The Shaman

Before we start this entry, here's a new video we posted on YouTube yesterday which is attached to a blog entry from a month ago: "Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?". I'm posting it here for all the subscribers to this blog who wouldn't have seen this video back when that previous blog entry was first released.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfhOBevrN2U. And now, on with today's entry!


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHO2h_NPkE8

I've quoted author and psychobiologist David Jay Brown before, who had some very kind things to say about my book:

Rob Bryanton's Imagining the Tenth Dimension is one of the most brilliantly-conceived and mind-stretching books that I've ever encountered. Bryanton presents a uniquely compelling model of our 10-dimensional universe, that allows one to visualize and grasp the topography of the higher dimensions in a step-by-step manner. This is must reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of physics, shamanic exploration, or the nature of reality.

Last time we talked about Augmented Reality, new technology which allows us to visualize things that aren't part of our physical world. This time I'd like to look at David Jay Brown's suggestion that my way of visualizing reality is useful for people interested in shamanism. There's an extensive article on this subject in wikipedia, here's one sentence that I think is key:

Shamanism is based on the premise that the visible world is pervaded by invisible forces or spirits which affect the lives of the living.

The idea that our reality is created by extra-dimensional patterns and shapes is, of course, central to my project. Whether one thinks of those as "invisible forces" or something more metaphysical, I've been insisting, may have more to with point of view than what it is we're really describing. Regardless, though, a shaman's viewpoint has to embrace the basic idea that I've been promoting here: that there is much more to our reality than the 3D world we see around us, and finding ways to visualize how that could be requires us to embrace a perspective which is "outside" of time, and "outside" of space. What I think is remarkable, though, is that this same "timeless" viewpoint has been central to the theories of many of the great scientific minds of the twentieth century: we've talked about this before in entries like Wormholes and Dimensional Folding and Scrambled Eggs.

Black Elk
Ever hear of Black Elk? He was a Lakota medicine man who lived from 1863 to 1950. While there appear to be varying opinions on whether it's proper to call Black Elk a shaman, I would say there are strong connections between this man's transcendent viewpoint and what is referred to as shamanism in other parts of the world. There's a well-known book called Black Elk Speaks which recounts his visions and insights, in what some are calling "the most famous Native American book ever written". A YouTube visitor named "crazedmystic" posted the following quote from Black Elk Speaks on one of my video blogs a few weeks ago:

Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all.

I love this quote, not just because it speaks to the enfolded nature of reality which I am constantly going on about, but because it states it in such a beautiful way. I've tried to portray similar ideas about the connectedness that we all share, and the beautiful hoop, the "zero" that holds all other possibilities in so many other entries: Going to the Light, "t" Equals Zero, Imagining the Omniverse, and The Big Bang and the Big O, to name just a few.

Drums and Trance
What else is central to the shamanistic experience? It's impossible to generalize too much because shamans appear in various cultures throughout the world: still, music, trance, and altered states of consciousness can all play a large role. Have you ever been in a drum circle? This is one of those things that comedians like to make fun of, but there really is something there - the power of the drum, the shared experience of a large group of people becoming physically and mentally entrained through just drumming together, and the trance-like altered states of consciousness that can spring from such an experience can be surprisingly uplifting. One of my favorite books about all this was written by Mickey Hart, well-known musicologist and drummer for the Grateful Dead, called Drumming at the Edge of Magic.

"Altered states of consciousness", of course, can be brought about through various natural means, including dance or meditation, or through more traumatic experiences, but for many people the phrase makes psychedelics spring to mind immediately.

Psychedelics
We started this blog with a quote from David Jay Brown. As we discussed in David Jay Brown and Psychedelics, David is a respected expert on psychedelics and their serious study: he is also sometimes a guest editor of the newsletter published by the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelics Studies, which you can find at maps.org.

Which brings us to Terence McKenna, who some have referred to as a modern shaman. Here's a very interesting video showing Terence McKenna talking about shamanism in a way that seems very related to what I've been talking about here: McKenna tells us that a shaman would have to be able to tune into the "bifurcating trees of possibility" (McKenna's words) that are coming towards them from beyond the solid reality they see around them. I'd like to think that McKenna would have appreciated the connections between what he's talking about in this video, and the way that I've portrayed the fifth dimension as being part of our probability space (in entries like Dr. Mel's 4D Glasses and Predicting the Future). In entries like The Holographic Universe and Slices of Reality I've also described the fifth dimension as the place where we can see the underlying patterns of our reality are springing from, another related idea. And speaking of Augmented Reality, in a fanciful moment I find myself wondering if we'll ever get to the point where certain psychedelic experiences could be simulated using an augmented reality interface to superimpose those effects over top of the world we see around us? Now that would be quite the software program.


