New video - Changing Your Brain

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

Next - Poll 78 - Will the LHC reveal extra dimensions?

Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs - May 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 . April 11 .


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

1. New video - Infinite Division
2. Gimme a Beer!
3. Rebecca Black and QWOP
4. Trying to Escape
5. New video - Evidence for Seeing the Future?
6. New video - Threes
7. Livin on the Edge of the World
8. Turtles and the Tenth Dimension
9. Courage
10. New video - Bees and the LHC


And as of May 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. Light Has No Speed (11)
11. How to Time Travel (10)
12. Is Reality an Illusion? (14)
13. Our Universe Within the Omniverse (12)
14. Dancing on the Timeline (13)
15. 10-10-10 Look Before You Leap (15)
16. Magnets and Morality (17) 
17. Poll 44 - The Biocentric Universe Theory (16)
18. Monkeys Love Metallica (18)
19. Consciousness in Frames per Second (19)
20. Simultaneous Inspiration (20)
21. Polls Archive 54 - Is Time Moving Faster? (21)
22. Gravity and Love (new)
23. Complexity from Simplicity (23)
24. Poll 43 - Is the Multiverse Real? (22)
25. Bees and the LHC (new)
26. Flow (25)



Which means that these worthy submissions are leaving our top 26 of all time list this month.

 Alien Mathematics (24)
 Seeing Time, Feeling Colors, Tasting Light (26)

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: New video - Changing Your Brain

Poll 77 - What if the world's a simulation?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgbuKJnlW10

Poll 77 - "Simulism: If you discovered the life you're living is in a gigantic virtual simulation, how would that change the way you behaved?
1. I'd be nicer to people
2. I'd be more selfish
3. I wouldn't change a thing"
Poll ended February 4th, 2011.  12.6% chose answer 1, 14.3% chose answer 2, and 73.1% went for answer number 3.

By a significant factor, most of the visitors to the Tenth Dimension blog said they wouldn't change a thing if they knew the world they see around them were only a simulation. I'm reminded of Stephen Hawking's take on free will - even though he tells us he doesn't believe it exists, he acknowledges that the complex interactions that make a person choose one path or another can make it impossible to predict what that person will do - effectively, he tells us, it works to say that free will exists as a flawed but convenient interpretation, even for a scientist like Dr. Hawking who stands firmly in the "no such thing as free will" camp.

Likewise, I think the above response is the healthy one. Are we like Neo, living in the Matrix, but unaware of its existence? If Life is But a Dream, shouldn't we still make the best of what we've been given? On my Facebook Wall, there's a much-discussed video posted by New Scientist which suggests that persons trained to believe free will is an illusion will be more likely to cheat on tests, and less likely to be altruistic. Here's that video again:



I think there could be a similar parallel drawn here - wouldn't it be easy to say nothing matters if it's all just a simulation? But the above poll question contradicts that outcome - by asking people specifically what they would change, most people said they wouldn't change a thing. What if the question instead had been "would you change your behavior if you knew you were only living in a gigantic simulation? Without specific options to consider, would people be more likely to say they would change after all?

Well, here's an answer for you. Last year we ran the following poll question, check out the results that time. This was one of four poll questions we looked at under the title More Tangential Thinking.
Poll 72
Poll 72: "Simulism: would you live your life any differently if you knew the reality you're seeing around you is really just a gigantic virtual simulation?" Poll ended October 3 2010. 59.4% said yes, and 40.6% said no.

My comments at the time started out with the following paragraph:

Another completely different example of tangential thinking. People love to play with these "nested Russian dolls" concepts: what if my reality is a dream of some other reality? What if our universe comes from a black hole in another universe, which comes from another black hole, and so on?

So there you have it. Two substantially different responses to two fairly similar poll questions. As the pollsters will often admit: "it's all in how you ask the question".

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next:  New video - Changing Your Brain

Proof that Multiverse Equals Many Worlds

Here's a new paper announced at Cornell Universeity's arxiv.org which has just been published by two highly respected physicists: Leonard Susskind and Raphael Bousso. It confirms an idea I've been promoting for so long that it feels a little strange to me to see them discussing this as something new, but nonetheless this is exciting news. Over at MIT's Technology Review site, here's a link to an article published today about Bousso and Susskind's paper: it's titled Multiverse = Many Worlds, Say Physicists.

The illustration at left is shown in that article, no explanation is attached but the name of the picture is "Multiverse QM". QM, of course, is quantum mechanics, and as it turns out the illustration comes from page 22 of Bousso and Susskind's paper. The idea shown here, that our reality is constantly branching, and that those branches are causally interconnected in multiple ways, has always been an important part of my approach to visualizing the dimensions. 

What is still notably missing from this new paper is the acceptance that these branches are occurring at the fifth dimension, where the field effects for gravity and light are resolved. Until that idea moves into the mainstream, there will still be disagreement as to the relevance of my approach to visualizing the extra dimensions... but this paper certainly helps my project's inch by inch progress from the lunatic fringe towards the accepted picture of the underlying "information equals reality" nature of our universe or any other.

