David Jay Brown and Psychedelics

A direct link to this video can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHXLfDaZH24

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.
--David Jay Brown, author of Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse

How's that for a recommendation? I'm thrilled! I've quoted from David's writing a number of times in this blog, and would certainly have referenced his material during the writing of my book if I had been lucky enough to come across it back then. I've talked many times about the exciting synchronicities of ideas that happen across time and space, and how those connections can be so easily integrated into the way of visualizing reality that I've come up with for this project. For me, reading Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse was a revelation, because there were so many experts interviewed in that book who were discussing concepts which I raised in my own book, even though at that point I was unfamiliar with many of those experts and their writing.

David Jay Brown holds a Master's Degree in Psychobiology from New York University. Some of you may know his name from the excellent article he wrote for Scientific American Mind, published December 2007, called "Psychedelic Healing": this article was about the renewed interest in the use of psychedelics in the treatment of addiction, depression, and other mental disorders.

In one of my blogs about my song Seven Levels, I discussed some of the connections between psychedelics, mysticism and the number seven. Last blog entry, in "Twisted Dimensions", I returned to the idea from string theory that our universe might be embedded in a seven-dimensional brane. Since my project also attaches a significance to the seventh dimension as being the place where the wave function of all possible expressions for our particular universe are enfolded into what we can think of as a "point", I'm fascinated to see the connections between these many threads.

I've also been fascinated to be contacted by people who have experience with various psychedelics who tell me that my way of visualizing how our reality is constructed gives them a model for understanding and interpreting their experiences. At the tenth dimension forum, there is an Altered States section where I've heard from people who have taken LSD, salvia divinorum, DMT, magic mushrooms, and so on.

In my book and with my song From the Corner of My Eye, I've also explored other connections between disorders of the mind, perceptual tricks of vision, and how they might be revealing information to us about the underlying structures of reality. From over at Dr. Clifford Pickover's Reality Carnival (which recently posted a link to my project, thank you Reality Carnival), here's an entry about a surprising affliction known as Charles Bonnet Syndrome, in which otherwise normal people suffering from degeneration of their visual systems begin witnessing strange creatures... no psychedelics involved!

A YouTube user known as OcularStream just posted this 1997 BBC documentary on "Psychedelic Science", this is well worth watching if you have an hour: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=1BUwlYWs25c

I was particularly interested in part three of this video:

This is about the use of a psychoactive tea preparation known as ayahuasca in Brazilian culture - the idea that a mainstream religious movement of "just plain folks" meet weekly to commune with these psychedelic visions, and treat it not as entertainment but a deeply spiritual experience, is something I find significant.

As another interesting bit of synchronicity, it turns out that my province, Saskatchewan, was where some groundbreaking research into the clinical use of psychedelics was performed in the 50's and early 60's, a fact I mentioned previously in my blog entry Seeing the Big Picture - From 40 Kilometres Up!. Dr. Abram Hoffer, one of the Saskatchewan doctors who conducted those studies back then, appears in the above BBC documentary, and he laments how research was shut down in the 60's because of a fearful rejection by the governments of the time of all psychoactive drugs. Dr. Hoffer talks about the surprising successes of programs where in clinical trials they gave their patients a few small doses of LSD in controlled and peaceful environments: for instance, in one study about half of the alcoholics who received this treatment program said the experience changed their lives, and their desire to abuse alcohol was eliminated.

As we can see in the above BBC documentary, and in the above Scientific American article, that research is slowly resuming now. Which leads me back to David Jay Brown's wonderful recommendation for my project (thank you David, I'm grateful!). David's reference to "shamanic exploration", in the context of the lovingly administered treatments documented by Dr. Hoffer, or the peaceful ayahuasca communions in Brazil, is very connected to what I'm thinking about with this project: finding ways through the power of the mind to transcend the 4-dimensional world and perceive the extra dimensions that create our reality.

Here, to close, is a video of me sitting at my old ("nicely out of tune") piano singing one of the 26 songs I have attached to this project: in the final analysis, it's all about Connections.