A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=S_qx5Pd9Z-M


It really is too bad that Terence McKenna passed away in 2000, well before the advent of YouTube, as he has some fascinating presentations out there that are finding a new audience through the medium of streaming video, but without his participation in the dialog we are deprived of the instant feedback loop that can make YouTube and its comments sections so interesting. To close, here's a couple more of Terence McKenna videos that relate to all this:

You are the center of the Mandala:

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=MHsB3RviFN4

Changing your operating system

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=ctjNqQPnAk8


Next, we'll continue this discussion with an entry called "Modern Shamans".

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Augmented Reality

EDIT - My company, Talking Dog Studios, has been developing a number of augmented reality products since this blog entry was published. Click here to read about some of our AR projects.

This blog is continued in the following entries:
Augmented Reality Season's Greetings
How Big Is...
Augmented Reality - 10th dim Music Videos (a tenth dimension toy for you to play with)
Augmented Reality - Crazy Wakeboarder (another AR toy for you)
More on Augmented Reality
Doritos Augmented Reality
World Builder
WWF Augmented Reality

I believe I was first introduced to the concept of Augmented Reality by author William Gibson in his 1994 novel Virtual Light, although that's not what he called it back then. What's "augmented reality"? It's like "virtual reality" but it's overlaid on the real world. In Virtual Light, a stolen pair of glasses contain secret architectural plans for a remodeling of San Francisco, and someone wearing these glasses can walk down the street, look around at buildings and see the plans superimposed over the existing structures. With his 2007 novel Spook Country, Gibson developed the idea much further into a technology-driven innovation called locative art , in which location-specific 3D art displays could spring up any time, anywhere: Gibson called it "geohacking", but "augmented reality" would be another good term for what he's describing.

Last blog entry, we talked about the renewed interest in the idea that our universe is really a four-dimensional shadow of a five-dimensional hologram which we are moving within. This time around we're going to lighten up and have some fun with some creative new toys that allow us to play with our reality, using nothing more than a webcam, a web browser, and a piece of paper with a shape printed on it. This is augmented reality.

Augmented reality has been around for a while, and not just in the mind of visionaries like William Gibson. Here's a news story from two years ago showing some of the ground-breaking work that was being done back then.

A direct link to this video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKw_Mp5YkaE&NR

The projects shown in the above video are interesting, but they still required proprietary hardware and software to work their magic. What I find really interesting are the developments in the last few months that now let any of us play with this technology at home, with no special software programs to install.

Last month, three German auto magazines had an ad on the back cover which gave you a "free" MINI Cabrio. Take a minute to watch this mini-documentary:

A direct link to the above movie is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=HTYeuo6pIjY

This is definitely a step forward, but unfortunately this campaign worked only on PCs running Internet Explorer with Active-X. If that's what you have and you want to try making this one work for yourself, check out this blog entry at technabob.com.

Where things get really interesting though, is people are now figuring out how to play the same tricks using flash as the interface, which makes it compatible with almost all modern computers. Take a look at this:

Papervision - Augmented Reality (extended) from Boffswana on Vimeo.

It's surprisingly easy to get this animated green monster to appear right on the table in front of you, if you'd like to play with this go to http://www.boffswana.com/news/?p=392 for instructions on how to do so.

Now here's an even stranger looking implementation of the same idea. This is "New Year's Greetings '09" from AID-DCC Inc. & Katamari Inc. in Japan, and this really fired my imagination the first time I saw it work:

A direct link to this video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=TW6_X9qBeds

If you go to their website to try this out yourself, it would probably help if you speak Japanese, but if not, you just have to click on the yellow rectangle that appears in the lower part of the window beneath a drawing of a fellow holding a piece of paper in front of his computer/webcam setup. I did find this site loads correctly some times and gets hung up other times, if you don't get to that yellow rectangle just try refreshing the screen or come back later.

By the way, the 3D part of these last couple of links is being created with "Papervision3D", click here to go to the Papervision3D blog and a further discussion of how to get the above "Happy New Year 09" augmented reality trick working for you.

