At Right Angles to Spacetime

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

This new video accompanies my blog entry You are a Point at the Center of Spacetime, published last August. Now I'd like to tie the ideas in this video to a blog entry that came a month later, called Light Has No Speed.

Last time, in Time's Illusions, we looked at two definitions of the word "now":

1. "Now" is what I see at this instant. This includes what I see when I look up at the stars: even though I know it took years for their light to reach me, their light is reaching me right "now".
2. "Now" is what's entangled with this very instant, and that's how the quantum world's instantaneous "spooky action at a distance" effects occur. "Now" is not what I see when I look at a star that's ten light years away, because the time it takes light to travel means that I won't be seeing what that star looks like "now" until ten years in the future.

Which of these agrees more with your definition of the word? Consider this:

A point in 3D space can, by virtue of it being of indeterminate size, be infinitesimally small (like the point we're most familiar with from geometry), or infinitely large, encompassing all of 3D space. In my book, and blog entries like The Flipbook Universe and What's Around the Corner, I've been asking people to imagine that this infinitely large "point" would be a "frame" of space (with no time), and each 3D frame is one planck length away from the next to create 4D spacetime.

A point in 4D spacetime can also be infinitesimally small (like the tip of my nose at 3 p.m. tomorrow afternoon, a very specific location in space and in time), or it can be infinitely large. What does an infinitely large point in spacetime encompass? In other words, which of the two "now"s listed above should we be thinking about here?

If I were to say that the infinitely large version of that point is the entire universe at 3 p.m. tomorrow afternoon, I would only have enlarged the space aspect: but I also need to enlarge the duration, the 4D element.

In Light Has No Speed, we looked at a presentation by physicist Peter Russell which explains that for a photon, there is no space and no time. From a photon's point of view, it travels instantaneously from a star 100 light years away to an observer such as you or I. So is our 4D point of infinite size like a photon, potentially encompassing all of our universe's timeline from its beginning to its end in one single instant?

Here's an additional clue from Mr. Russell to throw into this: for a photon, there is no non-locality, and the photon is "outside" of spacetime. So from the sounds of it our photon is not in the fourth dimension. Where is it then?

We know that non-locality is part of our universe, as it and other "spooky" quantum processes have been proven to exist beyond a doubt (we've talked about this in such entries as Our Non-Local Universe and Local Realism Bites the Dust). So is our 4D point in its largest state encompassing the "now" of non-locality? We've talked many times about how it's so easy for us to forget that the star we see in the sky is really not part of our "now" because of the time it took for the light to arrive here - looking at a star is looking back in time. The "now" of non-locality and quantum superposition allows for instantaneous correlations to occur at great distances, because our "now" is not what we see when we look into the sky.

Is it better, then, to think of our infinitely large 4D point that way: as encompassing the quantum world of instantaneous entanglement and non-locality?

Here's how I prefer to think about it - both definitions of "now" apply, because you and I are actually a point in the fifth dimension rather than the fourth. And just as trying to relegate "up/down" or "forward/backward" to a specific dimension within a 3D space makes sense only from a particular reference frame, thinking about these two versions of "now" makes more sense when we realize that our current "observation point" is in a frame of the fifth dimension, not the fourth. This is what Einstein came to believe as well: that our reality is defined at the fifth dimension, where the field equations for gravity and light are resolved.

Believing that our "now" is only in the fourth dimension leaves us thinking that the two arrows we're looking at here are not compatible. My diagram shows us how Peter Russell can say that light is not part of 4D spacetime, and light is not part of non-locality - because light is at right angles to spacetime.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next - Is Spacetime Flat or Curved?

