Imagining the Tenth Dimension

New Video - Observers and Addictions

2012-05-22T15:06:00.000-06:00

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COAfHQNFEb8

Next: Poll 93 - One Inevitable Future?

Poll 92 - One Inevitable Past?

2012-05-16T03:57:00.000-06:00

"In his book 'Just Six Numbers', cosmologist Martin Rees says this: 'if the Earth's history were re-run, it could end up with a quite different biosphere.' This demonstrates that there is not just one inevitable timeline for our universe." Poll ended April 27, 2012. 86.3% agreed, while the remaining 13.7% did not.

People who argue that free will is an illusion have been taught to think that everything about our reality is inevitable, like a long row of dominoes - as soon as you knock over the first one, the rest have no option but to fall over, one after the other.

Here's a link to an article about a new paper published at phys.org, which does a great job of putting this discussion into a broader context: Does the Quantum Wave Function Represent Reality? Let me quote the opening paragraph from that phys.org article, which was written by Lisa Zyga:

At the heart of quantum mechanics lies the wave function, a probability function used by physicists to understand the nanoscale world. Using the wave function, physicists can calculate a system's future behavior, but only with a certain probability. This inherently probabilistic nature of quantum theory differs from the certainty with which scientists can describe the classical world, leading to a nearly century-long debate on how to interpret the wave function: does it representative objective reality or merely the subjective knowledge of an observer? In a new paper, physicists Roger Colbeck of the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, and Renato Renner who is based at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, have presented an argument strongly in favor of the objective reality of the wave function, which could lead to a better understanding of the fundamental meaning of quantum mechanics.

This is a powerful idea, and it speaks to the underlying timeless nature of what we keep coming back to with this project: it shows how there can be Everett's Many Worlds, which is a way of interpreting this quantum wave function which allows for the existence of more than one possible outcome from any position within space-time. We are not dominoes, we are not automatons. And while this doesn't give us magical powers (which is to say, our choices can't violate causality and select an outcome which is logically impossible), we still do have the power to choose one outcome over another within the probability space of possible outcomes. This means medical studies that propose any decision-making process that we perceive as being our free will is really just the result of inexorable electrochemical processes are wrong, because they ignore the underlying quantum nature of our reality. And it means that Martin Rees is correct: even in the big cosmological picture of our universe and of our planet, there are many possible paths we could have traveled to get to "now", and many other possible "now"s that are not even causally connected to the one we're currently observing.

This is true no matter what point in time you are thinking about: there are many possible outcomes, all equally real, and not just the outcome that we happen to be observing right here and right now. Embrace your probability space!

And enjoy the journey.

Rob Bryanton

PS - Just a few days ago, Nature Magazine published an article that also relates very nicely to this discussion: http://www.nature.com/news/a-boost-for-quantum-reality-1.10602

Next: New Video - Observers and Addictions

Tesseracts and Time Travel

2012-05-10T03:33:00.001-06:00

Over the last few weeks we've been looking at entries based upon a list of questions given to me by high school senior Jim Evins for a paper he was writing about my project. We'll conclude with three more questions.

"In chapter 3 of your book you discuss the possibility of an alien race that moves backwards in time. If they were to show up in the year 3000 and attain victory over earth, and we attain victory in our flow of time, would we not just destroy one another’s history and reverse the reality of who showed up first on our planet?"

The accepted definition for anti-matter is that it’s matter which is moving backwards in time. That underlying “sea of information” that we looked at in the first question is ultimately symmetrical, a balanced whole, where every positive and negative can exist simultaneously, and our universe or any other is defined in part by how it breaks that symmetry: this is why our universe is made primarily of matter rather than anti-matter. Physicist Sean Carroll talks about how the existence of our universe means there should be a corresponding universe made up primarily of anti-matter, and in that universe time’s “arrow” would be in the opposite direction to ours.

But if matter and anti-matter interact, they destroy each other. So the reverse time aliens I’m describing in the thought experiment you’re referring to are made of the same matter as us, but they perceive time to flow in the opposite direction. How could that be possible? In my book I describe how for us, time appears to flow in one direction only because we derive our energy from chemical processes which obey the thermodynamic laws of entropy, and many physicists talk about the fact that our universe started with extremely low entropy and will end with extremely high entropy. But physicists also talk about “time reversal symmetry” which means any process viewed in one direction of time should make just as much sense when viewed in the opposite direction. So with the scenario I was describing, these aliens derive their energy from some other process which moves in time’s opposite direction, and hence they perceive time to move in the opposite direction to ours. I propose that it would be possible for both races to destroy each other, and yet both could survive within their own perceived version of reality. How? Because quantum mechanics tells us there are many possible pasts and many possible futures. So just as Everett’s Many Worlds Interpretation tells us the universe must exist where I lost my leg as a child, that universe has nothing to do with the one I’m observing, it has no effect on my reality.

Again, if you believe there is only one possible past, present and future for our universe then conversations such as these would be fraught with paradox. But this deeper understanding of how we move within a constantly evolving probability space, and how the probability space I had one minute, one year, or one decade ago is not the same probability space as I’m within right “now” allows us to see how this thought experiment would work: the aliens could destroy us, we could destroy the aliens, but those two universes do not directly affect each other because they are part of our universe’s 6D phase space.

"Are you aware of 4 dimensional objects such as tesseracts, pentatopes, and rotatopes, and if so how are they incorporated (if at all) into your view of the fourth dimension?"

I talk about extra-dimensional shapes such as these regularly in my blog or on my youtube channel . Here’s a link to the blog entry and video for Imagining the Fourth Dimension, my blog entry which most recently deals with this question: http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2011/08/imagining-fourth-dimension.html

In a nutshell: there’s a difference between a concept such as cube, and a physical cube. Likewise, there’s a difference between tesseract as a concept, and a physical object that is in the shape of a tesseract. What do I mean by this? A 3D cube as a concept can be freely discussed as an idea, but if a cube had length, width and depth within 3D space but no duration within 4D space-time it would be impossible for us to view such an object. Likewise, a 4D hypercube or tesseract can be discussed as a concept, but it would be impossible for us to view such an object unless it had a duration within the fourth dimension. When we look at animations of rotating tesseracts, then, we are looking at a visualization of how cross-sections of that object would appear within the third dimension, one frame after another, and we’re not really viewing the tesseract in its entirety.

"Do you feel it’s possible to reverse our sense of time and flow the opposite way, or do we have to maintain the flow we were born into?"

With our physical bodies, we are stuck with our “arrow of time” because of those thermodynamic processes I spoke of above. The only way that we can currently perceive these extra dimensions, or time flowing in the opposite direction, is with our minds and the power of imagination.

Thanks again, Jim, for your insightful questions. Next week, we'll look at Poll 92 - Is there only one inevitable timeline for our universe?

Enjoy the journey!

Rob

New Video - Psychedelics and Surprises

2012-05-07T11:01:00.000-06:00

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ylVADkkf1Q

Next: Tesseracts and Time Travel

Why Can't We Stop at the 5th Dimension?

2012-05-01T03:24:00.001-06:00

Two weeks ago I told you about student Jim Evins, who gave me a list of questions for a school paper he's writing about my "new way of thinking about time and space". Here's his second question:

"The 7th dimension dictates all the possible beginnings and ends of our universe, but why would this characteristic not fall under the 5th dimension, seeing as the 5th dimensions explores all possibilities of our current reality?"

...and here's my reply:

In one sense, we've already covered this in my previous response. Or try thinking of it this way: Einstein accepted that our observed reality is derived from the fifth dimension way back in 1921, yet this is rarely taught in schools. Quantum mechanics and concepts such as Feynman’s “sum over paths” tell us that there are many causally connected pasts and futures that connect to any particular “now”, and Everett said that these branches are orthogonal to space-time: so this leads me to insist that you or I are moving points within a fifth-dimensional probability space. Right now, there is zero probability that you and I can suddenly be in the universe where it’s 2012 and dinosaurs never became extinct. If I had lost my leg in a car accident as a child, there would be zero probability of me now suddenly being in the universe where that leg is still fine. But those other versions of our universe, according to the Schrodinger wave equation and Everett’s Theory of the Universal Wave Function, must exist. We just can’t get there from here because Einstein was right: our reality is being derived from the fifth dimension, and not the sixth.