Now, playing with these Augmented Reality toys at home with your webcam is fun. But the possibilities get even further out when you use this technology with the new generation smart phones. Here's a movie showing a 3D virtual pet you can interact with on your iPhone:


A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=_0bitKDKdg0


And here's an Augmented Reality game called Tower Defense which works on the Nokia N95 phone:

A direct link to this video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=zyWVH6jkDHg

And finally, here's a creepy Augmented Reality game for the N95 which has you hunting through your house to find the ghosts that are hiding there:

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=YrQ_57RF2TU

These are innovations that have just come to light in the last couple of months, and I'm sure there are many more creative and mind-boggling innovations on their way. Augmented Reality holds lots of exciting promise, and I can't wait to see what's coming up.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob

Next: The Shaman

The Holographic Universe

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMLVjFrtq6Q

Last time, in Slices of Reality, we talked about interference patterns. This time we're going to talk about holograms, and if you look that word up in wikipedia you'll see that holograms are created using interference patterns.

I've been receiving a lot of email in the last week or two from people interested in the idea that our universe is really a hologram. In my book and this blog I've talked before about the connection between the way of visualizing reality I'm proposing here and the idea of the Holographic Universe, a connection that has also been noted in a few of the reviews of my book. Now, here's a link to a recent story in New Scientist magazine that shows why people's excitement about this idea has been re-ignited: the article, written by Marcus Chown and published January 15 2009, is about new discoveries just announced by the GEO600 experiment. GEO600 is a German project that has been looking for gravitational waves for the past seven years. Here's some excerpts from the article:

GEO600 has not detected any gravitational waves so far, but it might inadvertently have made the most important discovery in physics for half a century.

For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into "grains", just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. "It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time," says Hogan.

If this doesn't blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: "If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram."

The idea that our reality is not continuous, but granular, broken down into planck-unit-sized "grains" of spacetime is something I've been saying since I launched my project. The idea, though, that proving the existence of this granularity would be direct evidence that our universe is a hologram is a not a connection I've talked about before. This New Scientist article goes on to describe the groundbreaking work in the 90's of such physicists as Jacob Bekenstein, Leonard Susskind, Gerard 't Hooft, and Juan Maldacena, some of which I've talked about in my book, and in previous blogs like Why Stop at Ten Dimensions, Hypercubes and Plato's Cave, and Why Do We Need More Than 3 Dimensions?. Here's a few more excerpts from the article:

What's more, work by several string theorists, most notably Juan Maldacena at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, has confirmed that the idea is on the right track. He showed that the physics inside a hypothetical universe with five dimensions and shaped like a Pringle is the same as the physics taking place on the four-dimensional boundary.

According to Hogan, the holographic principle radically changes our picture of space-time. If GEO600 really has discovered holographic noise from quantum convulsions of space-time, then it presents a double-edged sword for gravitational wave researchers. On one hand, the noise will handicap their attempts to detect gravitational waves. On the other, it could represent an even more fundamental discovery.

More importantly, confirming the holographic principle would be a big help to researchers trying to unite quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of gravity. Today the most popular approach to quantum gravity is string theory, which researchers hope could describe happenings in the universe at the most fundamental level. But it is not the only show in town. "Holographic space-time is used in certain approaches to quantising gravity that have a strong connection to string theory," says Cramer. "Consequently, some quantum gravity theories might be falsified and others reinforced."

Hogan agrees that if the holographic principle is confirmed, it rules out all approaches to quantum gravity that do not incorporate the holographic principle. Conversely, it would be a boost for those that do - including some derived from string theory and something called matrix theory. "Ultimately, we may have our first indication of how space-time emerges out of quantum theory." As serendipitous discoveries go, it's hard to get more ground-breaking than that.

Regular readers of this blog will note the important idea that our universe actually comes from the fifth dimension, another drum that I've been beating from the outset, and which I've talked about in a number of blogs, such as Time is a Direction, The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic, and Flatlanders on a Line. Speaking in terms of spatial dimensions, this article's comment that we live in a universe with five dimensions and shaped like a Pringle is extremely important.