Here's a few select paragraphs from the MIT article, please click on the following links to read the full article, read the arxiv.org posting, or download the pdf of the paper:

Today, Leonard Susskind at Stanford University in Palo Alto and Raphael Bousso at the University of California, Berkeley, put forward the idea that the multiverse and the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics are formally equivalent. But there is a caveat. The equivalence only holds if both quantum mechanics and the multiverse take special forms.

They call this new idea the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics.

That's something worth pondering for a moment. Bousso and Susskind are two of the world's leading string theorists (Susskind is credited as the father of the field), so their ideas have an impeccable pedigree.

...what this new approach does have is a satisfying simplicity-- it's neat and elegant that the many worlds and the multiverse are equivalent. William of Ockham would certainly be pleased and no doubt, many modern physicists will be too.

"A satisfying simplicity... neat and elegant": that's also what people like about my approach to visualizing the dimensions. I'm always excited when I see ways in which the ideas I arrived at through intuition and imagination are now being confirmed with proofs by great minds such as these. As I've said all along, I believe there's an underlying truth which connects these many schools of thought together, and today is an important step in that journey.

Are you enjoying the journey?

Rob Bryanton

Next: Poll 77 - What if the World's a Simulation?

New video - The Quantum Observer

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgw3Lv7R1w0

Next - Proof that Multiverse Equals Many Worlds

Why Did I Choose the Red Shirt?

Yesterday a YouTube user named Jimmy asked me this thought-provoking question: "If the fifth dimension includes a version of the universe where I could have worn a blue shirt or a red shirt today, did the events that led to today make it inevitable that I would choose the red shirt? Did the fifth dimension choose this outcome for me?"

This is a good question because it gets to the root of whether free will is an illusion, and why people who don't believe we exist in the fifth dimension can be more likely to conclude, as Stephen Hawking has, that our free will is nothing more than a convenient fiction to acknowledge the complex and interlocking pattern of outcomes that led to our currently observed universe. My response:

Here's how I think about it. Einstein and Kaluza agreed that our reality is defined at the fifth dimension. So although we think we're in 4D spacetime, I would insist that our "now" is really a constantly evolving point in the fifth dimension.

Using your example, yesterday your  5D "point" had many possible 5D paths leading both to it and from it. One set of paths forward involved you selecting a blue shirt today, another involved you selecting a red shirt. Today, your 5D position includes only the paths where you're wearing a red shirt, so even though the path of you choosing a blue shirt this morning was an available path yesterday, that path is no longer accessible today - unless you were now able to leap over to that path using the sixth dimension.

What makes the choice? This is where quantum physicists can get uncomfortable, because it has been experimentally proven time and time again that the wavefunction of all possible states for the universe exists in superposition until an observation is made. That includes the red shirt today and blue shirt today universe for you. Schrodinger made up his story about his cat experiment to try to show people how ridiculous it would be if what happens at the quantum level were also happening here at the macro level, but nowadays experimental evidence is making it increasingly difficult to say where the dividing line between the quantum world and our classical world resides - and I remain firmly convinced that there is no dividing line. Which means that you, your consciousness, your free will, chose to observe the "red shirt today" universe from your current 5D vantage point, but the "blue shirt today" universe was and continues to be just as real, but is no longer accessible from your current position within the observed quantum wavefunction.

Yes, that current point might be more likely based upon what has come before, but your decision this morning to choose a red shirt was not forced upon you by some inevitable quantum process. "But what about Schrodinger's imaginary cat?", you might say. "The cat didn't choose to have the radioactive particle decay or not, didn't choose to have the vial of poison smashed or not, didn't choose whether to live or die while trapped in Schrodinger's imaginary box." This is very true. And likewise, in our own day-to-day existence there are random events, random selections and choices happening at the quantum level and at the macro level which can occasionally make one path or another selectable while eliminating others.

If somebody had killed you yesterday, you would not be here to select a red shirt or blue shirt today. But since you're here, you have a consciousness which can be aware of the paths forward, and within the bounds of causality and probability select the red shirt path or the blue shirt path, but not the path where you jump to the moon. And to use that famous cat example, there was still the path where the cat could have chosen to jump out of the box before they closed the lid!

Thanks for writing,

Rob

My 2008 blog entry The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic goes into more detail about this idea. And next time we'll be looking at a new video blog which also relates to this discussion - The Quantum Observer.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob

Each in Our Own Filter Bubble?

Some of my most viewed blog entries in the last while have been about the world of memes, and how those relate so nicely to my approach to visualizing the dimensions. Rebecca Black and QWOP, Turtles and the Tenth Dimension, and Turtles and Timelike Entanglement have all been about this topic, and the first of those entries in particular referred back to something I've been working on every week since the beginning of 2008: The Google Suggestions Time Capsule Project.

Now watch this excellent new TED Talks video about the automatic personalized filtering that's becoming more and more prevalent in the world of internet searches.



This video begs the question: with the Google Suggestions Time Capsule Project, could I be unwittingly revealing things about my own internet habits? It's food for thought!

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Why Did I Choose the Red Shirt?