There is one very unique case in which your question does apply, what if one of the two points we’re drawing a line from is the beginning (most commonly called the big bang) of our universe? In the fourth dimension, we can only perceive one causally connected line that gets you from that beginning, that passes through “now”, and gets you to the end of the universe. If the hard determinists were correct, and everything about our universe is inevitable and free will is an illusion, this would be the end of the discussion. Still, we’ve already established that our reality comes from the fifth dimension, not the fourth, so if the first point we define in the fifth dimension is the beginning of our universe, then within this 5D probability space there are all the causally connected 4D lines that get you to any other version, or the phase space of our universe, but it’s important to realize that most of those lines would not pass through the unique “now” that you or I are currently observing because there are so many different possible world lines. Most important of all, once you travel on any one of those lines you are immediately beginning to pare away the possible causally connected paths. In other words, by saying “then this happened” you are obviously excluding all the other possible outcomes that are not logically compatible with the “then this happened” you have just described. The only way to have the complete freedom to navigate within our unique universe’s phase space is within the sixth dimension, and the only way to think of that phase space as a single point is to perceive it within the seventh dimension and above.

Thanks Jim for the great questions. We'll finish these up next week with an entry called "Tesseracts and Time Travel".

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

Next: New Video - Psychedelics and Surprises

Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs, April Report

2012-04-28T03:24:00.003-06:00

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 . May 11 .
. June 11 . July 11 . August 11 . September 11 . October 11 .
. November 11 . December 11 . Top 100 Entries of 2011 .
. January 12 . February 12 . March 12 .

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

1. New video - Imagining the Sixth Dimension
2. New video - Imagining the Fifth Dimension
3. Brain Pickings
4. New Video - Imagining the Eighth Dimension
5. Psychedelics and Surprises
6. Observers and Addictions
7. What is Life?
8. Why Only Ten?
9. Scientific American on Rob Bryanton
10. New video - Imagining the Seventh Dimension

And as of April 26th, 2012, 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. The Pencil Visualization (2)
3. What's Around the Corner? (3)
4. Mandelbulbs (4)
5. Is Reality an Illusion? (5)
6. The 5th-Dimensional Camera Project (6)
7. Gravity and Love (7)
8. Bees and the LHC (8)
9. 10-10-10 Look Before You Leap (11)
10. Vibrations and Fractals (12)
11. An Expanding 4D Sphere (9)
12. Just Six Things: The I Ching (10)
13. Light Has No Speed (13)
14. Time Travel Paradoxes (14)
15. Changing Your Brain (15)
16. Roger Ebert on Quantum Reincarnation (16)
17. Our Universe Within the Omniverse (17)
18. Magnets and Morality (18)
19. Quantum Weirdness and Water (new)
20. Simultaneous Inspiration (20)
21. How to Time Travel (19)
22. Photons and Free Will (25)
23. Creativity and the Quantum Universe (21)
24. Dancing on the Timeline (22)
25. Complexity from Simplicity (23)
26. What is Reality? (24)

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

Language and the Mind (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. Also, a lot of people are enjoying discussing these ideas with me on my facebook page: facebook.com/rob.bryanton .

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Why Can't We Stop at the Fifth Dimension?

New video - Timelessness and the Ultimate Ensemble

2012-04-23T03:10:00.003-06:00

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Kke6VFVZhE

Next: Why Can't We Stop at the Fifth Dimension?

Abolishing the Fourth Dimension

2012-04-17T05:22:00.011-06:00

Seems like there's a lot of new discussion happening in the last few days about whether it's proper to call space-time the fourth dimension. With this project, I've often argued that time is not a dimension, it's a direction, and as with any of the other directional names (like up, forward, north, and so on) it's arbitrary what dimension we assign a particular label, as long as we recognize that there's an opposing direction (like down, backward, south, and so on) which we need to pair it up with if we're going to be thinking about a dimension rather than just a direction. But the following video, posted on the YouTube Minute Physics channel just a few days ago, takes the controversy to another level: it's titled "There is no 'Fourth' dimension".

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9sbdrPVfOQ

(By the way, the lovely optical illusion at the top of this blog was posted in the comments area for a Gizmodo article about this MinutePhysics video. If this optical illusion works as well for you as it does for me then you may be surprised to learn that this is not an animation, it's just a still image. Any motion you might see is being imparted by your observation of the still image - what a wonderful visual metaphor for the quantum observer! I wish I could give credit to the creator but that information is too difficult to see in this copy of the image.)

Here's the comment I sent to the Minute Physics channel, if they ever respond I'll be sure to add what they say to this blog entry.

Dear Minute Physics,

Congratulations on the success of this channel! Scientific American published a blog last summer asking why there weren't more viral science channels on YouTube (and at that time identified my channel as one of the few). Clearly you have moved into that space, good for you. I have some comments about your latest video.

Larry and Moe. Who is the third stooge? Curly.
Moe and Curly. Who is the third stooge? Larry.
Length and width. What is the third dimension? Depth.
Depth and length. What is the third dimension? Width.

Saying there's no fourth dimension is the same as saying there's no third stooge or there's no third dimension. At best it's a semantics discussion: yes, you can't say who the third stooge is unless you also first identify who the other two stooges are. But at worst this video has the danger of leading people to conclusions such as this: wasn't Einstein wrong then when he agreed with Kaluza about our universe's field equations being resolved at the fifth dimension? Surely, some people will say, if this video's claim that "there's no fourth dimension" is correct, then there must also be no fifth dimension or no tenth dimension as well.

I agree that it's important for people to realize that you can't have a fifth dimension without acknowledging the other four dimensions that are included within. But saying there's no fourth dimension seems like a dangerous oversimplification to me. Your thoughts?

Sincerely,

Rob Bryanton

Then, as a further interesting coincidence, my friend Lee Price sent me a link to this new article written by Lisa Zyga and posted at phys.org. It's entitled "Physicists Continue Work to Abolish Time as Fourth Dimension of Space". Here's the opening paragraphs from that article:

Philosophers have debated the nature of time long before Einstein and modern physics. But in the 106 years since Einstein, the prevailing view in physics has been that time serves as the fourth dimension of space, an arena represented mathematically as 4D Minkowski spacetime. However, some scientists, including Amrit Sorli and Davide Fiscaletti, founders of the Space Life Institute in Slovenia, argue that time exists completely independent from space. In a new study, Sorli and Fiscaletti have shown that two phenomena of special relativity - time dilation and length contraction - can be better described within the framework of a 3D space with time as the quantity used to measure change (i.e., photon motion) in this space.

The scientists have published their article in a recent issue of Physics Essays. The work builds on their previous articles, in which they have investigated the definition of time as a “numerical order of material change.”

As Lee pointed out when he sent me this article, this is a viewpoint that would have interested Gevin Giorbran. Gevin's Everything Forever - Learning to See Timelessness encouraged us all to visualize the underlying structures of our reality from a perspective where we are "outside" time. But in his book Gevin also embraced my approach to visualizing the dimensions, because he saw how that same timeless viewpoint is reached by the time we've envisioned the ultimate ensemble of the tenth dimension.