Is Our Universe Flat or Curved?
In our four-dimensional universe, it appears that space-time is essentially flat. If it were truly flat, then parallel lines would never meet and our universe would have no boundaries in any direction. NASA's WMAP project has returned results showing that the universe is flat within a 2% margin of error. What does this mean? It means that for most intents and purposes our universe is truly flat. But in the largest picture of all, I believe that the above two ideas are going to be shown to be equivalent - our universe is very close to flat, but there is still a very slight curvature, and the 13.7 billion year "boundary" that cosmology shows us as being our line of time back to the big bang will still show that we are only witnessing a tiny region of a much larger whole, an idea that is central to this project and which we've talked about in recent entries like Dreaming of Electric Sheep and Imagining the Omniverse. So, in the same way that Euclidean geometry makes sense in our local frame of reference--a square building really is constructed from lines at 90 degree angles and parallel lines don't ever meet--if we look at the entire planet we can see that a square that encompasses a hemisphere must have angles that are slightly larger than 90 degrees and parallel lines really can meet each other as they traverse the globe. That "pringles potato chip" shape they are referring to, then, is like the horizon we see all around us as we are in the middle of the ocean: all we need to do is widen our frame of reference beyond the boundaries of 4D space-time to see how that horizon is created by a very subtle curvature that for any local observations is so small as to be inconsequential, but in the biggest picture of all it gives us a way to visualize how the holographic information that defines our universe from the fifth dimension is "just over the horizon" of our 4D spacetime.

You are a Hologram
The cover of this New Scientist issue we're quoting from here sums it up this way - "YOU ARE A HOLOGRAM - projected from the edge of the universe". While this phrase gives us one way to think about the fifth dimension as coming from just beyond the boundary of our 4D spacetime, I've talked many times about other ways of visualizing how each additional dimension is "around" or "outside" the previous one - so rather than thinking about the hologram that creates our universe as being something that is far far away, I think it's more useful to think about the hologram as being "just around the corner in time" - which is the phrase I use in my song "The Unseen Eye".

As we discussed in "What Would a Linelander Really See", the term "extra dimensions" is often used by physicists rather than "higher dimensions" when talking about the dimensions beyond spacetime: I think this is a useful distinction, because saying "higher" somehow sets the idea up in our minds that we should be gazing skyward as we think about these additional dimensions. In blog entries like Unlikely Events and Timelessness and Time in 3 Dimensions, we've talked about how "events that are so unlikely they will talk longer than the life of the universe to occur" is another useful way of visualizing how we can derive the information that represents dimensions beyond 4D space-time, another useful branch to this discussion.

Information Becomes Reality
Are we embedded in a fifth-dimensional hologram which is at right angles to the fourth dimension? Imagining what the phrase "at right angles to the fourth dimension" means has been one of the main goals behind this project. If you've been following along, I hope that by now you have grown more used to thinking about the fifth dimensional probability space as it relates to Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation, the universe as a hologram, and the digital physics concept that information equals reality - I believe these ideas will eventually be shown to all fit together in the big picture of timelessness.

To finish - one of the videos for my song "The Unseen Eye".

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

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Augmented Reality

Slices of Reality

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nheaNclVe2Y


This stunningly surreal shot of an airplane's spinning propeller was taken using an iPhone, which has the unique property of working more like a scanner than a traditional still camera: on an iPhone the image is assembled using sequential vertical "slices" moving from the left side to the right side of the image, a very rapid process that in most cases would give you a completely normal-looking photograph, but in situations like these it gives you something quite extraordinary. Clearly, this is the tip of the iceberg, and now that that this has been noticed we should soon be seeing lots of artistic shots like this one of various fast moving objects. Would a hummingbird's wings become deconstructed in a similar way? I have no idea what will work and what won't (and since I don't own an iPhone I'm not going to find out any time soon), but I was immediately drawn to this picture in the context of my project.

One of the basic ideas from Imagining the Tenth Dimension is that reality is not continuous: what we think of as our "line of time" is actually being assembled one planck length after another from a wave function, a probability space, which I propose exists within the fifth dimension and above. Thinking about waves and patterns from the extra dimensions which manifest themselves down here in spacetime is something we've talked about many times, in entries like Hypercubes and Plato's Cave and The Flipbook Universe: but trying to visualize how interlocking oscillations and patterns in the higher dimensions could manifest as separate particles, physical objects, and living creatures within the physical reality we're part of is still not an easy thing to do. Can you see that the strange shapes representing the spinning propeller in this photograph are an interference pattern, created by the "slices" of the camera's picture-taking process interacting with the rotational spin of the prop? In the same way, the "slices", or quanta, of our line of time are an important part of the processes that create our reality.

