course) like those areas of grouping and symmetry order that we would see within 100 tosses of a coin.

Traveling around within this omniverse of all possibilities, we'll occasionally find coherent structures that represent a potential universe, and if we then look more closely at the dimensions below, we'll find the wave function for that particular universe and all of the possible states for that particular universe, and each universe will have unique characteristics as defined by its position within the omniverse.

Our own universe, then, is constrained by its basic physical laws, which appear to not have changed over the life of our universe. Physicists talk about the big bang as being the "most ordered state" for our universe, and how everything from there on has been a move from more order to more entropy. Now, we've just been looking at a way to see how our universe is the result of a push towards a large amount of grouping order, and the arrow of time that we are experiencing now is the result of a return to symmetry order - but here's the hardest part to wrap our minds around: where this is all occurring is outside of time and space, and it all occurs simultaneously.

A number of the great minds of the twentieth century tried to get us all to visualize this place where, as Einstein liked to say, "the distinction between past, present and future is meaningless". As we're imagining the omniverse, what we're thinking about is the timeless place where our universe, and all of the possible parallel universes resulting from chance and choice for our universe, and all of the other possible universes and their own wave function of possible expressions all enfold together - into a beautifully balanced zero which is not empty, but full, of all the other possibilities.

To finish, here's a video for one of the 26 songs I've attached to this project: this is me sitting at my old piano in my living room, singing a song about the extra dimensional patterns that create our reality, and how sometimes we might be able catch a glimpse of those patterns in our day-to-day life. The song is called "From the Corner of My Eye".


A direct link to this video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=2f8IBDXv_xI

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Edit: A few months later another related blog was published: Imagining the Omniverse - Addendum

Next: New stuff at the store