So is it really possible to say "time is independent from space" (Sorli and Fiscaletti's viewpoint) while still acknowledging the existence of extra dimensions? As I've said in entries like Imagining the Third Dimension, visualizing the third dimension as timeless is the approach that physicists like Julian Barbour ask us to use, and accepting the need for some additional degree of freedom to change from state to state is how I describe the direction of time no matter what dimension we're discussing. It would be nice to say both of the above examples are just semantics, that a rose is a rose, and no matter what you call the additional degree of freedom the third dimension uses for change from state to state doesn't change the fact of its existence. But Sorli and Fiscaletti are talking about a change which is more fundamental than that, and ultimately may not require the existence of extra dimensions at all. As I said most recently in Connecting Zero to Ten, "the idea that there are really no dimensions, that there are just infinite vectors within one underlying fabric which is dimensionless, actually resonates more strongly for me..." because that's another way of describing this timeless ultimate ensemble my approach reaches with the tenth dimension.

One final note: as long as both of the examples we've looked at here (from Minute Physics and the work of Sorli and Fiscaletti) are willing to acknowledge the existence of the multiple outcomes predicted by Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, then I believe we really are talking about different ways of describing the same thing. On the other hand, if either of these are intended to encourage us all to believe that there is only one possible set of outcomes for our universe from its beginning to its end, then that's where my project would have to part ways.

Even if time is an illusion, free will is not. Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

P.S. - here's my video for Imagining the Fourth Dimension, which works very nicely as a response to the Minute Physics video.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MN4KC_zlW4g

Next: New Video - Timelessness and the Ultimate Ensemble

Are the 6th and 9th Dimensions Empty?

2012-04-14T03:44:00.004-06:00

Not long ago Jim Evins, a senior student from Mountain Vista High School in Highlands Ranch, CO sent me a list of questions for a school paper he was writing about my approach to visualizing the dimensions, and I thought his questions did a good job of underlining some of the misconceptions that can arise. We'll look at his questions over the next couple of entries. Jim's first questions was this:

"How would you conceptualize a line in the 6th and 9th dimensions? From your description in the book all I gathered is that those two dimensions are more or less empty space for the 5th and 8th dimension to fold through."

And my response:

My approach to visualizing the dimensions is related to the point-line-plane postulate, which is the accepted methodology for visualizing any number of spatial dimensions. Think of dimension “x” in its entirety as a point, then any point not included within that first point would form a line in dimension “x+1”, and any other point not on that line would be part of a plane in dimension “x+2”. You can now start over: think of the plane you just defined as a new single point in a new dimension “x”, and you can repeat this process indefinitely according to the point-line-plane postulate. Try using this approach to visualize the first, second and third dimension, no problem. Try using it to visualize the entirety of 3D space as a point, then some other point not encompassed by that point would be a way to define a line in the fourth dimension, and a point not on that line would be a way to get to the fifth dimension. Try using this to start from the 4th dimension or the 7th dimension, and you will have thought of a way of defining the 6th dimension or the 9th dimension.

The line/branch/fold logic that my project presents can be used to start at any dimension as well, although for simplicity in most cases I have started with the 1st, 4th, or 7th dimension as the line just to avoid some confusion in the discussion. But no matter what spatial dimension you’re describing, if there is a way of describing every possible state within that dimension, then whatever is not encompassed by that set of all possible states gives you a way of getting to the next dimension “up”, or “outside” of the current dimension. The term phase space is useful for these discussions: as it says in wikipedia, this is a “space in which all possible states of a system are represented, with each possible state of the system corresponding to one unique point in the phase space.”

Again, this logic can work no matter what dimension you start from: if you can define the phase space for a particular dimension as dimension “x”, then conceive of that phase space as a single point, then some other point not within that first system allows you to draw a line in dimension “x+1”. Although this gets harder for us to visualize as the number of dimensions increases, what we’re really talking about is that each additional dimension is orthogonal, or at right angles to the previous one. So let’s use all of this logic to answer your question.

Our 3D universe in its entirety can be thought of as a point. This is space, but not space-time. In order to form a 4D line, if we think of our 3D universe in some other state as some other point, that gives us a line which passes through those points and extends in either direction to the beginning and end of our space-time universe. If there were only one possible timeline (or “world line” as some physicists prefer to call it) then this would be as far as we could go. But from any point within that 4D line, quantum mechanics tells us there are many probabilistic outcomes that could occur, and Hugh Everett III’s Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics defines these other possible causally-related outcomes as being in a sub-space which is “orthogonal to space-time”. Although Everett’s theory did not explicitly invoke extra dimensions, I insist that this means Everett’s Many Worlds lie within the dimension which is orthogonal to 4D space-time: the fifth dimension. But the words “causally-related” are important here: Everett did not believe that his Many Worlds theory allowed for us to jump to other versions of our universe which are not logically connected to our own. As Everett put it, “causality cannot be violated”. My project advances the same idea: at any particular point within the fifth dimension there are a number of possible futures and pasts, but causality cannot be violated: so here in 2012 you and I can no longer get to the version of our universe where the twin towers still stand in New York, and so on. In order to get to that version, we would either have to go back in time to 2001 and choose a different fifth dimensional branch (no time machines around yet as far as I know so we can’t do that) or find a way to use the sixth dimension to jump to some other non-causally-connected version of our universe.

What we’re talking about with the 6th dimension then is the phase space of our unique universe: every possible state, every possible outcome for our particular universe as constrained by its deep structure constants. Each possible state of the system corresponds to one unique point in the sixth-dimensional phase space. And unlike the causally-connected lines of the fifth dimension, you would have the complete freedom to travel on a line that passes through any two points within that 6D phase space, like the version of our universe where it’s 2012 and Michael Jackson is still alive.

Now if we happened to live in a different universe with different basic physical laws, the same would apply: we would have a completely different but equally real 6D phase space representing all possible states for that other universe. You could start from any point within one of those 6D phase spaces, but there would be no way for you to get from that phase space to our phase space because they are not connected to each other. But what if we want to? This is how we can imagine the seventh dimension: perceive one phase space as a point, and the other phase space as a point, and the line that passes through those two points is a line in the seventh dimension.

Let’s say that the first point represents all possible outcomes (all possible pasts, presents, and futures) for our unique universe, and the other point represents a universe where the speed of light is different. There could be a line that passes through those two points, and traveling on that line in one direction would be a journey through different possible universes where the speed of light has a higher and higher value, while traveling in the opposite direction would take us through universes where the speed of light is lower and lower. Does this 7D line encompass the multiverse of all possible universes? No! No matter what parameter we adjust, we would need the “plane” of the eighth dimension to be able to get to other universes not included on that line.

Which takes us to the second part of your question. Isn’t the phase space of the eighth dimension as far as we need to go? Within the 8th dimension, no matter what point we define, there can be a line to some other possible universe with different basic physical laws, and in fact this is the conclusion I have drawn as well: for physical manifestations of reality, the 8th dimension is as far as you need to go. The 9th dimension, then, is where I would place information patterns which can have no physical expression, such as naturally arising tendencies or “preferences” towards one kind of reality over another, or impossible universes which can exist as ideas only. Saying that the ninth dimension is empty space, then, is not really accurate. The ninth dimension is more closely related to what quantum physicists like Anton Zeilinger or Seth Lloyd are talking about when they say “information equals reality”: ultimately, everything about our observed reality or any other is derived from an underlying fabric of potential information states. With my project, then, I would say a “line” in the ninth dimension is a way of connecting one unrelated information pattern to another, which is admittedly a very abstract concept, but such is the nature of these biggest-picture-of-all discussions.

To complete this thought: if we take that sea of all possible information patterns and perceive it all as a single unchanging point, that’s how I would propose we think of the tenth dimension. Any attempt to navigate within the tenth dimension, then, immediately spills us back out in the other possible states that are contained within the geometries and patterns of the other dimensions.