Moiré Patterns

The above video was posted on YouTube by alecmartindeleon, you can find it at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=n_2kSdj6V0w

In the concluding chapter of my book, I focused on constructive interference patterns as a way to imagine how our reality and the mysterious spark of life are akin to the dancing moiré patterns that happen when repeating patterns of information are interacting with each other - and the important concept I've spoken about before, "that which ceases to change ceases to exist" is tied to that idea as well. Thinking of "life" as something that springs into being through the interference patterns of memes (selection patterns from the extra dimensions) and spimes (space-time objects, which would include genes and the DNA helix in the case of life on Earth) is one of the more "out there" conclusions I've reached with this project, and I haven't spent much time talking about that idea in these blogs because it's quite a stretch for most people to visualize how such a thing could be possible.

More metaphysical/spiritual ideas of imagining an extra dimensional meme-space that connects us all together and yet gives us each our unique experience as individuals is also something I've talked about, in entries like I Know You, You Know Me, and You are Me and We are All Together. But a picture can speak a thousand words, and I think this amazing iPhone picture gives us a very useful visualization tool for all of the above ideas.

I would like to give credit where it's due, but...
The above iPhone picture has been making the rounds for the last week or so, but I'm not sure who created the original shot. I found it at http://www.globalnerdy.com/2009/01/13/cheap-camera-interesting-shot/#, and in that blog entry the picture's creator is not named but a link is provided to monkeydyne.com, which currently only shows a drawing of a windup toy monkey (perhaps links have been temporarily pulled down because of a sudden and expensive spike in traffic to the site?). I would love to know more about this picture and how it was taken, just how fast the propeller was spinning, etc., but this is all I have to go on at the moment.

In any case, I hope you enjoyed looking at this picture while thinking about interference patterns and the nature of reality.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: The Holographic Universe

Going to the Light

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

White noise is a random signal (or process) with a flat power spectral density. In other words, the signal contains equal power within a fixed bandwidth at any center frequency. White noise draws its name from white light in which the power spectral density of the light is distributed over the visible band in such a way that the eye's three color receptors (cones) are approximately equally stimulated.

An infinite-bandwidth, white noise signal is purely a theoretical construction. By having power at all frequencies, the total power of such a signal is infinite and therefore impossible to generate. In practice, however, a signal can be "white" with a flat spectrum over a defined frequency band.

- from the wikipedia article on white noise

There's a lot of connections in the above to what we've been talking about here with the Imagining the Tenth Dimension project. In entries like Randomness and the Missing 96%, Unlikely Events and Timelessness, and Imagining the Omniverse, we've talked about the tenth dimension as being all possibilities existing simultaneously, an enfolded symmetry that, like a pencil balanced on its tip, is always ready to fall one way or another and create a pattern, or create a universe. In my book I also compare the tenth dimension to white noise or white light. Here's how I end chapter one:

In the picture we’ve constructed here, the tenth dimension when viewed by itself becomes quite uninteresting compared to the multitude of possibilities that are generated when we descend down to the dimensions below. Speaking poetically, the tenth dimension is like white noise, an endless field of all colours and vibrations blurred together. Because it encompasses all possible realities without delineation between those realities, it is like a void. Where things do get interesting is when we cut cross-sections out of that formlessness to view some specific aspect: like our two-dimensional Flatlander viewing the feet of a human creature visiting from the dimension above as ten lines that become two, there is no way for anyone in a dimension less than ten to perceive all of the possibilities that the tenth dimension contains.
In any dimension lower than ten, all that can be viewed of reality is cross sections. But that is what makes our existence so interesting: not the infinite “white noise” of possibilities; but that out of all those possibilities that could be, we are in this very specific one, right here, and right now.

I think the connection of white noise or white light to infinity in the wikipedia description we just looked at is very interesting, since I've talked about the tenth dimension in those terms as well, and how each spatial dimension has its own version of infinity. As I've said in entries like "Is there more than one infinity?", "Can there be a positive and negative infinity?", and "Why stop at ten dimensions?", a very important phrase to remember is "there are many roads to infinity".

Thinking about the tenth dimension as "white light", then, brings to mind a metaphysical connection as well. What are we talking about when we hear that a dying person or a departing soul should "go to the light"? In the Big Bang and the Big O, we quoted Oscar Janiger, who described death as a return to "the fundamental substrate of all things" - another way of describing the "outside the system" qualities of the tenth dimension.