Just Six Things

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ICmPQFNGog

Image from wikipedia, depicting "six degrees of separation"

What if there were only six vectors needed to describe every aspect of our universe in its current state, and every possible version of our universe from its very beginning to its ultimate end? Last month, in Three Becomes One, we returned to the idea that all six dimensions become a "point" -- indicating a position within the multiverse landscape -- in the seventh dimension and above with my approach to visualizing the extra dimensions, and that's why the fine structure constant and basic physical laws stay locked in and unchanging for our particular universe. Last entry, in Are Bees More Sixth-Dimensional, we took a look at a variety of ideas related to six-sided shapes, six dimensions, and the mind-blowing theory that honey bees are using sixth-dimensional geometry to communicate the positions of new food sources to each other.

Six has been an important number to this project since its inception. In fact, back in 2006 I bought the domain name justsixthings.com, because I was thinking that might be a good name for my next book. I also bought just6things.com and 6things.ca because they were available and seemed like possibly useful variations. 6things.com was taken though, and as I mentioned last time, that's the new website that I'd like to talk about in today's entry.

The six degrees of separation concept is interesting in the way it ties into our discussions of connectedness and the nature of reality, but it has other uses as well: many different projects have found ways to use this idea as their launching pad. For instance, SixDegrees.com was an early social networking site that ran from 1997 to 2001, and at the peak of its popularity it had one million registered users. Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is a trivia game that suggests no matter what actor you name, you should be able to use six steps or less to find a connection to Kevin Bacon. In 2007 Kevin Bacon started a charitable giving site called SixDegrees.org to show how this concept can be used to make people's lives better.

Here's the logo for 6things.com. You'll see that the slogan here is recursive as you go round and around the circle: "six things you like from the six things you like from the..." and so on. 6things.com is a "relevance engine". Here's what they say about the project from a recent press release:

6things you like in 6 minutes Everyday.... 6things is a relevance engine, that is a perfect solution for information overload, without losing time.

6things.com is a non-linear innovation, in that it
* Provides 6things you like from 6,844,647 things
* Eliminates the need to maintain yet another account
* Improves signal-to-noise ratio by deducing your 'micro-interests'
* Reduces wasted time by kicking you off in 6 minutes

Even if the user did not share enough content, no worries. Simply press on one of the 6 Buttons up on top, that captures your interest.

Passively discover curators with similar taste, without actively searching for them. Our Algorithms computes the 'taste distance' between you and others based on 'micro-interests'.

Passively consume real-time content that is your current object of attention, without actively searching for 6,844,647 things. Our Machine Learning Algorithm extracts your 'micro-interests' from your shared content.

You don't have to remember yet another password or have to signup. The product can be accessed from http://www.6things.com

Here's three twitter feeds for you: 6things (the project's feed), vasusrini (creator of the project), and samdida (co-creator and designer). I've not heard the term "relevance engine" before, but I do like the concept. Stumbleupon, for instance, could be thought of as a user-driven relevance engine, and that service continues to be one of the most popular ways for people to find my 11-minute animation about the ten dimensions. Likewise, I've talked a number of times about web 3.0 pioneer Nova Spivack and his brainchild twine.com, which uses a combination of user recommendations and the semantic web to filter out the signal from the noise for people trying to deal with The Stream. "The Stream" is what Mr. Spivack calls the oncoming deluge of information we're all having to deal with more and more each day.

In the early months of this blog (back in 2007) I was using the phrase "conceptual framing" a lot, which relates to these discussions. We tend to think in frames, we don't do so well imagining an atom and a galaxy at the same time, but if we take ideas one step at a time, one frame of reference connected to the next, we find it easier to process. Will 6things.com achieve its goal of providing relevant new links in an extremely timely manner? The project is just in beta right now, but it seems like a great idea and I look forward to watching them grow.

Here are six other past blogs where I've talked about the "Just Six Things" concept and the importance of the number six:

Just Six Things: The I Ching
E8 and the Semantic Web
What's Around the Corner?
The Statistical Universe
Alien Mathematics
Time in 3 Dimensions

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Love and Gravity

Polls Archive 29 - Do Electrons Have No Size?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxfyCiieubE
Poll 29 - "An electron is a point-like particle. This means, just like the "point" we start the tenth dimension visualization with, an electron is 'of no size, no dimension'." Poll ended December 16 2008. 41% agreed while 58% disagreed.

This poll question relates to some blog entries that were published around the same time: "We Start With a Point", "A Point Within the Omniverse", and "Elvis and the Electrons".

Here's a link to the wikipedia article on electrons. As it says in the article: "Electrons are believed to be point particles with no apparent substructure. They are identical particles that belong to the first generation of the lepton particle family."

So: all electrons are identical, and all electrons are point particles. Here's the first couple of sentences from the wikipedia article on point particles:

"A point particle (or point-like particle, often spelled pointlike particle) is an idealized object heavily used in physics. Its defining feature is that it lacks spatial extension: being zero-dimensional, it does not take up space."

Thinking of an electron as having no size and being zero-dimensional, then, is the correct approach as far as modern physics is concerned. And yet, conceiving of an electron in those terms is not an easy thing for us to wrap our heads around, as 58% of the people responding to this poll showed us.

"We Start With a Point"
My animation, which has now been seen by millions of people around the world, starts with these five words: "we start with a point". Building one idea upon another, we end up with a way to visualize all aspects of reality as contained within the ten dimensions, a mind-blowing journey that makes people want to watch this animation over and over again. When author David Jay Brown called my book "brilliantly conceived and mind-stretching", he was celebrating the large cloud of ideas that spring from the starting point of this way of visualizing reality. Here in this blog, there are a great many tangents that we've explored, all of them stemming from the point of indeterminate size that the original animation both begins and ends with.

Envisioning that the entire universe really contains only one electron, then (a fanciful idea from celebrated physicist Richard Feynman which we discussed most recently in Poll 27) requires us to stretch our minds even further. And, as we just discussed in Poll 28, stacking on top of that the idea that our perceived reality is being created through the pattern-recognition powers of our minds builds a conceptual tower which some are still not willing to climb!

To those of you who are not ready to embrace the more "out there" notions that this project sometimes gets into, I'm fine with that. At the core of these discussions, though, is what I believe to be an essential truth about the nature of reality, and as each of us come with our pre-conceived notions and our own experiences which frame our worldview, this project is about ways of showing how we are all connected together: in a very real way, we are like Feynman's single electron, existing simultaneously within a reference frame which is completely outside of time, outside of space. Think of this: the spark within each of us that some call consciousness, and some call "soul", or "spirit", is like a point-like particle when perceived within each "frame" of space-time, but it's also part of a much larger wave function which exists across timelessness. As I've said before: "you are the point".

To finish, here's my song "Connections", which ties these ideas together in its own way.

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=J25WhT8WZQ4

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Polls Archive 30 - Do you believe in ghosts?

Google Suggestions Time Capsule - 2nd Quarter 08

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgvy2GvJ7OQ


Happy second anniversary! My animation and website went live the end of June 2006, and vaulted to popularity a few days later on July 3rd: first as a result of digg, then due to stumbleupon, and on out through a continually widening word of mouth from one site to another throughout the world. This project has continued its popularity for two years now, still averaging 2 million hits a month at the main website. Why? I believe it's because now, more than ever, people are becoming interested in thinking about those big picture ideas of how everything fits together.


Back at the beginning of this year, I became interested in keeping track of the top Suggestions that Google makes when you type a single letter of the alphabet into the search windows incorporated into certain browsers, and how those suggestions change over time, and how much we might be able to draw from this as a record of the memes that rise and fall in our society over time. The original post is here, and although the post was created in January I have continued to update that entry on a weekly basis since then. The graphic above is my attempt to represent those results in a single visual (hopefully you've be able to read most of this and use it as a companion to the original post), and a post that talks about the poll question that was started around the same time relating to Google is here.

I've talked before (in my entry Tens, Google and the Expanding Universe) about Google's battle with spammers and scammers trying to vault their particular site to the top of Google's search results, which is part of the feedback loop that becomes Google's awesome responsibility: because once something becomes a top search result, it is more likely to stay there for a while. Three months ago in my blog entry Googling in the Tenth Dimension I listed some of the hundreds of words and phrases you can type into Google and have pages related to my project come up as the number one search result. As I said at the time, the continually changing parameters Google uses to organize its results will no doubt have made some of the search terms I provided back then to be pushed further down in the search results by now, and some other new ones will, I presume, have risen to the top.

Take a look at my diagram above. Considering how often Google shuffles their other search results, I have to admit I'm surprised at how many of the single letter search results did not change over the six months I've been tracking this information. Still, as a time capsule, this project will be a useful reference to look back upon in years to come... but it does look like some of the single letter search results - particularly those ones shown in red in the above graphic - are not going to be changing any time soon. Oh well, this just pulls us back out to that all-important big picture thinking - how many years will it take for some of the red items above to be toppled? Only time will tell.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton
Next: What Would a Flatlander Really See?

Just Ten Things

Here's the current results from the previous poll, gang: 35% say I'm talking about physics stuff, 21% say this is about spirituality, and at almost half, 42% say it's both. Fantastic! This is the important thing to keep in mind: even though we're all talking about the same thing, each of us has their unique point of view, and in some cases that point of view has been designed to disallow the existence of other conflicting points of view. So what? We've known that all along, that's the way life is.

So here we are in the fifth dimension (this is a fact physicists have known about since Kaluza proved it in 1919, but for some reason the established media have not been inclined to promote this information: more about the "conspiracy theories" meme in a bit). We are being drawn forward by the future towards absolute zero: not the sad place where everything becomes meaningless, but rather the place where all the positive and negative spins of our probability-space world reassemble back into one, and everything fits together.

Why is the fifth dimension such a dangerous idea? Because there are moral questions that have to be answered. If you are going to admit that all we really are is a sea of information (which many people on this planet like to think of as the Mind of God), chosen from the unobserved reality that quantum mechanics calls indeterminacy, then there are moral questions that have to be answered. Selfish memes and selfish genes point the way for us to see how the patterns that connect us from the beginning to the end of our universe have to include each of us taking some personal responsibility for the creation of good within the world in which we live.

Which leads to the question of whether science preferring to suppress anything to do with spirituality might have more to do with the funding that comes from an old boys network who remain right where they are as long as the rest of the planet doesn't find out what they've been up to and how easy it would have been to stop them if we had only known. As the global village becomes aware of itself, we become a more enlightened and caring world, and that's what the web is starting to do for us all right this very moment in spacetime.

Is it a good thing that the Divas currently in trouble (Lohan, Spears, Hilton etc.) are being monitored so closely that we could actually save their lives instead of letting them self-destruct as some of their predecessors before them did? This is one of the ways that we can see the more enlightened viewpoint is steadily gaining ground. By the time we realize that we are all just different aspects of the same quantum observer, we see how we could be part of the same recurring patterns, created by the opposing organizing forces of symmetry and order, as explained so well by Gevin Giorbran, over at EverythingForever.com.

Still, let's not be mistaken here. There are a growing number of scientists who are seeing parts of the same image I portray at Imagining the Tenth Dimension: everything fits together at zero. Zero is the mind of God viewed in its entirety: no wonder zero has had such a rough ride down through the millenia! The idea that everything ends at an Omega point that is "outside the system" relates to what Gödel was talking about with his incompleteness theorems. Within that omega, gravity determines the amount of grouping, and the speed of light's planck length defines the framing chosen from probability space that defines our particular universe, with its unchanging gravity and its restrictions against faster-than-light travel.

Gravity, then, can easily be thought of as the probability of something continuing to be here an instant from now, based upon the sum over histories paths that got that object to where it is right now. Gevin suggests that at the quantum realm this is also a form of inertia: the more locked in by the overall consensual reality a particular pattern is, the harder it is for free will to make a difference to it. That's why no amount of free will can change the force of gravity, and the multiverse of possibilities that surround us in the fifth dimension is an easy way for us to imagine not just the "bent 4D spacetime" of gravity, but the hidden forces of dark matter as well.

Popular culture and philosophy/spirituality show us the ways that a "big picture" enlightened view is completely compatible with cosmology and quantum mechanics: but that has more to do with the Joseph-Campbell-sized simple truths that everyone knows, which leads some people to belittle the worth of those ideas. Once we understand that ideas are just a part of meme-space, which is just as real as the physical space we see around us right now, we see how easy it is to make a change to some things that up to now may have seemed insurmountable. And you see the ways in which we're all connected together and are co-operating with each other, and the ways that some of us think they disagree with the consensual reality they're in when in the really big picture they couldn't possibly disagree. After all, according to my framework for discussion, we're all just a point in the seventh dimension.

Here's a link to an upcoming article from next week's issue of Newsweek about exciting new experiments showing how the future really can influence the present. The secret of life is about being interested in what happens next. Once you understand that reality and information are interchangeable, you understand what the ancient mystics have known all along: time is an illusion, and everything fits together at zero. Terence McKenna definitely got it right.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

The Tenth Dimension Goes Live

Here's something new we're trying now: schedule permitting, every day at 10 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time (which is 4 p.m. CST my time), I am talking live to people from around the world about the Imagining the Tenth Dimension project.

The live chat in its full form can be found at www.tenthdimension.com/chat. A small part of the room is below. As you'll see, this includes a "Copy Chatroom" button that lets you grab a piece of code, so that anyone who wants to can paste this part of the chatroom into their own website.

One of the nice things about this window, which comes from the good folks at meebo, is any YouTube, Google Video, or Metacafe movie can be shared without leaving the chat window, plus links to Flickr photo sets. Any url link can also be shared, and and any of these links to media and websites become thumbnails that remain after visitors leave the site.

Within the formatting of my blog, the video window is not being shown here, but a text-only chat sometimes has its uses as well.

Welcome to the Tenth Dimension. Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

The Wii World

Our world is getting smaller: in other words, new technology like the Wii is making our world more wee (sorry for making the obvious pun). Does getting everybody in the world connected together through technology smack of socialism? Like most things, that depends upon your point of view.

I live in the province of Saskatchewan, Canada. Saskatchewan is a strange place: first left-wing socialist government in North America, birthplace of medicare, pioneers in fibreoptics, first adopters of on-demand hi-def TV over phone lines. Here in Saskatchewan, our province has now launched government-sponsored free wireless internet access in the four largest cities.

A few months ago in this blog, I mentioned the ideal interface for anything should be able to be boiled down to just two choices: a concept I deal with in my book in the chapter "The Binary Viewpoint". In Gevin Giorbran's Learning to See Timelessness, we see a way to imagine that everything is the result of two opposing forces of order, grouping and symmetry. And in my book, we talk about the biggest-picture-of-all multiverse, and how our own universe could be summed up as being a slice from that multiverse. If reality and information are two sides of the same coin (as quantum mechanics tells us), then any instant in spacetime should be able to summed up by that binary point of view: these are things it is, these are the things it isn't.

The July 07 issue of Scientific American has a great article by neurobiologist Joe Z. Tsien about new research showing how the brain encodes memory. By tracking the firing of hundreds of neurons simultaneously, his team has reached the conclusion that we use a hierchical pyramid of associations spread across "cliques" of neurons to encode specific memories. That pyramid, they say, has a binary element to it: so all memories about moments we almost died would be part of a certain neuron clique, and then memories where we almost died while swimming would be in a subset of that clique, while memories where we almost died in a car accident would be part of a different subset of that same clique, and so on.

To quote Mr. Tsien from the article:

"This combinatorial, hierchical approach to memory formation provides a way for the brain to generate an almost unlimited number of unique network-level patterns for representing the infinite number of experiences that an organism might encounter during life--similar to the way that the four 'letter'or nucleotides that up DNA moecules can be comined in a virtually unlimited number of patterns..."

Mr. Tsien ends the article on a speculative note:

"For me, our discoveries raise many interesting--and unnerving--philosophical possibilities. If all our memories, emotions, knowledge and imagination can be translated into 1s and 0s, who knows what that would mean for who we are and how we will operate in the future. Could it be the 5,000 years from now, we will be able to download our minds onto computers, travel to distant worlds and live forever in the network?"

Once again, I am struck by the idea that science and philosophy are moving to a central meeting point: the above paragraph sounds very similar to the ideas I have been promoting, but the fact that it comes from a respected member of the scientific community adds a different kind of weight to the discussion. As I explain in my book, what we think of as a soul or an individual's unique consciousness can also be thought of as a hierarchy of patterns, moving across space and time.

Coincidentally, that same issue of Scientific American has an article on new technologies that will make high speed wireless communication more and more ubiquitous, allowing high data-rate communication to be achieved through the lights in a room or the power lines into a building. This is part of an inexorable process we have been moving towards for decades now. Some day soon, no matter where you are in the world, there will be a "universal dial tone" at your disposal. In the most remote and uninhabited parts of the world, the connection might be to only a simple speech-to-text or voice-to-voice interface, but the idea of anybody in the planet having cheap and easy access to electronic communcation, whether that just be a chance to talk to a friend, or when needed, an emergency 911 operator, will help to show us how connected we are in other ways that have nothing to do with electronics or technology.

For me, one of the most exciting things about Nintendo's Wii console is not just its implications as a virtual reality tool for the home, but the way it has the potential to draw people together, allowing them to see how their own consensual reality differs from and is the same as others on the planet, and how much/how little that matters. What do I mean by that? This inexpensive box includes a service called the "Everybody Votes Channel". Anyone with an internet-connected Wii can vote on a question, and predict what they think the most common answer is going to be. So, for instance, a recent worldwide poll asked this simple question: "Do you have dreams for the future?" (a topic near and dear to my heart as readers of this blog and my book will know). Brazil, Mexico, and Peru came in with the highest percentage of "Yes" answers to this question (up around the 95% mark), the US, Denmark, and Canada came in some place near the middle of the pack (still with a fairly high percentage of yes answers). Interestingly, Gemany, Japan, and Austria came in with the lowest number of Yes answers, some place around 66%. The worldwide average for this poll came in at 80.3% yes answers, 19.7% for no.

In the connected world of blogging, commenting, and tagging, there is an astonishing clamor of people furiously typing away, wanting to be heard, wanting to feel connected. Finding ways to automatically sort out what the consensus points are that can be boiled down from that tidal wave is one of our most important goals. The Wii's Everybody Votes system shows us a glimpse of where we want to end up: inexpensive access to a worldwide system, where people can express their innermost beliefs, and see how much we all really have in common with each other, and whether the parts that any one of us don't have in common with others really matters that much in the big picture.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

PS: As a new experiment, we have a live chat window at tenth dimension: the link is at www.tenthdimension.com/chat . Schedule permitting, I will be logged in to the live chat window some time every day for anyone interested in talking about the project. Of course, everyone is welcome to go to this chat window any time and share video or URL links with each other, as part of the ongoing discussion about the nature of reality.

What do you want to change?

Last blog ended with the big question: what do you want to change?

One of the big ideas Imagining the Tenth Dimension has been pushing is memes. This term, introduced to us by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, refers to ideas and beliefs that propogate themselves across time and space in much the same way that our genes have done so since the beginning of life on this planet. I have been arguing that memes (rhymes with "teams") are more than just an intellectual concept. If, as Anton Zeilinger, professor of physics at the University of Vienna has been quoted to say, "quantum physics requires us to abandon the distinction between information and reality", then memes are just another way of looking at the information that creates the multiverse from which our universe is a slice.

As the social networking world of Web 2.0 starts to become more and more integrated and cross-connected, we are finding ways to instantaneously track the rising and falling of memes which shape our world. This is a paradigm shift which seems completely natural to the under twenty-fives of the western world, who have spent all of their lives with computers in their homes, and were part of BBS communities long before the internet rose to prominence. This generation are comfortable with a feeling of inter-connectedness through Web 2.0 which the baby boomers (of which I am one) can only begin to dream. How much longer will it take before this connection to people of similar interests around the world finally corrects the free-fall in under-30 voter turnout we have been seeing for the last thirty years? That change is already beginning.

