New Video - Rebecca Black and QWOP

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXs-QE2-464

Next: Poll 81 - Is Light at Right Angles to Spacetime?

Poll 80 - What is "NOW"?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgb1PTOAdDU

Poll 80 - "What is 'now?
#1. Even though I know it took years for a star's light to reach me, that light is reaching me 'now'.
#2. 'Now' is what's entangled with this very instant, and that's how the quantum world's 'spooky action at a distance' effects occur."
Poll ended April 23 2011. 21.2% choose answer #1, while the remaining 78.8% chose answer #2.

I already remarked in my blog entry for Photons and Free Will that I was cheating a bit on this question, as in my opinion the correct option -- #3 "both of the above are correct" -- wasn't even provided as a choice. In my experience, whenever there's an "all of the above" choice in a poll question like this, that's the more likely one to be correct, and that's why I didn't provide that option here, because I wanted people to think carefully about their answer.

After all, what's wrong with answer #1? Isn't a distant star's light reaching me "now", even though I know that the light I'm seeing is actually from an image of that particular star that's many years in the past? I could have stated answer #1 more forcefully, to ask if people agree that the "now" of when that photon was generated, and the "now" of when it reaches my eye are (from the photon's perspective) both simultaneous. I wonder how much that would have changed the results?

Here's that video for Photons and Free Will again, which was just posted to YouTube last month.



Next up is the new video for Rebecca Black and QWOP. Enjoy the journey!

New video - Novelty

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_ANS2k97IM

Next- Poll 80: What is "NOW"?

More Dancing in the Dimensions

Here's a new track I was just sent by a Netherlands artist called Philatelic (click here to see their channel). You'll hear samples from my video Light Has No Speed in this track. Thanks for sending me this, Philatelic!


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

(Just a warning, the other tracks we're looking at here are mixed more aggressively than the above one so you might want to turn your speakers down a bit now.)

When I posted the above video to my facebook page, my friend Sprosh Gomez responded with another track I hadn't heard before, by two fellows from Hungary calling themselves Chemical Spoon: this track is called Dimensions, and you'll hear samples from my original animation throughout.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TkCn-jRYgE

Here's another slightly different version of that same Chemical Spoon track, this one's labeled "Dimension Psynostra", and we looked at this version previously in an entry called Dancing in the Tenth Dimension:

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

While we're looking at dance tracks incorporating samples of my voice, this one has samples from my video Imagining the Omniverse, which coincidentally has just passed 100,000 views on YouTube. This track is from Netherlands music producer Scope DJ, and we looked at it before in my blog entry Dancing in the Omniverse:

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

I'm always grateful when artists who have sampled me provide links back to my work, as Scope DJ and Philatelic have done. Enjoy the journey out there on the dance floor!

Rob Bryanton

Next: New Video - Novelty

Poll 79 - Does Gravity Come from the 5th Dimension?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iM41wQM2yGk

Poll 79 - "In Einstein's view of the universe, gravity is pictured as a bending of the 'rubber sheet' of our spacetime. If our 'sheet' was a 2D plane, we'd see this bending as being through the 3rd dimension. This shows us gravity comes from the 5th dimension." Poll ended March 28 2011.   63.3% agreed, while 36.7% did not.

Interesting fact: what is the speed of gravity? Most physicists agree that it's equal to the speed of light. The thought experiment often used around this conundrum is "what would happen if the sun suddenly ceased to exist?". Since the light from the sun takes roughly eight and a half minutes to travel from the sun to the earth, this means it would take that length of time before we were plunged into darkness. But what about the gravitational attraction that keeps the Earth in orbit around the sun? It turns out that the answer is the same: if the sun suddenly disappeared, it would take roughly eight and a half minutes until the Earth would be flung out of the solar system, since the gravity of the sun would no longer be there to keep us orbiting.

Here's a link to a New Scientist article from 2003 about the first measurements taken that prove this concept. How does all this relate to my approach to visualizing the dimensions? Let's return yet again to a diagram I've been showing you this year which seems to sum all this up nicely:

Both the speed of light and the speed of gravity are illusions, created by the non-continuous nature of our reality. The jury's still out on whether gravitons really exist, but if they do they would be just like photons: from their perspective, past present, and future are simultaneous. But from our perspective, reality is divided at the fifth dimension into a series of "Now"s that are each one planck frame after another. This is why for us looking into the night sky filled with stars is looking into the past, and why it would take eight and a half minutes for disaster to strike if the sun's gravitational pull on planet Earth were to suddenly disappear.

According to my approach to visualizing the dimensions, our observed universe is an interference pattern, a holographic projection, created at the fifth dimension by the interaction of gravity and light.

For more about all this, read my blog entry The Holographic Universe, or click here for a collection of all my blog entries tagged with that topic.  And enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next - More Dancing in the Dimensions

New video - Language and the Mind

Over on YouTube, people have been asking why I've got myself represented as some kind of weird-looking giant in this video. My response: "this is me messing with your perception of reality". :)


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hO-F3OVWO4k

Next: Poll 79 - Does Gravity Come from the Fifth Dimension?

Poll 78 - Will the LHC reveal extra dimensions?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZDs43U115U

Poll 78 - "The CERN LHC will provide evidence of extra dimensions before the end of 2011. " Poll ended March 1 2011. 46.9% agreed, while 53.1% disagreed.

In Bees and the LHC, I quoted from an article published last year in Scientific American which suggested that the LHC might finally reveal evidence of extra dimensions, and that was what inspired this poll question.  Here we are half way through 2011 now, has there been anything definitive from the LHC yet? Not so far as I know. There were hints a couple of months ago that the LHC may have caught a fleeting indication of the Higgs boson, but more recent results are not confirming the sighting. In May there was a New Scientist article reporting news from the soon-to-be-shut-down Tevatron, about hints of a new particle which would not fit within the Standard Model, and arxiv.org references a paper suggesting that such a particle could be straddling extra dimensions.

This lovely little animation of vibrating Calabi-Yau manifolds comes from the blog of Czech physicist Luboš Motl. Luboš declares himself to be conservative in his viewpoints, but even he, in an entry from last November, accepts the possibility that the LHC is going to reveal evidence of extra dimensions. He even goes so far to say that he believes this revelation to be much more likely to occur than the possibility that climate change will cause significant problems to the biosphere or for mankind in this century! To be clear, he places the possibility of the LHC revealing extra dimensions at only one to two per cent, saying in the conclusion of his detailed and informative blog entry that even if the LHC fails to reveal extra dimensions this year there are still very good reasons for physicists to continue to believe they exist.

Luboš also links to articles from Popular Science and ZDNet about the possibility of  the LHC revealing extra dimensions in 2011. Will it come to pass? The clock is ticking.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: New Video - Language and the Mind