In entries like Elvis and the Electrons and We Start with a Point, we've talked about how this works from a physics standpoint. In entries like You are Me and We are All Together and I Know You, You Know Me, we got more specific on how this could be related to ideas of all conscious awareness being aspects of the same connected whole. But, as we just discussed in entries like Do You Believe in Ghosts? and Have You Ever Seen an Aura?, the idea that there is more than just the physical world we see around us is a concept that some people can accept and others cannot. I have to presume, dear reader, that if you have made it this far then you are willing to at least consider the possibilities.

To finish, here's one the 26 songs I wrote for this project, and it's about the tiny little hints we catch fleeting glimpses of that suggest to us that the universe is even more strange and complex than we've been led to believe: the song is called "From the Corner of My Eye".


A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=MyP5jxFe5Po

Coming up next: Slices of Reality

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

PS - Due to popular demand we now have a 6 DVD set of video blogs for sale at the Tenth Dimension store. Thanks everyone for your support of this project!

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=QoZ5YomCLrQ

"t" Equals Zero

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=aQw_v4dqQwY

For the last 100 years of so, there has been much debate over whether our universe is eternal, or whether it could be cyclical-- now that we know our universe is expanding, some have suggested that perhaps there will be a time in the future that expansion will slow down, stop, and eventually the universe will collapse back in upon itself, creating new conditions akin to the big bang ( this concept is referred to by some as the "Big Bounce"), in which case our current universe would be only some place on a gigantic timeline in a potentially endless series of expansions and contractions.

One might expect that expansion/contraction debate to be over now with the 1998 discovery that the universe's expansion is accelerating. Nonetheless, in the last six months or so there have been a number of articles in magazines like New Scientist reporting on new theories that once again put forth the idea of a cyclical universe. While these theories are being advanced by serious scientists with reasonable explanations, there is also an emotional reason for us all to not want to believe the universe will endlessly expand: because, as the cover story of last March's Scientific American explained, if it does then that means our visible universe will eventually be empty, as everything accelerates faster and faster away from each other, and the ultimate destiny of the universe will be a meaningless and empty nothingness.

There is a solution, though. That solution does provide us with a cycle, but that cycle happens outside of time and space, in a place where everything happens simultaneously, and, as Gevin Giorbran described it so well, where Everything is Forever. Nutty new age mumbo jumbo? Not at all. This time around, I'd like to discuss a book by physicist John W. Moffat, called Reinventing Gravity. To quote Dr. Moffat:

... there is no actual singular beginning to the universe, although there is a special time equal to zero (t=0) as there is in the big bang theory. But in my Modified Gravity Theory (MOG), t=0 is free of singularities. The universe at t=0 is empty of matter, spacetime is flat, and the universe stands still. Because this state is unstable, eventually matter is created, gravity asserts itself, spacetime become curved and the universe expands. In contrast to the big bang scenario, the MOG universe is an eternal, dynamically evolving universe--which may have implications for philosophy and religion as well as astrophysics and cosmology.

What does Dr. Moffat mean by this? Isn't he proposing another scenario where the universe ends in a meaningless heat death of maximum entropy, or the Absolute Zero of the "Big Freeze", or is torn apart to nothingness by the "Big Rip"? Here's his explanation, which ties very nicely to blog entries of mine like "Scrambled Eggs" and "Time in Either Direction":

An interesting feature of the MOG cosmology is that at t=0, entropy can just as easily increase toward negative time as positive time. Then entropy will continually increase into the infinitely distant past or negative time. Thus t=0 in MOG is a special time when the universe can expand both into positive time and into negative time. Because there is no singularity, the infinite past can be joined to the infinite future; a singularity would cause an obstruction between the past and the future.

What Dr. Moffat is proposing, then, is that there is a place at the "end of time" for our universe or any other, regardless of the "direction" of time that a particular universe is experiencing, where everything fits together within timelessness.

Persons familiar with my book and this blog will recognize this as one of the central ideas behind my project, but to be clear, Dr. Moffat's proposal still disagrees in one important way: in my model, what Dr. Moffat is calling "t=0" and what he is referring to as the infinitely distant past or future are all the same thing. While it's visually easy to imagine a donut ("torus") shape that joins the infinite past to the infinite future (the hole in the middle is t=0, and the outside edges of the donut are the infinite past and future states) I want to be clear that at this point there is still this divergence between Dr. Moffat's Modified Theory of Gravity and the intuitive way of visualizing reality that I have come up with in my project.