In summary, it’s not correct to say that the 6th and 9th dimensions are empty, because they are full of the possibilities of the dimensions they encompass. A 1D line is full of all the points that lie on that line, but there are many other points that lie outside that line. A 2D plane is full of all the lines that lie within that plane, but there are many other lines that lie outside that plane… and so on. Likewise, the 6D phase space for our unique universe is full of its probabilistic outcomes, but there are still many other universes outside our 6D phase space that have their unique and completely separate set of probabilistic outcomes. The 9th dimension, then, is full of the different information patterns that could result in a universe such as ours or could be only abstract concepts. But there is no “other” 9th dimension, which is why I say it’s impossible to draw a line in the tenth dimension without having that line manifest in some way in the other dimensions… or to have superstrings vibrating in the tenth dimension without creating patterns in the other dimensions.

Thanks for the questions, Jim! Next week we'll look at his question: Why Can't We Stop at the 5th Dimension? But coming up next: Abolishing the Fourth Dimension.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

New Video - What is Life?

2012-04-11T03:58:00.001-06:00

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Jq3WXiH4-E

Next: Are the Sixth and Ninth Dimensions Empty?

Cadbury Eggs and the Sixth Dimension

2012-04-08T11:52:00.002-06:00

A nice Easter-themed science video for your enjoyment. Once again, another idea from mainstream science which so easily interfaces with my approach to visualizing the dimensions: as I've said many times, all possible states for our particular universe are contained within the entirety of our unique version of the sixth dimension.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4eXU8VHM2g

Next: New video - What is Life?

Poll 91 - Free Energy within Ten Years?

2012-04-06T03:14:00.004-06:00

Poll 91: "By ten years from now (2022), 'free energy' technologies will finally be in common usage around the world." Poll ended March 24 2012. 35.7% agreed, while the remaining 64.3% did not.

Is free energy a crazy idea? The conspiracy theorists who say free energy technology has existed since at least the time of Tesla, and that this knowledge has deliberately been suppressed, do have mounting scientific evidence to support the idea that it's possible to get "something" from "nothing". Here's a link to a recent New Scientist magazine article about the scientific research in this regard. Let me quote the opening paragraphs from this article, "Harnessing the Quantum Power of Empty Space", which was written by David Harris:

"NOTHING will come of nothing." Shakespeare's epithet seems the kind of self-evident statement that only poets and philosophers would argue over. And physicists like Chris Wilson.

Last year, Wilson and his team at the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, provided what seems a particularly egregious case of something for nothing. They claimed to have conjured up light from nowhere simply by squeezing down empty space (New Scientist, 19 November 2011, p 16). That would be the latest manifestation of a quantum quirk known as the Casimir effect: the notion that a perfect vacuum, the very definition of nothingness in the physical world, contains a latent power that can be harnessed to move objects and make stuff.

Sightings of this vacuum action have been mounting over the past decade or so, leading some physicists to propose a new generation of nanoscale machines to take advantage of it, and others even to suggest a leading role for vacuum energy in determining the origin and fate of the cosmos. Others remain to be convinced.

Within this online version of this New Scientist article there's a nice little three minute cartoon about the concept of energy from the supposed "nothing" of empty space, check it out.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdLAN18CSDE

Speaking about the concept of "nothingness", next week we'll look at this question: Are the Sixth and Ninth Dimension Empty? But first, coming up next: a Cadbury Eggs and the Sixth Dimension.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

New Video - Connecting Zero to Ten

2012-03-31T03:50:00.007-06:00

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKTOWhgq7Ys

Next: Free Energy Within the Next Ten Years?

Top Ten Tenth DImension Blogs, March Report

2012-03-28T02:23:00.002-06:00

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 . May 11 .
. June 11 . July 11 . August 11 . September 11 . October 11 .
. November 11 . December 11 . Top 100 Entries of 2011 .
. January 12 . February 12 .

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

1. Thrive Movement
2. Quantum Weirdness and Water
3. Gravity and Light from the Vacuum
4. We are All Quanta
5. New video - Imagining the Fifth Dimension
6. Psychedelics and Surprises
7. New video - Imagining the Fourth Dimension
8. Observers and Addictions
9. New video - Imagining the Second Dimension
10. Why Only Ten?

And as of March 26th, 2012, 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. The Pencil Visualization (3)
3. What's Around the Corner? (2)
4. Mandelbulbs (4)
5. Is Reality an Illusion? (5)
6. The 5th-Dimensional Camera Project (6)
7. Gravity and Love (9)
8. Bees and the LHC (10)
9. An Expanding 4D Sphere (7)
10. Just Six Things: The I Ching (8)
11. 10-10-10 Look Before You Leap (13)
12. Vibrations and Fractals (12)
13. Light Has No Speed (11)
14. Time Travel Paradoxes (14)
15. Changing Your Brain (15)
16. Roger Ebert on Quantum Reincarnation (16)
17. Our Universe Within the Omniverse (17)
18. Magnets and Morality (18)
19. How to Time Travel (19)
20. Simultaneous Inspiration (22)
21. Creativity and the Quantum Universe (20)
22. Dancing on the Timeline (21)
23. Complexity from Simplicity (23)
24. What is Reality? (24)
25. Photons and Free Will (25)
26. Language and the Mind (new)

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

Monkeys Love Metallica (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. Also, a lot of people are enjoying discussing these ideas with me on my facebook page: facebook.com/rob.bryanton .

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: New Video - Connecting Zero to Ten

Imagining the First Dimension

2012-03-23T03:56:00.134-06:00

The first dimension is a line passing through two points. Is there anything simpler? But within this discussion of the dimensions that make up our reality, the power of the line is important to keep in mind.

This line has length only – no width or depth. Right at this instant, we could define a point at the tip of my nose, and another at the tip of your nose, and visualize a line that passes through those two points. Even though that line most likely passes through the earth's crust to get from my position on the planet to yours, that means little to the one-dimensional line we have just drawn.

And as you and I go about our day, that line will move around, continuing to pass through those two points we've defined. Billions of light years away, if we were to follow that line, it would be passing through one galaxy after another as you and I change our positions relative to each other back here on Earth (and the Earth itself turns on its axis and orbits around the sun and the galaxies move through space), but ultimately at any one instant we are still just talking about a simple one-dimensional line.

So, no matter what dimensions we're thinking about, there will always be a point that we can define that represents a dimension in a certain state, and a second point representing a dimension in a different state, and there can be a one-dimensional line that passes through those two points. But what that line passes through to get from one point to the other, and what that line extends to as it passes beyond each of those points, can be a mind-boggling realm of information and different forms of reality.

That's the simple power of the line. Traveling from one point to another is a way of thinking about "time" for any dimension, since time is a way of describing change from state to state. While we, as creatures made out of 3D atoms and molecules, perceive the line that gets us from one state to another as being in the fourth dimension, that concept works equally well for any dimension, which is why with this project we say that "time" for an imaginary two-dimensional creature would be one of the two possible directions in the third dimension, and so on.

In Imagining the Zeroth Dimension, we talked about how our universe or any other arises from a breaking of symmetry, and how the original animation that started this project visualizes the dimensions by starting with a point of indeterminate size and moving through the first, second and so on with repeating logical steps. This process also works from the other end: we can start with the tenth dimension as a point of indeterminate size, then imagine the descending steps from the ninth, eighth, and seventh dimension to represent an increasingly finely detailed "paring away" of the possibilities represented in the tenth dimension as a timeless Set Of All Possible States, or an ultimate ensemble of all possible information patterns conceived as a single unchanging entity. Thinking, then, of the "point" that represents our universe locked in at the seventh dimension, and thinking of a point in any other dimension, allows us to think about all the one-dimensional lines that could exist within or be connected to our universe, and how all those lines still represent only a tiny subset of the potential contained within the tenth dimension.

Finally, in Imagining the Second Dimension, we talk about how this one-dimensional line we're portraying has caused some people to say "that's impossible, something with no width or depth can't exist". If you're one of those people, this will be a good next entry for you to read.