A direct link to this video can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J25WhT8WZQ4

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

PS - here's a link to another of my songs that relates to the discussion of addiction and finding a way out: Addictive Personality
And for a serious website about research into the use of psychedelics, check out the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). David Jay Brown edited the last issue of the MAPS Bulletin, it's on the subject of Technology and Psychedelics.

Next: John August and The Nines

Twisted Dimensions

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQVjPMfa4HI

From the beginning of this project, we've been talking about a new way of visualizing the extra dimensions that acknowledges their basic nature: because they are spatial dimensions, we know that each new dimension adds an additional degree of freedom, and each adds a way to get to parts of the information that becomes our reality that were unavailable from the dimensions below. In Moving Dimensions and Synchromysticism, I talked about a very useful concept introduced by Dr. Eliott McGucken with his Moving Dimensions Theory:

The only way to stay stationary in the fourth dimension is to move at the speed of light. Ergo the fourth dimension is expanding at the rate of "c" relative to the three spatial dimensions.

While Dr. McGucken is willing to acknowledge the possibility of additional dimensions, his theory focuses on the fourth.

This time around I'd like to play with some other creative visualizations. Here's a very simple graph I've created that tries to help us visualize the expanding possibilities that are added with each extra dimension:

Each additional dimension is at "right angles" to the one below, and each adds an additional data-set that was previously inaccessible. From the mind-boggling realm of our 3D universe of seventy sextillion stars, we expand to a 4D realm of the quantized frames that make up time's arrow (as I've talked about in entries like The Flipbook Universe, Time is a Direction and Time in Either Direction). From there we expand to the 5D realm of available choices which the David Deutsch team at Oxford have proven are equally valid and equivalent at both the quantum and macro levels (though Dr. Deutsch, I'm sure, would ask me to say that in his opinion those branches are not a proof of extra dimensions), and so on.

Our poor minds are not designed to deal with such scales, but my way of visualizing reality does provide us with a way to hold ten dimensions in our imaginations, simply by working up through one layer after another. As simple as this graph I'm showing you here may be, this "V" encompasses the omniverse of all possible expressions of energy and information by the time we are out to the 10, the widest part of the graph.

Here's where we get into a new idea now: I was thinking about the contention from some physicists that our universe is actually constrained at the 3rd dimension and the 7th dimension, because the superstrings that create our reality are embedded in branes (which are referred to as a D3-brane and a D7-brane) within those dimensions. Looking at the simple "V" above, how could we represent such a thing? I imagined "twisting" the "V" at dimension 3 and dimension 7, kind of like making balloon animals at a kids' party. Here's what our graph looks like with those two twists added:

Here's what I immediately noticed: if we add these two twists, we still have a diagram that reflects what I have been talking about. The tenth dimension is still the widest part of the graph, because it includes the most possibilities. But the fifth dimension, which is where Kaluza proved and Einstein eventually agreed our physical reality comes from, is still wider than the fourth. I have claimed in my book and this blog many times now that this is the important key to this way of visualizing reality - the branching possibilities that are available to us through chance, choice, and the actions of others, come from a fifth-dimensional probability space, and the sixth dimension contains the parts of that probability space which are inaccessible from our current position within the fifth dimension. Would the fluid nature of what we're talking about be better conveyed by a 3D ball at the bottom, rather than the diamond shape we're seeing here? Perhaps. Likewise, if we think of a quantum observer being perched at that crossover point in the third dimension, and imagine them looking "up" to the higher dimensions, we can see how their fourth dimensional "line of time" and their fifth dimensional "probability space" would be all that they could see: the sixth dimension would be like the dark side of the moon, hidden from view. The idea that the fourth, fifth, and sixth dimension create a unified whole of all possible timelines for our universe which becomes a constrained "point" (or brane) within the seventh dimension does tie very nicely into this way of visualizing how one dimension relates to another that we've been playing with in this project.

(The idea that our fifth dimensional probability space does not include the wave function of all possible expressions for our universe--which would be the whole of the sixth dimension--also gives us a way to imagine why it is that our universe's wavefunction includes a version of the universe where it's 2008 and dinosaurs still walk the earth, but we never accidentally encounter that timeline: because those versions are at an additional right angle from our 5D probability space, in that sixth dimension which is inaccessible to us but just as real: more about all this in my upcoming blog entries.)