As I've mentioned before, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek also has a new book out called The Lightness of Being, which proposes that there is an underlying state from which all other possible universes or patterns of information spring. In my model, that is the tenth dimension in its unobserved state, and in Dr. Moffat's model that is t=0. I believe that all are different ways of thinking about the same thing: the enfolded whole where everything fits together. I've talked in more detail about these ideas in blogs like We Start With a Point, A Point Within the Omniverse, and Imagining the Omniverse. To close, then, here is my song about that idea of an enfolded symmetry state where every possibility exists simultaneously, and which is like a pencil balanced on its tip, always ready to fall one way or another and create a new pattern or a new universe: Everything Fits Together.


A direct link to this video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=6nAS2trDuck
Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Going to the Light

The Big Bang and the Big O

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=e0iofBT3Vhs

"I always remember the Big Bang as the biggest orgasm in history." - Oscar Janiger

A few days ago, in Poll Question 30, we talked about death and how natural it is for us to believe that some part of us carries on afterwards. Here's a quote from well-known psychiatrist and psychedelics researcher Oscar Janiger, this is from the 1993 book Mavericks of the Mind, a brain-expanding collection of interviews by David Jay Brown and Rebecca McClen Novick:

David Jay Brown: Have you ever given any thought to what happens to human consciousness after physical death?
Oscar Janiger: I've given a lot of thought to it, but I'm afraid not much productive thought. My bias is that when the current is shut off, we somehow lose our sense of individuality... my thought is that, for myself only, that I'm simply shut down in my present state, and that somehow I--which is now a kind of fruitless phrase--am somehow restored to the earth, or to the matrix, or to what the Germans called the urschleim, or the fundamental substrate of all things, the fundamental primitive primordial stuff of which we are constituted. We go back to before the Big Bang. I always remember the Big Bang as the biggest orgasm in history.

Persons familiar with my project will recognize several ideas here: we are all connected to a larger whole (or, as physicist Michio Kaku puts it, we each have a wave function that gently seeps out into the entire universe), there is an enfolded symmetry containing all possibilities that is "before" the Big Bang (which I've talked about in entries like "The Big Bang and the Big Pie" and "Imagining the Omniverse")... but Dr. Janiger's bold connection of the Big Bang to sexual orgasm is an idea that's new to me. So this time around, let's play with that as a concept.

Rock On!
Are you familiar with the origins of the term rock and roll? Originally, this phrase was a euphemism within the American black community for sexual intercourse, originating in the 1930's. It's a particularly evocative phrase, I think, because it implies something that's more sensual: rather than an unimaginative binary in/out of straight lines and ejaculation, "rocking and rolling" brings to mind curves and creativity, a sex act that is interested in the combined satisfaction of both participants.

In the 1950's, disc jockey Alan Freed is credited with popularizing rhythm and blues records and using "rock and roll" as the new label to promote this predominantly black music style to the white audiences of America. Did the average white American know about the sexual connotations of the phrase? They did not. In fact, with racism still deeply embedded in 1950's American culture, the term "rhythm and blues" was a much more difficult sell because of its common association with "negro" culture, so giving this music style a new name was an important key to helping it find a broader audience.

As a music style, how do you define rock and roll? I've talked before about neuroscientist Daniel Levitin's "This is Your Brain on Music", a wonderfully diverse book which ties together many of the ideas my project also plays with: what gives music its power? What connects music to memory, and what allows music to be able to universally communicate emotion across centuries and across cultures, transcending time and space? Dr. Levitin talks about the subtle interplay of rhythm and groove, the cultural and genetic connections of dance and vocalizing, and yes, how intertwined those are with sex not just for human beings but throughout the animal kingdom.

"It's got a back beat, you can't lose it" - Chuck Berry
For all the rhythmic interplay and emotional connections that the best rock music is plugged into, that snare drum cracking away on the two and four is an extremely important ingredient - it's one of the things that gets people up out of their chairs and makes them want to move, and that dancing is what made puritanical parents of the 50's and 60's reel back in horror, condemning this music because of the sexually suggestive ways they saw their kids bopping around on the dance floor back then.