Till then, enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: New video - Connecting Zero to Ten

Imagining the "Zeroth" Dimension

2012-03-17T03:19:00.050-06:00

Zero is powerful because it is infinity's twin. They are equal and opposite, yin and yang. They are equally paradoxical and troubling. The biggest questions in science and religion are about nothingness and eternity, the void and the infinite, zero and infinity.

- Science Writer Charles Seife, in his book Zero: the Biography of a Dangerous Idea

Last August I started a more in-depth series about the nature of each dimension, but I started with Imagining the Second Dimension. Some people have asked why didn't I go right back to the beginning, so let's try that now. Here's how I would start this discussion:

With Imagining the Tenth Dimension, we start from a zero, which some would call a "zeroth" (or "zero-th", if you prefer) dimension, and we move to the first, second, and beyond using a repeating logical structure to eventually end up at a timeless ultimate ensemble. When you get right down to it, that's what every respectable TOE (Theory of Everything) needs to describe: some underlying "thing" that all else is derived from. Otherwise, you're back to the "turtles all the way down" joke that often comes up in these discussions. Reconciling this timeless everything (which with my project I'm calling the tenth dimension in its unobserved state) with the zero that we start from (a point of indeterminate size) is the mind-blowing concept we arrive at with my project once we have imagined all ten dimensions.

I have often insisted that zero is not a dimension, because after all we need two new directions to travel within to define a spatial dimension. I have also suggested that the zero and ten represented on my helix logo for this project are shown to be on a line within the other dimensions because they represent the two directions which take us towards the infinitely large one way, and the infinitesimally small the other. Connecting Zero to Ten is the most recent entry where we've talked about that idea. But consider this: even if we ignore everything but this zero, this point of indeterminate size, we should remember what that means: even though we tend to think of this point as having no size, the definition of "indeterminate" is really "all possible values are true". Incredibly, that means even this lowly point that we start from does have a way that we can think of it as being infinitely large, encompassing absolutely everything within the information that becomes reality! So with that in mind, and for the sake of discussion here, let's continue to pursue the idea this there could be a "zeroth" dimension.

We began this entry with a quote from Charles Seife's Zero: the Biography of a Dangerous Idea, a book which discusses the relatively recent origin of this most powerful of numbers. Why does Seife call zero a dangerous idea? As an example, his preamble chapter includes an anecdote about a billion dollar warship that was suddenly dead in the water when a software bug resulted in a "divide by zero" error which completely crashed the computers running the ship. Then, chapter one begins with these thoughts:

...as natural as zero seems to us today, for ancient people zero was a foreign -- and frightening -- idea. An Eastern concept, born in the Fertile Crescent a few centuries before the birth of Christ, zero not only evoked images of a primal void, it also had dangerous mathematical properties. With zero there is the power to shatter the framework of logic.

The beginnings of mathematical thought were found in the desire to count sheep and in the need to keep track of property and of the passage of time. None of these task requires zero; civilizations functioned perfectly well for millennia before its discovery. Indeed, zero was so abhorrent to some cultures that they chose to live without it.

My friend Gevin Giorbran, author of the brilliant Everything Forever, Learning to See Timelessness, liked to point out that some cosmologists say the accelerating expansion of the universe will eventually take us to an absolute zero of perfectly flat space, an empty and formless void which seems like the most grim future imaginable. Gevin's take on this idea was that this zero we're headed towards is not empty, but full of all the other possible states, and this can be supported by the commonly held viewpoint that our universe arises from the breaking of an underlying symmetry. This means that our universe is now headed back towards a natural return to the perfectly balanced whole that exists both "before" and "after" the existence of our universe. Here's a quote from chapter 20 of Gevin's book:

(1 + (-1)) + (2 + (-2)) + (3 + (-3)) +... = 0 + 0 + 0 + ... = 0

     The simplest most straightforward way of summing all numbers is to sum the equal but opposite numbers together as shown above. So for a moment we will imagine that the correct sum of all numbers does sum up to and equal zero. Except this means that we need to change the value of zero away from being "no" things. We need to treat zero as the largest value in the mathematical system which actually includes the two already vast infinities of positive and negative numbers. Suddenly zero has become an infinite whole that contains all other numbers. Every positive and every negative number on the real number plane is summing or combining together to form an ultimate number of absolute value. Obviously this is not math as we know it. This is a math without time, without process, a math of truly infinite values.

    So we have made a dramatic change and the next step is to see the effect that changing the value of zero has had on the value of other numbers. If we are going about this bravely, as if we are imaginatively exploring a series of ideas, and so the brain is actually working, we notice that the values of other numbers have also changed, transformed in the same shift that we have taken with zero. Ordinarily the nothing of zero is a foundational axiom. Our foundation has shifted dramatically. What now is the value of one or two?

    If zero is seen to contain all other numbers, then logically all other numbers must have a lesser value than that of zero. If zero is the largest value, the only way there can be lesser values is if we remove some measure of value from the whole of zero. For example, suppose that we take away a (-1) from zero. What remains in the absence of that (-1)? Zero is still very large but zero is no longer an absolute value containing all other numbers. Something has been removed from it. But what value does zero transform into to show that loss?

    The answer is simply that zero minus (-1) equals 1. The missing (-1) causes zero to transform into the value 1. If zero contains all numbers within it, and we take away a value, zero then contains all numbers except the removed value. If we remove a negative one from zero the value of zero records that loss by transforming into a positive one. It still contains all other numbers besides (-1). So it is still a very large number like zero. But it is no longer the complete whole of all numbers. It is one. A very large number one.

    So if we treat what just happened as the logical rule we can now discover the values of other numbers in this system. For example, one is the sum of all numbers, so it contains within it all numbers, except (-1) is removed. The number two is the sum of all numbers except (-2) is missing, so it is also near zero but its content is less than zero and less than one. The number three contains all other numbers except (-3) so it is very large but smaller than two, one, and zero. And so on, and so on. The transformation that has happened is not simply an inverse reversal of ordinary mathematics, rather in this mathematical system, the value of a number decreases as we count toward greater numbers, since more of the negative numbers are being removed and placed somewhere else.

    Now, I should point out, just for the sake of clarity, that switching to the negative, the number (-1) is a combination of all numbers except that a positive 1 is removed, which would otherwise create the balance of zero. And in removing a positive two the whole shows that loss by becoming the number (-2). Unlike ordinary math, where negative values are less than nothing at all, here the numbers (-1) and (-2) are very large. In fact the content of (-1) is equal but inverse to the content of (+1). In physics, matter and anti-matter particles are equally substantive yet inverse in form and structure.

Do you follow Gevin's logic here? Saying that zero minus negative one equals one really makes perfect sense in ordinary math, but framing this idea in terms of zero being "full" and any of the other numbers as being slightly less than that requires a powerful mental shift. This shift takes us to the understanding that the broken symmetry that creates our universe or any other is defined by what's "missing" from it. In the case of our own universe, we know there is much less anti-matter than would be expected if our universe is derived from an underlying symmetry state: so it is this absence of anti-matter which is one of the defining factors that resulted in our particular universe.

There's no question in my mind, Gevin Giorbran was a genius and I'm sad that he's no longer with us. And p.s., I really should remind everyone that Gevin's book is available in hard cover, soft cover or as a downloadable pdf from www.tenthdimension.com/store.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Imagining the First Dimension

New video - Wrapping It Up Part One

2012-03-11T03:54:00.010-06:00

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrulvxL1FzY

Next: Imagining the "Zeroth" Dimension

TIme Crystals

2012-03-05T03:25:00.023-06:00

What is a crystal? The wikipedia definition begins with this sentence:

A crystal or crystalline solid is a solid material whose constituent atoms, molecules, or ions are arranged in an orderly, repeating pattern extending in all three spatial dimensions.

