Tenth Dimension TagCrowd

This is the one year anniversary of the Imagining the Tenth Dimension blog, which had its first entry on January 12th, 2007. In the past year we've talked about a lot of things: one of the through-lines has been memes, and how our reality is defined by what can thought of as multi-dimensional shapes or patterns. Whether you think of those shapes as a Calabi-Yau manifold, or an E8 rotation, or the visualization tool that I've come up with here, you are still trying to envision how it all fits together from out of the background of timelessness and indeterminacy that quantum physics tells us our reality springs from.

Speaking of visualization tools, a couple of days ago I came across a nice site called TagCrowd. This is a free service. You give it a website URL, an uploaded file, or just some pasted text, and it generates a tag cloud based upon the number of occurrences of words within whatever was submitted. For fun, I fed it all of the eighty-some blog entries I've published here in the first year. The TagCrowd site, created by Daniel Steinbock, then gives you html code released under a Creative Commons license, which generates the image you see pasted below. This, of course, is different from the label cloud at the head of this blog, because that cloud is generated by my conscious decisions on whether or not to label a particular concept from a particular blog entry. The tag cloud below, on the other hand, is a more direct representation of how often I have used certain words in my explorations surrounding this project in the past year. I thought the result was pretty interesting, hope you do too: and thank you to the millions of people around the world who have watched the animation and visited the tenth dimension website!

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

already animation anthropic available big bang become beginning being believe book change choices concept connections consciousness created creative death different dimension dimensional discussion enjoy everything exist eye fifth fits fourth future god google gravity higher ideas imagining important includes information interesting journey life mainstream matter memes mind moment multiverse music nature note number observer patterns people person physicists physics positive possible potential probability quantum question reality reason represent result science seven seventh simple song space spacetime specific spirituality state string system talking ten tenth dimension theory things think true unique universe version video view ways words work world years

created at TagCrowd.com

The Tenth Dimension Goes Live

Here's something new we're trying now: schedule permitting, every day at 10 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time (which is 4 p.m. CST my time), I am talking live to people from around the world about the Imagining the Tenth Dimension project.

The live chat in its full form can be found at www.tenthdimension.com/chat. A small part of the room is below. As you'll see, this includes a "Copy Chatroom" button that lets you grab a piece of code, so that anyone who wants to can paste this part of the chatroom into their own website.

One of the nice things about this window, which comes from the good folks at meebo, is any YouTube, Google Video, or Metacafe movie can be shared without leaving the chat window, plus links to Flickr photo sets. Any url link can also be shared, and and any of these links to media and websites become thumbnails that remain after visitors leave the site.

Within the formatting of my blog, the video window is not being shown here, but a text-only chat sometimes has its uses as well.

Welcome to the Tenth Dimension. Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

What do you want to change?

Last blog ended with the big question: what do you want to change?

One of the big ideas Imagining the Tenth Dimension has been pushing is memes. This term, introduced to us by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, refers to ideas and beliefs that propogate themselves across time and space in much the same way that our genes have done so since the beginning of life on this planet. I have been arguing that memes (rhymes with "teams") are more than just an intellectual concept. If, as Anton Zeilinger, professor of physics at the University of Vienna has been quoted to say, "quantum physics requires us to abandon the distinction between information and reality", then memes are just another way of looking at the information that creates the multiverse from which our universe is a slice.

As the social networking world of Web 2.0 starts to become more and more integrated and cross-connected, we are finding ways to instantaneously track the rising and falling of memes which shape our world. This is a paradigm shift which seems completely natural to the under twenty-fives of the western world, who have spent all of their lives with computers in their homes, and were part of BBS communities long before the internet rose to prominence. This generation are comfortable with a feeling of inter-connectedness through Web 2.0 which the baby boomers (of which I am one) can only begin to dream. How much longer will it take before this connection to people of similar interests around the world finally corrects the free-fall in under-30 voter turnout we have been seeing for the last thirty years? That change is already beginning.