In blog entries like Randomness and the Missing 96%, and Unlikely Events and Timelessness, we've talked about the role of chance and probability in all of this. Perhaps, then, rather than diamond shapes, rather than circles, we should use bell curves to represent what happens between the twists? Another interesting tangent to the discussion. In any case, the arrows I have added here indicate the places where our model is most fluid (green arrows), and the places where our model is most constrained (red arrows). The tenth dimension, then, as the underlying state of quantum indeterminacy, from which all possible universes and all possible patterns of information (including those, as I discussed in "God 2.0" that some of us might want to refer to as The Creator), would be as far as we need to go.

One of the criticisms I sometimes hear of this project is that it seems arbitrary for me (or anyone else) to stop at ten. Just because I can't think of any further possible expressions of the information that becomes our reality, doesn't that merely indicate a limitation of my own imagination? And I'm not talking about the M-Theory idea of 11 dimensions here: as I've said before, those 11 dimensions are ten spatial dimensions plus one of time, and my model incorporates time as a direction in one of the spatial dimensions, so time is accounted for in my model, no need to count it as a separate "dimension".

But while I was playing with my graph paper, I thought I might as well see what happens if the exact same pattern continued to repeat. What I saw I'm not going to try to offer any explanations for, I throw this out only as an amusing part of the game we're playing here: if there are, as some have suggested, infinite dimensions, then perhaps you could continue this pattern of twists forever. But what immediately caught my eye as a tiny bit of synchronicity, is that 26 comes up as one of the "most fluid" dimensions if we continue this pattern, in the same way that 10 does as well.

Since string theorists had proposed for a number of years that our reality comes not from the tenth but the twenty-sixth dimension, this seemed like enough of a "how about that" moment that I thought I would pass it on. Again, I'm not trying to say that this proves we are also constrained by branes at the 13th and 21st dimensions, or that the 17th dimension also contains some important layer at which the possibilities become the most wide open: for me, ten is as far as we need to go. But the coincidence of 26 coming up in this graph was too good to pass up, my apologies if I have now completely confused you all as to what I'm up to here!

As a bit of an homage to the number 26 and its historical relevance to cosmology, 26 is the number of songs I attached to this project. Here then, to conclude this blog entry is song 14 of 26, this one is about how there might be a part of our consciousness that remembers where we come from, whatever dimension you would like to imagine that to be: "I Remember Flying".


A direct link to this video can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Soe2swgtsE


Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: David Jay Brown and Psychedelics

Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs - August Report

The April 08 version of this list is here.
The May 08 version of this list is here.
The June 08 version of this list is here.
The July 08 version of this list is here.

As of August 21st, 2008, here are the blogs that have seen the most visits in the last 30 days. Please note, for both of the following lists, the number in brackets is the position that blog held in the report for the previous month.

1. Video Feedback (new)
2. The Annotated Tenth Dimension Video (9)
3. Dark Energy, Linelanders and the LHC (new)
4. Moving Dimensions and Synchromysticism (new)
5. What Would a Flatlander Really See? (5)
6. What Would a Linelander Really See? (8)
7. The Spacetime Tree (new)
8. Unlikely Events and Timelessness (new)
9. Changing Your Genes - part 2 (new)
10. Randomness and the Missing 96% (new)


And as of August 21st, 2008, here are the twenty-six Imagining the Tenth Dimension blog entries that have attracted the most visits of all time.