We've talked before in this blog about physicist Frank Wilczek, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics, who has some interesting ideas about the nature of time which can be tied to this project. Last month Dr. Wilczek, along with Alfred Shapere of the University of Kentucky published a paper at arxiv.org with the fascinating title of "Classical Time Crystals". That same day, Dr. Wilczek published a related paper, called "Quantum Time Crystals". Please follow the links if you'd like to get into the nitty gritty of what these scientists are proposing. Or check out this informative article written by Lisa Zyga and published February 20, 2012 at physorg.com: "Time crystals could behave almost like perpetual motion machines".

Wait, perpetual motion? That's impossible, right? We've talked a few times lately about the suspicions held by some that free energy technologies already exist and have been deliberately and maliciously suppressed by powers-that-be. Could time crystals be another path to this ideal? A time crystal would be a structure which exhibits a continuously repeating motion across time even in its lowest energy state. Lisa Zyga's article says Shapere and Wilczek suggest that even if time crystals don't exist in nature, it should be possible to construct them:

“It’s so tricky to implement mathematically,” Wilczek told PhysOrg.com. “It’s surprising that they can exist at all. But, whether or not they exist naturally, I’m very optimistic that it’s something one could engineer.”

But let's not jump to the wrong conclusion here: Wilczek is not promising a new free energy source or a violation of the laws of thermodynamics. As the article reports:

He added that, even though time crystals might move continuously, they couldn’t be used to generate useful energy since they can’t be disturbed, and they wouldn’t violate the second law of thermodynamics.

Back in Bees and Tangential Thinking, we discussed this quote from Stephen Hawking:

I still believe the universe has a beginning in real time, at the big bang. But there's another kind of time, imaginary time, at right angles to real time, in which the universe has no beginning or end.

And as I said in that previous blog entry: what is Hawking's "imaginary time"? It seems clear to me that if it's at right angles to our 4D spacetime, then it must be the fifth dimension. While I understand his use of "time" and "imaginary time" to convey these fourth- and fifth-dimensional ideas to the public, they do have the potential to create some confusion. Calling the fourth dimension "duration" rather than time, and the fifth dimension our "probability space" has been my suggestion for making these concepts more clear.

What I love about this new idea of "time crystals" is that it encourages us to think about time as just another spatial dimension, which could have repeating structures within it that occur naturally, or that can be constructed. Like Hawking, Wilczek also invokes "imaginary time", but he gives us a modern spin on this idea: he calls imaginary time "iTime".

In nature, fractals and fibonacci sequences and even DNA could be thought of the same way: as repeating structures which have a larger function that exists not just within space-time, but as waves and repeating patterns that exist outside of space-time. Extending these ideas of extra-dimensional patterns beyond the fourth dimension to explain much else about our reality has been one of the main goals of this project.

Is life itself like a time crystal? In entries like Beer and Miracles, we've looked at some astonishing implications of how yeast cells have been shown to be able to lie dormant for 45 million years and still spring back to life when the proper conditions are presented. What was within those cells during that huge time period that could be called "alive"? This is one of the great mysteries of the universe, and I believe Frank Wilczek is providing us with new and important implications about how that "tiny spark of life" that we've talked about so often with this project really could be something that forms naturally within the underlying extra-dimensional structures of our reality: like a crystal, the repeating pattern that engages with space-time to allow life to occur at any place within the universe could be a highly ordered extra-dimensional structure, a time crystal from the "iTime" of the fifth dimension. How cool is that?

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: New Video - Wrapping it Up Part One

Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs - February Report

2012-02-29T05:21:00.030-06:00

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 . May 11 .
. June 11 . July 11 . August 11 . September 11 . October 11 .
. November 11 . December 11 . Top 100 Entries of 2011 .
. January 12 .

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

1. Duality and Consciousness
2. What is Life?
3. Why Only Ten?
4. New video - Imagining the Second Dimension
5. Psychedelics and Surprises
6. Wrapping it Up in the Tenth Dimension
7. We are All Quanta
8. New video - Imagining the Third Dimension
9. Rob on the Peake Experience
10. Observers and Addictions

And as of February 26th, 2012, 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. The Pencil Visualization (6)
4. Mandelbulbs (3)
5. Is Reality an Illusion? (4)
6. The 5th-Dimensional Camera Project (5)
7. An Expanding 4D Sphere (7)
8. Just Six Things: The I Ching (8)
9. Gravity and Love (9)
10 Bees and the LHC (11)
11. Light Has No Speed (12)
12. Vibrations and Fractals (10)
13. 10-10-10 Look Before You Leap (13)
14. Time Travel Paradoxes (14)
15. Changing Your Brain (16)
16. Roger Ebert on Quantum Reincarnation (15)
17. Our Universe Within the Omniverse (17)
18. Magnets and Morality (18)
19. How to Time Travel (19)
20. Creativity and the Quantum Universe (20)
21. Dancing on the Timeline (21)
22. Simultaneous Inspiration (22)
23. Complexity from Simplicity (23)
24. What is Reality? (25)
25. Photons and Free Will (new)
26. Monkeys Love Metallica (24)

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

Polls Archive 54 - Is Time Moving Faster? (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. Also, a lot of people are enjoying discussing these ideas with me on my facebook page: facebook.com/rob.bryanton .

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Time Crystals

Poll 90 - Neutrinos and the Laws of Physics

2012-02-23T07:00:00.003-06:00

Poll 90 - "With which statement do you agree? Scientific experiments demonstrating that neutrinos traveled faster than light will: 1) require a re-writing of the laws of physics. 2) eventually be shown to be a measurement error, no faster-than-light travel occurred." Poll ended February 10, 2012. 58.6% chose option one, while the remaining 41.4% picked the second answer.

Speaking personally, I fall in the camp of people who suspect that these faster-than-light indications will eventually be shown to be the result of some sort of measurement error. Nonetheless, I have to suggest that if this faster-than-light evidence were eventually confirmed without a doubt, I believe that rather than requiring a re-write of the existing laws of physics (and more specifically Einstein's special theory of relativity), this would finally be a confirmation of the existence of extra dimensions: the conclusion we should reach is that these neutrinos were somehow using the "fold" of the next dimension up to arrive at their destination just a tiny bit sooner than Einstein's "speed of light" limit allows.

How much are we talking about when we say a tiny bit here? In the European experiment called OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Tracking Apparatus), these neutrinos appear to have traveled from CERN in Geneva to an underground lab in Italy 60 billionths of a second faster than the speed of light would allow! Such a miniscule amount, but still amazing if it were true.

Since it's now over five months since this evidence was first presented, let's look at some of the most recent musings about what this all could mean. First of all, here's a recent article interviewing Lyn Evans, the former director of the LHC, in which he discusses the results of the OPERA experiment. Lyn says this:

I’m working on an independent experiment that should start in a few months and we should have the results by the end of summer. If that gives the same result then we start to worry about extra dimensions.

So Lyn would appear to be in agreement with my thoughts on this topic. But he's certainly not the only scientist interested in trying to confirm or refute the evidence of these extra-speedy neutrinos. A recent Scientific American blog entry writes about experiments being planned at the Fermilab facility in Batavia, Illinois:

Fermilab has its own cutting-edge neutrino experiment that should be able to confirm or (as most suspect) refute the OPERA claim—as well as probe other puzzles of these particles. MINOS (Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search) shoots a beam of neutrinos through two detectors, one at Fermilab and one in a Minnesota mine some 735 kilometers away... A planned project called NOvA will succeed MINOS, extending the baseline of the neutrino experiment to about 800 kilometers and adding a much larger detector on the Minnesota end.

The scientists responsible for the first test have already repeated their experiment and found the same small but significant faster-than-light evidence, as reported in this arxiv.org submission. In fact, there were some scientists who participated in the first experiment but were not willing to have their names attached to the results. But because the second experiment was conducted in an even more stringent setup to help reject some possible sources of measurement errors, most of those scientists were now willing to have their names added to the second paper, after this more refined experiment was unable to disprove the existence of these faster-than-light-speed neutrinos.