All around the world, people who felt powerless are starting to realize that they have more control of their futures than the highly-concentrated power structures of the twentieth century had taught them to believe. As people wake up, the clamor for the latest football to the groin video on YouTube is gradually being joined by a connected world with serious concerns about the future of this planet. As these memes start to become more dominant, we can see how they are like any other waveform in the information that creates our reality - resonance and entrainment starts to kick in, and tipping points that change our consensual reality become more and more possible.

In the physical world, books like Steven Strogatz's "Sync : the Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order" have shown us how vibrational patterns can be transmitted across rooms, causing pendulum clocks to fall in synchronization with each other, or across fields and valleys, causing huge swarms of fireflies to blink off and on in unison. New developments such as WiTricity are showing how resonance can be used to induce an electric impulse without wires, giving us hope for electronic devices that will some day charge themselves.

In the world of ideas spreading across the internet, new initiatives are springing up daily. Sites like edge.org have done much to bring new intellectual explorations to the forefront, including books like "What We Believe but Cannot Prove". John Ondrasik (of Five for Fighting fame) has created a site called "What Kind of World Do You Want" which encourages people to post videos about their hopes and dreams, and promises to donate money to one of six charities as people watch these videos. Microsoft is promoting their "I'm Making a Difference" campaign, which donates money every time people registered with the program use Windows Messenger. The Fire the Grid project goes even further, inviting people around the world to meditate on peace and healing for the planet at a certain time on July 17th... could the initiative which moves our world into a new phase really be that close?

Let's ask ourselves this: what stands in the way of us as a planet reaching a tipping point, a chaos-theory-style bifurcation, where enough people can desire a specific change that our consensual reality is affected through resonance and entrainment? Projects like Julius Popp's Bit.Fall (which tracks common words from the internet and puts them into visually stunning computer controlled waterfalls), We Feel Fine (which track the emotional words that bloggers use associated with the word "feel" and creates fascinating real time animations of how, where and when these words are being used) are pointing the way to the future of cloud tagging. Newly popular YouTube videos from younger contributors, like "Stand Up For World Peace" are showing how simple ideas can be imaginatively presented (Norman McLaren style in this case) and create a huge amount of conversation and response in the Web 2.0 world. And the video "Prometeus - The Media Revolution" gives us a plausible scenario for how things could develop over the next few decades.

I believe that Imagining the Tenth Dimension has the potential to be part of that change. Almost two million people have visited the tenth dimension website and seen my new way of imagining reality, plus the hundreds of thousands more who have seen copies of the video at revver, youtube, and so on. I have been hearing from people all over the world who are excited about its implications. A few video bloggers (like this one and this one) have posted their thoughts on YouTube. A tenth dimension fan from Greece has translated the voiceover into Greek subtitles and posted the result at Google Video. The book has been sold in dozens of countries around the world, and discussions are now beginning for translation of the book into other languages. As we approach the first anniversary of the launch of the tenth dimension website, the tenth dimension meme shows no sign of slowing down, and for that I am very grateful.

Enjoying the journey,

Rob

PS - here, just for fun, are some more videos of some of the songs from the tenth dimension project.

Memes / Tag Clouds / Spimes

Yesterday, John Brownlee, in his Wired.com blog “Table of Malcontents” posted a lovely recommendation for the tenth dimension website:

John's blog entry


As I said to John in the comments to his blog entry, Imagining the Tenth Dimension is a hobby project for me, but it has been an awe-inspiring experience to see the worldwide audience that has sprung up for the book and the website purely from word of mouth, and transmission of ideas through the web.

As I am always quick to point out, my "way of imagining" is not the accepted explanation for string theory, but it has gotten a lot of positive responses from people who like it as a new framework for discussion. In a previous post, "Time as a Spatial Dimension", I discuss some of my reasoning behind this new way of thinking about time and space.

This project is a creative exploration. It includes 26 songs about the nature of reality which I am now in the process of recording, the first six of which can be heard from the tenthdimension website at this time. I am interested in the links between this way of thinking about time and space, and how it gives us a tangible way to imagine the multiverse. It also ties in with spimes/tag clouds/memes, the granularity of time as predicted by loop quantum gravity, Minsky's Society of Mind, and many other topics from science/metaphysics/philosophy which are being discussed at the tenthdimension forum.