All around the world, people who felt powerless are starting to realize that they have more control of their futures than the highly-concentrated power structures of the twentieth century had taught them to believe. As people wake up, the clamor for the latest football to the groin video on YouTube is gradually being joined by a connected world with serious concerns about the future of this planet. As these memes start to become more dominant, we can see how they are like any other waveform in the information that creates our reality - resonance and entrainment starts to kick in, and tipping points that change our consensual reality become more and more possible.

In the physical world, books like Steven Strogatz's "Sync : the Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order" have shown us how vibrational patterns can be transmitted across rooms, causing pendulum clocks to fall in synchronization with each other, or across fields and valleys, causing huge swarms of fireflies to blink off and on in unison. New developments such as WiTricity are showing how resonance can be used to induce an electric impulse without wires, giving us hope for electronic devices that will some day charge themselves.

In the world of ideas spreading across the internet, new initiatives are springing up daily. Sites like edge.org have done much to bring new intellectual explorations to the forefront, including books like "What We Believe but Cannot Prove". John Ondrasik (of Five for Fighting fame) has created a site called "What Kind of World Do You Want" which encourages people to post videos about their hopes and dreams, and promises to donate money to one of six charities as people watch these videos. Microsoft is promoting their "I'm Making a Difference" campaign, which donates money every time people registered with the program use Windows Messenger. The Fire the Grid project goes even further, inviting people around the world to meditate on peace and healing for the planet at a certain time on July 17th... could the initiative which moves our world into a new phase really be that close?

Let's ask ourselves this: what stands in the way of us as a planet reaching a tipping point, a chaos-theory-style bifurcation, where enough people can desire a specific change that our consensual reality is affected through resonance and entrainment? Projects like Julius Popp's Bit.Fall (which tracks common words from the internet and puts them into visually stunning computer controlled waterfalls), We Feel Fine (which track the emotional words that bloggers use associated with the word "feel" and creates fascinating real time animations of how, where and when these words are being used) are pointing the way to the future of cloud tagging. Newly popular YouTube videos from younger contributors, like "Stand Up For World Peace" are showing how simple ideas can be imaginatively presented (Norman McLaren style in this case) and create a huge amount of conversation and response in the Web 2.0 world. And the video "Prometeus - The Media Revolution" gives us a plausible scenario for how things could develop over the next few decades.

I believe that Imagining the Tenth Dimension has the potential to be part of that change. Almost two million people have visited the tenth dimension website and seen my new way of imagining reality, plus the hundreds of thousands more who have seen copies of the video at revver, youtube, and so on. I have been hearing from people all over the world who are excited about its implications. A few video bloggers (like this one and this one) have posted their thoughts on YouTube. A tenth dimension fan from Greece has translated the voiceover into Greek subtitles and posted the result at Google Video. The book has been sold in dozens of countries around the world, and discussions are now beginning for translation of the book into other languages. As we approach the first anniversary of the launch of the tenth dimension website, the tenth dimension meme shows no sign of slowing down, and for that I am very grateful.

Enjoying the journey,

Rob

PS - here, just for fun, are some more videos of some of the songs from the tenth dimension project.

Memes / Tag Clouds / Spimes

Yesterday, John Brownlee, in his Wired.com blog “Table of Malcontents” posted a lovely recommendation for the tenth dimension website:

John's blog entry


As I said to John in the comments to his blog entry, Imagining the Tenth Dimension is a hobby project for me, but it has been an awe-inspiring experience to see the worldwide audience that has sprung up for the book and the website purely from word of mouth, and transmission of ideas through the web.

As I am always quick to point out, my "way of imagining" is not the accepted explanation for string theory, but it has gotten a lot of positive responses from people who like it as a new framework for discussion. In a previous post, "Time as a Spatial Dimension", I discuss some of my reasoning behind this new way of thinking about time and space.