The controversy continues. As reported in this article from the November 2011 Wired:

Tommaso Dorigo, a physicist at CERN, noted on his blog that there are still other possible sources of error. For instance, the OPERA collaboration’s clock might not have a fine enough resolution to determine exactly when the neutrinos arrived. “The measurement therefore is only a ‘partial’ confirmation of the earlier result: It is consistent with it, but could be just as wrong as the other,” he wrote.
Ultimately, the only thing that would convince many in the field is if another team upholds the findings in an independent experiment. Plunkett, co-spokesperson for the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) experiment at Fermilab, says that his collaboration expects to have results checking the OPERA findings in the spring of 2012.

Today, just as I was about to publish this entry, I see that there is a new buzz that it was a faulty connection on a GPS cable which caused the observed measurement error. Here's a link to the update from New Scientist:
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2012/02/speedy-neutrino-result-may-be.html
In this article you'll see that CERN is already planning confirmation tests for May, and that the OPERA team plan to release an update to their position on this controversy tomorrow. Needless to say, I'm keeping my eye on this one!

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Update: Here's a very interesting article published by Physics Today on February 23rd 2012 which discusses the original carefully worded news release showing that there are two factors being called into question, one of which would have have magnified the faster-than-light result, and one of which would have diminished it, and hence the need for more tests to be run in May. The article shows how most mainstream science news reports spun this information into articles, and in particular headlines, which had been crafted to give the impression that these scientists were already saying they had found an error which disproved the faster-than-light result, and that's simply not the case. So patience everyone, let's find out what's really happening here before we jump to one conclusion or the other!

Additional update, April 11th 2012: despite many previous claims saying that the results had already been officially debunked, it was only in the last two weeks that the scientists involved in the project made it official - the results were erroneous, and caused by a faulty fibreoptics cable and an inaccurate master clock. Neutrinos have not been proven to be able to travel faster than light, end of story.
(For now!)
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=embattled-faster-than-light-neutrino-experiment-leaders-step-down

Next: Time Crystals

New video - Imagining the Ninth Dimension

2012-02-20T03:47:00.001-06:00

A direct link to the above video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCP44Q37YHA

Next: Neutrinos and the Laws of Physics

Poll 89 - Is Many Worlds as True as Natural Selection?

2012-02-16T03:56:00.004-06:00

Poll 89: "In "The Hidden Reality", Brian Greene says: 'That the Many Worlds approach leads to an exceptionally rich picture of reality is no more a black mark against it than the rich diversity of life on earth is a black mark against Darwinian natural selection.'" Poll ended December 31, 2011. 78.5% chose "I agree with him" as their response, while the remainder said they did not agree.

Even though it comes from a different starting point, it's interesting to think about how this is a similar question to Poll 87, which asked this question:

"Physicist David Deutsch says that calling Everett's Many Worlds an interpretation "is like talking about dinosaurs as an 'interpretation' of the fossil record". Do you agree with him?" In that case 60.8% agreed with Dr. Deutsch, and in this case an even higher number agreed with Dr. Greene.

What I like about the Brian Greene statement is it gives us a nice reminder of the holy grail scientists continue to search for: what are the building blocks, the underlying steps, that reveal how a universe such as ours is created? That desire to find the elegantly simple process that explains how the beautiful and complex reality we see around us could arise is at the root of any TOE. or Theory of Everything. In past entries like Cymatics, Gravity and Light, Love and Gravity, and Strength of Gravity, Speed of Light, we've looked at some of my project's explorations of what this underlying simplicity might be. I've talked before about Dr. Erik Verlinde's proposal that just as there are no "liquidons" imparting the quality of liquidity to a fluid, there are no "gravitons" imparting gravity to matter. Since gravity is the only force, physicists tell us, that exerts itself across the extra dimensions, what we begin to imagine is that there are places within the underlying information that becomes reality where things tend to be grouped together more strongly - where gravity's strength is stronger - and places where the grouping order is less strong.

"Grouping order", of course, is how Gevin Giorbran liked to refer to the underlying organizing process that reveals itself within timelessness. If I throw a coin ten times and write down H or T for heads or tails, the highest possible grouping order would look like this: HHHHHTTTTT (or TTTTTHHHHH). The other possible extreme would be HTHTHTHTHT (or THTHTHTHTH), which Gevin referred to as being the highest possible "symmetry order". Both of those orders are, when viewed as a whole, identical: they represent a perfectly balanced symmetry, the "zero" that we start from and the "zero" that our universe returns to. The idea that our universe or any other springs from a breaking of symmetry is not unique to Gevin though. Cosmologists refer to symmetry breaking all the time as the answer to this simple question. "Why is there something rather than nothing?"

In the video for Imagining the Eight Dimension, I refer to the idea I've been promoting that ties so nicely to what Dr. Verlinde is proposing, and which Gevin Giorbran also showed us as a way of understanding: gravity is the underlying organizing principle that pulls things together, and the speed of light is the underlying organizing principle that divides things apart, through the planck frames that create our observed reality. As physicist Julian Barbour likes to describe it, each of those frames is unique and separate: and if we were in a part of the underlying information where gravity had nothing in opposition to it, we would be at the highest grouping order version of that information, the HHHHHTTTTT. On the other hand, if we were at the position where there was no gravity, and only the dividing apart that the speed of light reveals, we would be in the highest symmetry order, the HTHTHTHTHT.

Is there a simple process similar to Darwinian Natural Selection that causes our universe or any other to be selected from an underlying timeless whole, an Ultimate Ensemble, an Omniverse? And is Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation an important part of understanding what that simple process would be? 78.5% of the visitors to this blog were willing to agree with that idea.

For those of you who haven't watched the video for Imagining the Eighth Dimension yet, let's take a look at it now to finish today's entry.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDNO6vv1SjE

Next: New video - Imagining the Ninth Dimension

Poll 88 - Is the Sixth Dimension our Phase Space?

2012-02-10T03:50:00.044-06:00

Poll 88: "A phase space is defined as 'a space in which all possible states of a system are represented, with each possible state of the system corresponding to one unique point in the phase space.' Is the phase space for our unique universe in the sixth dimension?" Poll ended December 3, 2011. 71% agreed, while 29% disagreed.

"Phase Space" is definitely a phrase I wish I had known about back when I created this project, because its definition conveys so perfectly what we're talking about with not just the sixth dimension, but all of the dimensions as we're visualizing them here. Each dimension has its own unique set of possibilities, each is apparently infinite, and yet each is also a subset of the ones that follow.

If the "point" we start from represents a position within a system, then the "system" defines the nature of each of those points. Many times people visualize a point as only being of infinitesimally small size, which is valid but it's only one possible interpretation: so even a single geometric point, by virtue of being of indeterminate size, has an infinite quality to it, since a point of indeterminate size can be of any size you care to assign to it. So no matter what dimension you're visualizing, there's a way to think of a point within that system as encompassing the entire dimension, while still being only a subset of the possibilities contained in a system where further dimensions are added. Is that hard to visualize? Let's try it from the beginning.

A one-dimensional line is a simple system, which can have a phase space of possible states, or points, that lie upon the line. A two-dimensional plane would have a phase space with even more possible states, or points, that lie within the plane, and the phase space of the first-dimensional line we looked at could be a tiny subset of the second-dimensional phase space. This continues with each additional dimension, and the mind-boggling leap in possibilities from one dimension to the next quickly overwhelms us if we try to hold more than a few adjacent dimensions in our minds at once. Nonetheless, taking this logic one step at time, building one gigantic concept and then letting it become a tiny subset of the following one, is something our brains are more easily adapted to.

The video for Imagining the Sixth Dimension may help you to visualize further what we're talking about here, so for those of you who haven't seen it yet, let's take a look:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdnhKE95AqM

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Poll 89 - Is Many Worlds as True as Natural Selection?