1. Time is a Direction (1)
2. Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 1 to 10 (2)
3. The Google Suggestions Time Capsule Project (3)
4. The Flipbook Universe (4)
5. Tenth Dimension TagCrowd (5)
6. Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains (6)
7. The Fifth Dimension is a Dangerous Idea (7)
8. The Omniverse (8)
9. Google, Memes and Randomness (9)
10. Googling in the Tenth Dimension (10)
11. Hypercubes and Plato's Cave (11)
12. 26 songs (12)
13. Visualizations (13)
14. Flatlanders on a Line (14)
15. Song 22 of 26 - Insidious Trends (15)
16. Song 23 of 26 - Secret Societies (16)
17. Your Fifth-Dimensional Self (17)
18. Everyone Has a Story (18)
19. Anime, Gaming and Cusps (19)
20. Gevin Giorbran - Gone But Not Forgotten (20)
21. Crossing Your Arms to Change Your Trajectory (22)
22. The Tenth Dimension FAQ (21)
23. Song 8 of 26 - Big Bang to Entropy (23)
24. Song 1 of 26 - Everything Fits Together (24)
25. Magnets and Souls (new)
26. Video Feedback (new)

By the way, if you are 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. 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, and the Tenth Dimension Chat room usually has streaming video, along with video clips and live conversations twenty-four hours a day.

Are you enjoying the journey?

Rob Bryanton

Next: Twisted Dimensions

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 16 to 20

Click here for the archive of polls 1 to 10.
Click here for the archive of polls 11 to 15.
Click here for the archive of polls 21 to 25.
Click here for the archive of polls 26 to 30.


Poll #16 - Zero plus zero equals zero. What does infinity plus infinity equal?
(poll ended June 16 08)

5% said "zero", 70% said "infinity", 15% said "two infinities", and 8% said "none of the above".

This poll is a continuation of similar questions asked in the preceding couple of polls, where you will find some useful discussion about the "many roads to infinity" concept that can make questions like the one in this current poll seem contradictory. The first answer, "zero", for instance, would make sense in the following context: if I start with a line, and place a point on the line, all of the values heading in one direction on that line would be heading towards infinity. Meanwhile, all of those values in the opposite direction would also be heading towards infinity. Is there such a thing as "positive infinity" and "negative infinity" when we look at things in this way? If there were, then adding those two values (or concepts) together should cancel each other out and leave us with zero as the answer. My preference with this project is to say that because infinity is not a number, the infinity that you head towards in either direction on any particular line in any particular direction is ultimately heading towards the same thing: infinity. But keeping in mind the idea of a perfectly balanced equilibrium state which in this project is the tenth dimension in its unobserved state, an idea which also ties to the work of Dr. Sean Carroll which we've been talking about in this blog, does give us a way to think of how a point of indeterminate size, a perfectly balanced equilibrium, and "zero" all are interconnected ideas.

Other blog entries discussing infinity, timelessness, and Dr. Sean Carroll:
Unlikely Events and Timelessness
The Spacetime Tree
The Annotated Tenth Dimension Video
What Would a Flatlander Really See?
Wormholes
God 2.0
Daily Parrying
Time in Either Direction

Poll #17 - Max Planck said: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
(Poll ended June 30 08)
70 % agreed while the rest disagreed.

Another more succinct version of this quote is "science progresses by funerals".

As a person with an unusual approach to thinking about how our reality is derived, which some people embrace and some people reject as bunk, I of course take some comfort from Max Planck's idea presented in this quote. Will my dimensional hierarchy's connections to mainstream science ever be embraced by the mainstream or will this remain nothing more than an intellectual curiosity? Only time will tell. History is full of naysayers and established experts who ridiculed new ideas: there are many famous quotes that have been gathered in various places around the net. Michio Kaku, in his new book Physics of the Impossible, starts each chapter with quotes from famous historical figures and their comments on new ideas. This one, from a respected physicist just over a century ago, is typical of the kind of thinking that Max Planck is referring to:

"Radio has no future. Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. X-rays will prove to be a hoax." - Physicist Lord Kelvin, 1899

Poll #18 - Max Planck said: “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”
Poll ended July 14 2008
70% agreed while the remainder disagreed.

This relates to so many ideas we have looked at with this project, but most notably Godel's incompleteness theorum, which says it is impossible for us to get "outside the system" we are part of and describe the system in its entirety. The equilibrium state of the underlying quantum fields in their unobserved state is equivalent to how I am describing the tenth dimension - and, as I have always said, attempting to observe any part of the tenth dimension immediately collapses you into some part of the other dimensions. Tying this concept to string theory ("if no strings are vibrating in the tenth dimension, no reality is created in the dimensions below") is one of the interesting connections I see between my way of visualizing how our reality is constructed and mainstream scientific theory.