Our reality, I believe, has always been what the new tools we have before us are finally allowing us to see so clearly - that clouds of ideas/memes are navigating through space and time, rising, competing, and falling, and contributing to the consensual reality that we all share. The "long undulating snake" from the animation, then, would be a "spime": an object which can be mapped and tracked over space and time. Bruce Sterling's fascinating speech from the 2006 O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (which can be heard here is a very useful touchstone for introducing us to the ramifications of this way of thinking.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton


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YouTube and Conceptual Framing

You can listen to this file right now using this embedded player. This mp3 is available for download from archive.org under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike license - click here to download the file

We have now posted the 11 minute video for Imagining the Tenth Dimension up on YouTube: it's in two parts. Part 2's very first comment was a phrase similar to ones that I've read a lot about Imagining the Tenth Dimension in the last six months: "my mind is officially blown" (thanks for the comment, WeeklyTubeShow). By the way, the video also continues to be available in its continuously running 11 minute version, for viewing, embedding or download at revver.com.

One of the things that has made this animation so popular, I believe, is that it deals with a wide-ranging amount of conceptual information in the way that the mind is best able to deal with it: one layer (or frame) at a time. Up until a year or two ago there was a wonderful show in the Rose Center’s Hayden Planetarium at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, called “Passport to the Universe”. Narrated by Tom Hanks, it was a highly effective visual journey which took the viewer through one order of magnitude leap after another, from the earth to the solar system, to our galaxy, to our local group and then our local supercluster of galaxies, and on out to the hundred billion galaxies and seventy sextillion stars (that’s 7 followed by 22 zeroes!) currently believed to make up our observable universe.

The resulting journey was mind blowing, and intellectually stimulating. By connecting from one layer to another, we were able to track through an idea that is potentially completely overwhelming, simply by presenting the information in a way that allowed us a chance to digest it. This is absolutely necessary, because our monkey minds would find it impossible to simultaneously imagine the size of an atom, along with the size of the earth, along with the size of the local supercluster, and so on: we simply aren't wired that way.

With the amount of information the internet places before us, the result is similarly overwhelming. Tagclouds and other conceptual framing tools show promise, but the need for a graphic interface that allows us to mine complex data in a way that lets us appreciate the big picture but still drill into the fine detail is something for which I can hardly wait.

Have you seen this video?

This is Jeff Han at the TED conference, demonstrating a dramatic visualization tool that shows how we will deal with graphics and data mining in the future. As you watch this, forget for a moment that this screen of the future runs the risk of becoming a greasy haze as we paw away at the screen: that is a minor detail, and if you can achieve this by touching the screen, then a tool that allows you to grab the air in the front of the screen is just one step beyond. The important thing, I believe, is that this gives us back what our motor-sensory systems have been yearning for - the ability to reach out and grab something. Watching Jeff "pinch" a place on the screen to draw that part closer, or placing two fingers on the screen to define the pivot point as he examines a 3D map, makes me want to throw my mouse in the garbage right now.

A "Google Universe" tool, then, that allowed you to quickly zoom in and out through the journey from atom to solar system to the known universe and back again would be a profound educational tool. Likewise, a flickr interface that allowed you to quickly zoom in on a tag, narrowing your choices from cateogory to subcategory, and down to the picture you are looking for cries out for an interface where you are using natural physical gestures to pinch and pull at the data you are traversing.

And finally, back to the tenth dimension. A physical interface that allowed you to take the tenth dimension journey using an interface like the one Jeff Han is demonstrating would be equally illuminating: defining your most basic laws as you descend from the ninth through the seventh dimension, picking the point in the seventh dimension that represents our universe and all of its timelines, then zooming in to explore the sixth dimension and all the timelines that could have occurred up to now that didn't, stepping down to all of the fifth dimensional choices currently available but not taken, and down to the time and space that we see as our universe would be a thrilling journey. Then, zooming back out to the seventh dimension and above, and re-entering at some other point to explore the expressions of time and space that that unique "other-different-initial-conditions" universe could hold, with expressions from the sixth dimension and down to the first that are just as real but completely inaccessible to our own, I believe we would have a tool that allows people to imagine how something as daunting as a "multiverse of universes" could actually exist.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob