New video - Is Spacetime Flat or Curved?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7iFXPU_1YE

Next: Proof That Spacetime is Flat?

Poll 74 - Twins, Photons, and Mass

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iACKDPXtH4

Poll 74 - "One twin stays here, the other travels by near speed of light rocket, returns to earth in 60 years looking not much older. This thought experiment shows us that a photon (traveling at the speed of light) has no experience of time: it has zero duration." Poll ended November 14 2010. 83.8% agreed, while the remaining 16.2% did not.

The Twins Paradox, as this is often called, comes from Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. I remember as a child watching a Wonderful World of Disney episode which included an animation about this concept and thinking it was impossible. How could it be that one twin gets in a rocket ship, the other stays home, and yet when the rocket twin returns he still looks the same age while the twin who stayed home now looks old? I really had a hard time with how strange the whole idea seemed to be.

And yet if you take the logic of this paradox even further, you arrive at the amazing conclusion we first looked at in Light Has No Speed. The faster you go, the larger the disparity between your experience of time and those who you leave behind: but the rocket ship twin will never be able to travel right at the speed of light, because it would take an infinite amount of energy to move them. Even traveling at near the speed of light, as we describe in this poll question, would require unimaginably large amounts of energy to push the rocket ship twin along.

So how does a photon travel at the speed of light if it takes an infinite amount of energy to reach that speed? It's because photons have no mass.  Here's a quote from the NASA website about this:

 "Photons do not have mass, but they do have momentum. The proper, general equation to use is E^2 = m^2c^4 + p^2c^2 So in the case of a photon, m=0 so E = pc or p = E/c. On the other hand, for a particle with mass m at rest (i.e., p = 0), you get back the famous E = mc^2." 

Here's one more interesting idea about all this - photons have no mass, but they do carry energy. E=mc^2 is often used to show that there's an equivalence between mass and energy. The exact number varies according to the assumptions used, but as you'll see at this U.S. Department of Energy web page, if you were to take the energy planet Earth is receiving from the sun and convert it to mass, it works out to over 2 kilograms per second! That's a bit of scientific trivia I hadn't come across before.

So, to get back to the poll question: isn't it quite a leap to go from the twins paradox to the idea that light has zero duration? I'm thrilled that almost 84% of the visitors to this blog were willing to come along for the ride to make that leap with me. And I'm hoping it's because many of you saw and approved of the ideas presented in this video for my blog entry published around the same time as this poll question, Light Has No Speed.


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

Next up is the new video for Is Spacetime Flat or Curved. Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next - Is Spacetime Flat or Curved?

Turtles and Timelike Entanglement

Warning, the second half of this video is NSFW because of language, but does tie to the discussion at hand, which is "memes".


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fhg0hdUk9Ds

Next - Poll 74 - Twins, Photons and Mass

Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs - April Report

Previous lists:
. April 08 . May 08 . June 08 . July 08 . August 08
. September 08 . October 08 . November 08 . December 08 .
. Top 100 Blog Entries of 2008 . May 09 . June 09 . July 09
. August 09 . September 09 . October 09 . November 09 .
. December 09 . Top 100 Blog Entries of 2009 .
. January 10 . February 10 . March 10 . April 10 . May 10 .
. June 10 . July 10 . August 10 . September 10 . October 10 .
. November 10 . December 10 . Top 100 Entries of 2010 .
. January 11 . February 11 . March 11 .


Based upon number of views, here are the top blogs for the last thirty days.

1. New video - Just Geometry
2. Novelty
3. Alcohol and Other Drugs
4. New video - Psychedelics and Spacetime
5. Just a Shy Guy
6. We All are Chemicals
7. Cymatics
8. New video - Bees and Tangential Thinking
9. Gimme a Beer!
10. Trying to Escape

And as of April 26th, 2011, here are the twenty-six Imagining the Tenth Dimension blog entries that have attracted the most visits of all time. Items marked in bold are new or have risen since last month.

1. Jumping Jesus (1)
2. What's Around the Corner? (2)
3. Mandelbulbs (3)
4. An Expanding 4D Sphere (4)
5. Just Six Things: The I Ching (5)
6. Roger Ebert on Quantum Reincarnation (6)
7. The 5th-Dimensional Camera Project (7)
8. Creativity and the Quantum Universe (8)
9. Vibrations and Fractals (9)
10. How to Time Travel (10)
11. Light Has No Speed (11)
12. Our Universe Within the Omniverse (13)
13. Dancing on the Timeline (12)
14. Is Reality an Illusion? (19)
15. 10-10-10 Look Before You Leap (15)
16. Poll 44 - The Biocentric Universe Theory (14)
17. Magnets and Morality (17)
18. Monkeys Love Metallica (16)
19. Consciousness in Frames per Second (18)
20. Simultaneous Inspiration (20)
21. Polls Archive 54 - Is Time Moving Faster? (21)
22. Poll 43 - Is the Multiverse Real? (22)
23. Complexity from Simplicity (26)
24. Alien Mathematics (23)
25. Flow (new)
26. Seeing Time, Feeling Colors, Tasting Light (24)

Which means that this worthy submission is leaving our top 26 of all time list this month.

When's a Knot Not a Knot? (25)


By the way, if you're new to this project, you might want to check out the Tenth Dimension FAQ, as it provides a road map to a lot of the discussions and different materials that have been created for this project. If you are interested in the 26 songs attached to this project, this blog shows a video for each of the songs and provides more links with lyrics and discussion. The Annotated Tenth Dimension Video provides another cornucopia of discussion topics to be connected to over at YouTube. And as always, here's a reminder that the Tenth Dimension Forum is a good place to converse with other people about these ideas.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Turtles and Timelike Entanglement

Insidious Trends

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ip8Si7bORk

This is the last of the songs I'm going to show you from my 1983 album Alcohol and Other Drugs, and in a couple of ways it takes us back full circle to where we were over a month ago with my entry about Novelty. As I said back then:

...life is a unique process which creates "pockets of negative entropy". What is the opposite of life? It's the formless, shapeless state of maximum entropy. As living beings, we crave those surprising moments of synchronicity, the novelty of uncovering new connections, the promise of a new day... and people who lose that in their lives are moving towards death more quickly.

When I wrote Insidious Trends back in 1982 I was thinking about the love/hate relationship we have with the constant inundation of media: we complain about information overload (a topic of another song I showed you last year, Gimme the News) but we also constantly crave the novelty of new input. While this song might seem to be a protest against a hype machine which if anything is exponentially more revved up now than it was when I wrote this song almost thirty years ago, the concluding line of the song admits that I still love the rush of seeing and learning new things, having new experiences, being part of the accelerating rush towards whatever it is we're headed towards. The Singularity? This word seems to moving towards mainstream consciousness more and more within the last few months.

When I was compiling the list of 26 songs which I planned to use in my Imagining the Tenth Dimension project, most of those songs were written in 2002, with a few exceptions like this one. Those of you who have been the longest term fans of this project will already have seen a previous version of the above video. Using footage found from archive.org, Talking Dog's Ryan Hill created the original version of the video a couple of years ago, and now I've taken that video and re-performed the song, overlaying my performance over Ryan's montage of classic footage from the last sixty or more years.

INSIDIOUS TRENDS
- words and music by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

Step right up and try a few
These ones sure look good on you
Take one home and try it for a week
They’re the very latest fashion now
You can do without ‘em but I don’t know how
And of course they carry our money back guarantee

Yes there’s always somethin new
Tryin to get a hold on you
Yes there’s always somethin new
Tryin to sink its teeth in you

You can see it on your TV set
You can hear it on the radio
You can play it on your stereo
And you probably will (you know that you will)
And in every magazine and paper
They’ll play you the same old song
It’s big and new and made for you
And it’s the best thing to come along

Yes there’s always something new...

They will break down your resistance
Like they were breakin down a door
They’ll just hit you again and again and again
Till you can’t take no more (you’ll give in for sure)
It’s a million dollar gamble for a billion dollar prize
Who can keep you the latest on the longest artificial high?

(Instrumental with collage of commercial clips/hype)

Hey!

Yes there’s always something new
Tryin to get a hold on you
Yes there’s always some big deal
Sayin nothing else is real
Yes there’s always something new
Tryin to get a hold on you
Yes there’s always something new
Tryin to get a hold on you
(Step right and try a few, these ones sure look good on you
Take one home and try it for
They’re the very latest fashion now, you can do without em but I don’t know how
And of course they carry our money back guarantee)
Money back
Money back guarantee, money back
Money back guarantee, money back
Money back, money back

Oh, insidious trends are creepin through my life
Insidious trends are creepin through my life
Insidious trends are creepin through my life
Insidious trends are keeping me alive

Other songs we've look at from this album:
We All are Chemicals
Gimme a Beer!
Just a Shy Guy
Trying to Escape
Courage

Once again, I'd like to thank those of you who have thought enough of these songs to want to go over to the Tenth Dimension Digital Items store and purchase a copy of the 11 songs on this album. Enjoy the journey!

Next - Turtles and Timelike Entanglement

New video - Time Travel Paradoxes

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-x8qCX78MVk

Next: Insidious Trends

The One-Dimensional Universe

Here's an article published at physorg.com today about a new scientific theory that suggests our universe started from a point, became a line, then a plane, then 3D space. Hm, where have I heard this before?

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-04-primordial-weirdness-early-universe-dimension.html

Here's the opening few paragraphs from the article, but please do follow the link to find out more.

Primordial weirdness: Did the early universe have 1 dimension?
April 20, 2011

(PhysOrg.com) -- Did the early universe have just one spatial dimension? That's the mind-boggling concept at the heart of a theory that University at Buffalo physicist Dejan Stojkovic and colleagues proposed in 2010.

They suggested that the early universe -- which exploded from a single point and was very, very small at first -- was one-dimensional (like a straight line) before expanding to include two dimensions (like a plane) and then three (like the world in which we live today).

The theory, if valid, would address important problems in particle physics.

Now, in a new paper in Physical Review Letters, Stojkovic and Loyola Marymount University physicist Jonas Mureika describe a test that could prove or disprove the "vanishing dimensions" hypothesis.

Because it takes time for light and other waves to travel to Earth, telescopes peering out into space can, essentially, look back into time as they probe the universe's outer reaches.

Gravitational waves can't exist in one- or two-dimensional space. So Stojkovic and Mureika have reasoned that the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), a planned international gravitational observatory, should not detect any gravitational waves emanating from the lower-dimensional epochs of the early universe.

Cool stuff! Thanks to Lee Price for showing me this article.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: New video - Time Travel Paradoxes