Poll # 19 - The LHC is going to be successful in proving the existence of extra dimensions.
Poll ended July 28 2008. 71% agreed while the rest disagreed.

Poll # 20 - The LHC will reveal the source of dark matter and/or dark energy.
Poll ended August 8 2008. 63% disagreed while the rest agreed.

Very interesting! While neither of the questions had a resounding victory, this blog's readership are leaning towards the LHC finding proof of extra dimensions, but more readers also believe the LHC will not find the source of dark matter and dark energy. What can we make of this?

These two poll questions relate to discussions in my blog from a couple of weeks ago: Dark Energy, Linelanders, and the LHC, as well as Randomness and the Missing 96 per cent. There are many articles out there about the Large Hadron Collider, which is scheduled to go online this month, and what it may or may not find. Will it reveal the Higgs Boson, called by some the "God Particle"? Will it reveal evidence of extra dimensions, or the source of dark energy? Naturally, I am rooting for the extra dimensions discovery, as the whole discussion of extra dimensions in an environment where some mainstream physicists are claiming their existnce is unprovable conjecture would be finally laid to rest. My biggest fear for the LHC is that it will only reveal another forest of tinier and tinier particles, leaving science with the task of coming up with an even larger and more powerful particle collider for further experiments in the decades to come.

The July 21st edition of New Scientist magazine had an interesting article related to all this, here are some quotes:

Awaiting a messenger from the multiverse

by Stephen Battersby

AT THE most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the twin colliding beams of protons have been switched off for a few hours. All seems quiet, but both the giant machine and the foundations of physics are about to be shaken by a tiny time bomb. Hiding within a copper plate deep inside one of the accelerator's massive detectors is a peculiar interloper: a particle that is waiting to explode, and with its incandescent fragments write a message from beyond our universe.

If this particle does appear at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, it could change the nature of physics. Physicists might have to abandon their goal of explaining the fundamental basis of our reality and just accept that the properties of matter and energy in our universe arose at random. It could mean not only that we live on a small planet in an insignificant solar system in one of a trillion galaxies in the universe, but our own universe is just one insignificant slice of an unimaginably vast and diverse multiverse.

To many physicists, that is anathema; but not to Savas Dimopoulos of Stanford University in California or his colleague Nima Arkani-Hamed at Harvard University. In 2002, they first began to wonder what a multiverse might mean for particle physics.

This was at a time when the multiverse was being discussed, albeit reluctantly, as a solution to a cosmic problem. Astronomers had discovered a repulsive force pushing the galaxies apart, caused by an inherent energy present in space. Often called the cosmological constant, no one knows what is generating this force.

On the face of it, physics has a ready-made explanation. According to quantum theory, the vacuum, or the space between particles, is not totally empty. It is home to short-lived "virtual" particles that flicker in and out, created by the fundamental quantum fuzziness of the world. Although that might be a hard concept to swallow, it is an enormously successful idea. The calculations of quantum field theory show that these virtual particles cluster around the ordinary, solid, long-lived particles of matter, changing their properties in ways that accurately match many experimental observations.

It is relatively easy to devise a model of particle physics in which virtual particles with positive and negative energies cancel out exactly to zero, but why they should almost cancel each other out, leaving us with a tiny residual energy, is much harder to see.

One physicist had already predicted this, however. In the 1980s, Steven Weinberg at the University of Texas in Austin adopted a controversial line of argument called the anthropic principle, which roughly states that the universe has to possess properties that make it hospitable to life, otherwise we wouldn't be here to see it.

He started by pointing out that if our cosmological constant were only 100 times as big as observed, we would be in trouble. Its repulsive force would have stretched out the thin gas of the early universe, preventing it from ever collapsing into stars and planets. But if you have a lot of universes, each with a random value of the cosmological constant, there's going to be at least one with an energy density of roughly a few joules per cubic kilometre. That would enable the existence of planet-dwelling life forms who would then be in a position to observe this value of cosmological constant.

Such a range of universes might sound like wild speculation, but some respected cosmological models imply that there could indeed be many universes, perhaps even an infinite number. In the theory of eternal inflation, for example, our own universe is just one offshoot of an endlessly growing "tree" of universes.

Those of you familiar with my project will recognize many common themes in this article that relate to this ideas I have been promoting with Imagining the Tenth Dimension. Here are some related blog entries:
The Spacetime Tree
Unlikely Events and Timelessness
The Omniverse
Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains

So: will the LHC find proof of extra dimensions, but not the source of dark matter and dark energy, as this blog's participants have predicted? The idea I have promoted with this project (in my book and in blog entries like Dark Energy, Linelanders, and the LHC) is that dark matter and dark energy come from the combined gravitational effects of the neighboring parallel universes in the fifth dimension (for dark matter), and the combined "pull" from other expressions of matter and energy in the sixth dimension and beyond (for dark energy). Will the LHC push us further towards such an understanding? Only time will tell.

Thanks to everyone who participated in those polls, lots more to come. And by all means, if you have a suggestion for a poll question don't be afraid to post it here in the comments.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: The Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs, August Report

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 19 and 20

Click here for the archive of polls 1 to 10.
Click here for the archive of polls 11 to 15.

Poll # 19 - The LHC is going to be successful in proving the existence of extra dimensions.
Poll ended July 28 2008. 71% agreed while the rest disagreed.

Poll # 20 - The LHC will reveal the source of dark matter and/or dark energy.
Poll ended August 8 2008. 63% disagreed while the rest agreed.

Very interesting! While neither of the questions had a resounding victory, this blog's readership are leaning towards the LHC finding proof of extra dimensions, but more readers also believe the LHC will not find the source of dark matter and dark energy. What can we make of this?

These two poll questions relate to discussions in my blog from a couple of weeks ago: Dark Energy, Linelanders, and the LHC, as well as Randomness and the Missing 96 per cent. There are many articles out there about the Large Hadron Collider, which is scheduled to go online this month, and what it may or may not find. Will it reveal the Higgs Boson, called by some the "God Particle"? Will it reveal evidence of extra dimensions, or the source of dark energy? Naturally, I am rooting for the extra dimensions discovery, as the whole discussion of extra dimensions in an environment where some mainstream physicists are claiming their existnce is unprovable conjecture would be finally laid to rest. My biggest fear for the LHC is that it will only reveal another forest of tinier and tinier particles, leaving science with the task of coming up with an even larger and more powerful particle collider for further experiments in the decades to come.

The July 21st edition of New Scientist magazine had an interesting article related to all this, here are some quotes:

Awaiting a messenger from the multiverse

by Stephen Battersby

AT THE most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the twin colliding beams of protons have been switched off for a few hours. All seems quiet, but both the giant machine and the foundations of physics are about to be shaken by a tiny time bomb. Hiding within a copper plate deep inside one of the accelerator's massive detectors is a peculiar interloper: a particle that is waiting to explode, and with its incandescent fragments write a message from beyond our universe.

If this particle does appear at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, it could change the nature of physics. Physicists might have to abandon their goal of explaining the fundamental basis of our reality and just accept that the properties of matter and energy in our universe arose at random. It could mean not only that we live on a small planet in an insignificant solar system in one of a trillion galaxies in the universe, but our own universe is just one insignificant slice of an unimaginably vast and diverse multiverse.

To many physicists, that is anathema; but not to Savas Dimopoulos of Stanford University in California or his colleague Nima Arkani-Hamed at Harvard University. In 2002, they first began to wonder what a multiverse might mean for particle physics.

This was at a time when the multiverse was being discussed, albeit reluctantly, as a solution to a cosmic problem. Astronomers had discovered a repulsive force pushing the galaxies apart, caused by an inherent energy present in space. Often called the cosmological constant, no one knows what is generating this force.

On the face of it, physics has a ready-made explanation. According to quantum theory, the vacuum, or the space between particles, is not totally empty. It is home to short-lived "virtual" particles that flicker in and out, created by the fundamental quantum fuzziness of the world. Although that might be a hard concept to swallow, it is an enormously successful idea. The calculations of quantum field theory show that these virtual particles cluster around the ordinary, solid, long-lived particles of matter, changing their properties in ways that accurately match many experimental observations.