Dr. Levitin helps put this in context for us. Throughout the history of life on this planet, we see again and again that rhythmic displays and vocalizations are how mates are attracted, and how one creature demonstrates to another that it's healthy and vigorous, in other words a good choice for a sexual partner. In that sense, "rock and roll" was much the same as any dance music that had come before, and not nearly as big a deal or as new an idea as many suggested it was. What rock and roll was doing was the same as any other music that communicates emotion and physicality, and I've talked about this in other blog entries like "The Geometry of Music" and "Information Equals Reality". This also relates to sections of my book where I talk about the genetic connections shared by all living things in patterns that exist across time and space, and this is where I came up with a few fanciful connections of my own:

All of the body’s senses have ways to connect through our minds and our memories to other points in time and space. Sights, sounds, smells, and even textures can conjure up connections that are part of the complex system of memes that make up our individual experience across the higher spatial dimensions we are now imagining as being used to construct the ten dimensions of reality.
How about the well-known experience of a certain smell vividly bringing to mind a moment from the past? Scents and pheremones are known to be powerfully and intricately tied to memory and instinct, in ways that would seem to fold time. Could molecules of a certain scent that bring to mind a certain memory be exerting their power in part because those molecules are clumped together in a higher dimension? If that were the case, the doorway to the memes and memories of a different time and place could be much more easily accessed when the same fragrance is encountered again, because in a higher dimension that different time and place really would be in that much closer proximity to each other.
Sounds also can trigger memory and even instinct. We have already mentioned the squealing sound of chalk on a chalkboard being commonly reviled. Could this be because it resembles the cry of some prehistoric predator which our distant ancestors learned that they should retreat from as quickly as possible? Or, as another example, could the desire to urinate at the sound of running water be a racial memory that connects us to our ancestors who chose to urinate in a place where their urine would be carried away? That would mean the potential ancestors we could have had who constantly chose to urinate in their own standing drinking water supply died of disease, did not become our ancestors, and therefore we have no connection across time to them. As we discussed before, these ideas can also tie into the work of Richard Dawkins, who proposed a new way of looking at genes and how their “desire for continuance” connects them from the past to today in a “river out of Eden”.

It's All About Connections
Isn't it obvious that if we're talking about sex, then we're talking about a connection that we share with all of our ancestors, and if we're thinking outside of time and space then the pattern that represents "orgasm" is something that we share with our fathers (and at least some of our mothers) back to the beginning of sexual reproduction on this planet? But Dr. Janiger suggests an even deeper connection than that, back to the moment of creation for our universe.

Physicists talk about the Big Bang as being the most highly ordered state our universe was ever in. Quantum computing expert Seth Lloyd tells us to think of the Big Bang not as a physical event, but as the first binary yes/no that separates out our universe from all of the other possible universes that could have existed. More and more physicists, including Frank Wilczek, John Moffat, and Sean Carroll have put out articles and books in the last few months which talk about a state which exists "before" the big bang, an enfolded symmetry state from which our universe (or any other) springs, and this of course is one of the central ideas to my way of visualizing reality.

Still, I think it's important when we talk about the Big Bang being equivalent to a huge orgasm that we don't just apply the forward motion explosion/ejaculation image, because from our perspective that's actually backwards! What do I mean by that?

As we've discussed in entries like Scrambled Eggs and Time in Either Direction, when we think about our position within spacetime, and we think about the move back through time to the big bang, we are thinking about a gradual paring away of choices: a move towards the very simple initial conditions which defined our universe's basic physical laws. From our perspective, then, what lies "beyond" the big bang? Not our universe, not some other universe, but the enfolded symmetry of all possible states, where, as John Moffat says "t equals zero". We'll talk about this idea more next blog, but this leaves us with one of the most basic ideas from this project: no matter what you are thinking about in the universe, there is a binary viewpoint, and there is a holistic viewpoint. In quantum terms, this relates to the three states for a particle which can then be used in quantum computing: we can call these a "yes" state, a "no" state, and a "simultaneously yes and no" state. From our perspective, then, the move towards the big bang takes us to the highest grouping order (as Gevin Giorbran so eloquently showed us), or the most primary binary state for our universe (as Seth Lloyd asks us to think of it), but the actual "orgasm" of the big bang is what happens when we move beyond the big bang and back into the enfolded whole that we should all be celebrating as the source of every possible reality.

And for me, that's the connection between the big bang and the big "O".

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: "t" Equals Zero