Poll 87 - Many Worlds, Fossils, and Dinosaurs

2012-02-04T03:38:00.006-06:00

Poll 86: "Physicist David Deutsch says that calling Everett's Many Worlds an interpretation 'is like talking about dinosaurs as an 'interpretation' of the fossil record'. Do you agree with him?" Poll ended November 5 2011. 60.8% agreed, while 39.2% did not.

As I said recently in Imagining the Fifth Dimension, I have the utmost respect for David Deutsch, who has been a strong proponent of Everett's theory for many years. The quote we're talking about here was found in Peter Byrne's excellent The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III: Multiple Universes, Mutual Assured Destruction, and the Meltdown of a Nuclear Family, a book we've talked about in this blog before, including in an entry called The Quantum Observer.

Like "interpretation", words like "theory" can mistakenly fall into similar territory: in the general public, after all, theory has a fairly loose definition. I could say "I have a theory about what happened to my missing sock" but there's nothing rigorous implied by that statement. A scientific theory, on the other hand, is not just a guess for what might explain the phenomena being studied. As it says in wikipedia:

A scientific theory is a set of principles that explain and predict phenomena.Scientists create scientific theories with the scientific method, when they are originally proposed as hypotheses and tested for accuracy through observations and experiments. Once a hypothesis is verified, it becomes a theory.

Why do we refer to Everett's work as an interpretation, then? In fact, Everett himself called his work the "Theory of the Universal Wavefunction", so he wanted us to understand that what he had produced was much more than supposition. It was, after all, backed up by the equations of the Schrödinger wave function, which underlies the most successful scientific theory of all time: quantum mechanics. As I've said before in this blog, any self-respecting theory of everything has to have quantum mechanics incorporated within it if it's to be taken seriously.

So what we're left with here is Dr. Deutsch's sly swipe at the Creationist argument that the world was created less than 10,000 years ago, and the fossils must therefore have been placed in the earth at that time. Is that an "interpretation" of the fossil record? Sure it is, whether you agree with it or not. Particularly in the US, this viewpoint does have many supporters as we see in the wikipedia article on level of support for creationism:

According to a 2007 Gallup poll, about 43% of Americans believe that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so."

In that same article we see that while creationism has strong support in the US, there is a sliding scale of other countries around the world where this is not as prevalent a belief (for instance, about 20% believe this in Italy, sliding down through Norway, Spain, the U.K., Denmark, Sweden, France, and Japan, to Iceland, where less than 10% hold this belief). We also see that amongst persons in the US with education in the relevant earth and life sciences, the level of support for creationism is much much lower: according to a 1987 Newsweek poll of 480,000 scientists, creationism was given support by only 700 respondents, which represents about 0.146%.

So. If one approaches the fossil record from the pre-conceived notion that the earth is only thousands of years old, then a particular interpretation becomes more likely to occur. Why am I going on about all this?

From the outset of this project, I've said that I want to show people ways in which science and spirituality, physics and philosophy, can find common ground. But all of the above appears to point out one of the places where this is not really achievable: either you believe dinosaurs walked the earth millions of years ago or you think the earth was created a much shorter length of time ago than that. Isn't it clear that there's no easy meeting place where those two viewpoints can be reconciled?

Personally, I believe the universe really can be traced back to 13.7 billion years ago. But I've also said that the big bang is an illusion, and the extraordinary initial events of inflationary cosmology are better described as being a part of the process that selects a universe such as ours, though symmetry breaking, from a timeless whole that we might call the omniverse, or which Tegmark calls the Ultimate Ensemble. Still, you may be surprised that there actually is a way to find a meeting between these two viewpoints. Here's what I said in my book back in 2006:

What we’re saying, then, is where you actually began to observe becomes irrelevant. If it tickled your fancy, you could place that first observer at, for example, 6000 years ago. To do so would mean that prior to that time all potential physical realities remained possible within the wave function, and that at that point the observer turned their attention upon our universe and collapsed the quantum wave function into the reality we see around us, complete with the impression that time had actually extended out for billions of years prior to that. But why stop there? It could also be possible then that the universe didn’t actually exist until one second ago, which is when the observer turned their attention upon our universe and collapsed the probability wave function into what we now perceive as our reality, complete with a history which each of us believes we remember. Whether the observer came into existence 13.7 billion years ago or one second ago, the result will be the same: out of all the possible timelines which could have existed prior to this moment, through the act of observation we are now experiencing one of them as our own present, and our own history.

Is the above paragraph just a Rob Bryanton fantasy? No, retro-causality is now gaining acceptance within quantum physics. In Evidence for Seeing the Future, we looked at a November 2010 New Scientist article about new papers quantum computing expert Seth Lloyd and Aephram Steinberg of the University of Toronto, expressing the same idea:

But if quantum particles can't discriminate between things that affect them forward and backward in time, that means specifying a final condition can determine what happens before it. "Mathematically, there's no reason why final conditions can't be 'givens' as well and everything has to follow logically from them," Steinberg says.

This all ties together with the multiverse of possible universes, commonly known as Everett's Many Worlds. Since Everett's "Interpretation" fully agrees with the underlying quantum nature of our reality, I would say that Everett's critics are left with finding other ways to explain what physicist Raphael Bousso called the "mother of all physics problems":

"This may seem laughable, but without the multiverse our finest theories predict that empty space should contain about 10 to the power of 123 times more energy than it actually does."

- from an article published in the October 2008 edition of Seed magazine

Is there more than one parallel universe resulting from the quantum wavefunction? Is there a multiverse of other universes, perhaps ten to the power of five hundred other universes as some string theorists have predicted? This is the interpretation that makes the most sense to me, and this is what Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation also tells us.

Where does that leave us? If you don't believe in the multiverse, then my project is not likely to find much that resonates for you, and you and I are going to have to simply agree to disagree. There is a multiverse of other universes, and there are multiple pasts and futures which connect to any particular "now" you or I are observing. While I'm all for finding common meeting grounds between different belief systems, this is where I have to draw the line.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Poll 88 - Is the Sixth Dimension our Phase Space?

Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs - January Report

2012-01-30T04:17:00.000-06:00

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 . May 11 .
. June 11 . July 11 . August 11 . September 11 . October 11 .
. November 11 . December 11 . Top 100 Entries of 2011 .

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

1. Wrapping it Up in the Tenth Dimension
2. Why Only Ten?
3. New video - Poll 80 to 82 - Right Angles and Reality

4. What is Life?
5. Rob on the Peake Experience
6. New video - Poll 83 - Is Energy Not Conserved?
7. Psychedelics and Surprises
8. Connecting Zero to Ten
9. Timelessness and the Ultimate Ensemble
10. New video - Imagining the Second Dimension

And as of January 26th, 2012, 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. Is Reality an Illusion? (5)
5. The 5th-Dimensional Camera Project (4)
6. The Pencil Visualization (17)
7. An Expanding 4D Sphere (6)
8. Just Six Things: The I Ching (7)
9. Gravity and Love (8)
10. Vibrations and Fractals (11)
11 Bees and the LHC (9)
12. Light Has No Speed (10)
13. 10-10-10 Look Before You Leap (15)
14. Time Travel Paradoxes (13)
15. Roger Ebert on Quantum Reincarnation (12)
16. Changing Your Brain (14)
17. Our Universe Within the Omniverse (16)
18. Magnets and Morality (18)
19. How to Time Travel (19)
20. Creativity and the Quantum Universe (21)
21. Dancing on the Timeline (20)
22. Simultaneous Inspiration (22)
23. Complexity from Simplicity (23)
24. Monkeys Love Metallica (24)
25. What is Reality? (26)
26. Polls Archive 54 - Is Time Moving Faster? (25)

Which means that no entries are leaving our top 26 of all time list this month.

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. Also, a lot of people are enjoying discussing these ideas with me on my facebook page: facebook.com/rob.bryanton .

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Poll 87 - Many Worlds, Fossils and Dinosaurs