It is relatively easy to devise a model of particle physics in which virtual particles with positive and negative energies cancel out exactly to zero, but why they should almost cancel each other out, leaving us with a tiny residual energy, is much harder to see.

One physicist had already predicted this, however. In the 1980s, Steven Weinberg at the University of Texas in Austin adopted a controversial line of argument called the anthropic principle, which roughly states that the universe has to possess properties that make it hospitable to life, otherwise we wouldn't be here to see it.

He started by pointing out that if our cosmological constant were only 100 times as big as observed, we would be in trouble. Its repulsive force would have stretched out the thin gas of the early universe, preventing it from ever collapsing into stars and planets. But if you have a lot of universes, each with a random value of the cosmological constant, there's going to be at least one with an energy density of roughly a few joules per cubic kilometre. That would enable the existence of planet-dwelling life forms who would then be in a position to observe this value of cosmological constant.

Such a range of universes might sound like wild speculation, but some respected cosmological models imply that there could indeed be many universes, perhaps even an infinite number. In the theory of eternal inflation, for example, our own universe is just one offshoot of an endlessly growing "tree" of universes.

Those of you familiar with my project will recognize many common themes in this article that relate to this ideas I have been promoting with Imagining the Tenth Dimension. Here are some related blog entries:
The Spacetime Tree
Unlikely Events and Timelessness
The Omniverse
Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains

So: will the LHC find proof of extra dimensions, but not the source of dark matter and dark energy, as this blog's participants have predicted? The idea I have promoted with this project (in my book and in blog entries like Dark Energy, Linelanders, and the LHC) is that dark matter and dark energy come from the combined gravitational effects of the neighboring parallel universes in the fifth dimension (for dark matter), and the combined "pull" from other expressions of matter and energy in the sixth dimension and beyond (for dark energy). Will the LHC push us further towards such an understanding? Only time will tell.

Next - a combined archive of polls 16 through 20

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 18

Click here for the archive of polls 1 to 10.
Click here for the archive of polls 11 to 15.

Poll #18 - Max Planck said: “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”
Poll ended July 14 2008
70% agreed while the remainder disagreed.

This relates to so many ideas we have looked at with this project, but most notably Godel's incompleteness theorum, which says it is impossible for us to get "outside the system" we are part of and describe the system in its entirety. The equilibrium state of the underlying quantum fields in their unobserved state is equivalent to how I am describing the tenth dimension - and, as I have always said, attempting to observe any part of the tenth dimension immediately collapses you into some part of the other dimensions. Tying this concept to string theory ("if no strings are vibrating in the tenth dimension, no reality is created in the dimensions below") is one of the interesting connections I see between my way of visualizing how our reality is constructed and mainstream scientific theory.

Next - Poll Questions 19 and 20 - Will the LHC prove the existence of extra dimensions? Will it reveal the source of dark energy/dark matter?

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 17

Click here for the archive of polls 1 to 10.
Click here for the archive of polls 11 to 15.

Poll #17 - Max Planck said: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
(Poll ended June 30 08)
70 % agreed while the rest disagreed.

Another more succinct version of this quote is "science progresses by funerals".

As a person with an unusual approach to thinking about how our reality is derived, which some people embrace and some people reject as bunk, I of course take some comfort from Max Planck's idea presented in this quote. Will my dimensional hierarchy's connections to mainstream science ever be embraced by the mainstream or will this remain nothing more than an intellectual curiosity? Only time will tell. History is full of naysayers and established experts who ridiculed new ideas: there are many famous quotes that have been gathered in various places around the net. Michio Kaku, in his new book Physics of the Impossible, starts each chapter with quotes from famous historical figures and their comments on new ideas. This one, from a respected physicist just over a century ago, is typical of the kind of thinking that Max Planck is referring to:

"Radio has no future. Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. X-rays will prove to be a hoax." - Physicist Lord Kelvin, 1899

Next Poll Question - is it impossible to completely know a mystery that we're part of?