This project is a creative exploration. It includes 26 songs about the nature of reality which I am now in the process of recording, the first six of which can be heard from the tenthdimension website at this time. I am interested in the links between this way of thinking about time and space, and how it gives us a tangible way to imagine the multiverse. It also ties in with spimes/tag clouds/memes, the granularity of time as predicted by loop quantum gravity, Minsky's Society of Mind, and many other topics from science/metaphysics/philosophy which are being discussed at the tenthdimension forum.

Our reality, I believe, has always been what the new tools we have before us are finally allowing us to see so clearly - that clouds of ideas/memes are navigating through space and time, rising, competing, and falling, and contributing to the consensual reality that we all share. The "long undulating snake" from the animation, then, would be a "spime": an object which can be mapped and tracked over space and time. Bruce Sterling's fascinating speech from the 2006 O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (which can be heard here is a very useful touchstone for introducing us to the ramifications of this way of thinking.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton


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YouTube and Conceptual Framing

You can listen to this file right now using this embedded player. This mp3 is available for download from archive.org under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike license - click here to download the file

We have now posted the 11 minute video for Imagining the Tenth Dimension up on YouTube: it's in two parts. Part 2's very first comment was a phrase similar to ones that I've read a lot about Imagining the Tenth Dimension in the last six months: "my mind is officially blown" (thanks for the comment, WeeklyTubeShow). By the way, the video also continues to be available in its continuously running 11 minute version, for viewing, embedding or download at revver.com.

One of the things that has made this animation so popular, I believe, is that it deals with a wide-ranging amount of conceptual information in the way that the mind is best able to deal with it: one layer (or frame) at a time. Up until a year or two ago there was a wonderful show in the Rose Center’s Hayden Planetarium at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, called “Passport to the Universe”. Narrated by Tom Hanks, it was a highly effective visual journey which took the viewer through one order of magnitude leap after another, from the earth to the solar system, to our galaxy, to our local group and then our local supercluster of galaxies, and on out to the hundred billion galaxies and seventy sextillion stars (that’s 7 followed by 22 zeroes!) currently believed to make up our observable universe.

The resulting journey was mind blowing, and intellectually stimulating. By connecting from one layer to another, we were able to track through an idea that is potentially completely overwhelming, simply by presenting the information in a way that allowed us a chance to digest it. This is absolutely necessary, because our monkey minds would find it impossible to simultaneously imagine the size of an atom, along with the size of the earth, along with the size of the local supercluster, and so on: we simply aren't wired that way.

With the amount of information the internet places before us, the result is similarly overwhelming. Tagclouds and other conceptual framing tools show promise, but the need for a graphic interface that allows us to mine complex data in a way that lets us appreciate the big picture but still drill into the fine detail is something for which I can hardly wait.

Have you seen this video?

This is Jeff Han at the TED conference, demonstrating a dramatic visualization tool that shows how we will deal with graphics and data mining in the future. As you watch this, forget for a moment that this screen of the future runs the risk of becoming a greasy haze as we paw away at the screen: that is a minor detail, and if you can achieve this by touching the screen, then a tool that allows you to grab the air in the front of the screen is just one step beyond. The important thing, I believe, is that this gives us back what our motor-sensory systems have been yearning for - the ability to reach out and grab something. Watching Jeff "pinch" a place on the screen to draw that part closer, or placing two fingers on the screen to define the pivot point as he examines a 3D map, makes me want to throw my mouse in the garbage right now.

A "Google Universe" tool, then, that allowed you to quickly zoom in and out through the journey from atom to solar system to the known universe and back again would be a profound educational tool. Likewise, a flickr interface that allowed you to quickly zoom in on a tag, narrowing your choices from cateogory to subcategory, and down to the picture you are looking for cries out for an interface where you are using natural physical gestures to pinch and pull at the data you are traversing.

And finally, back to the tenth dimension. A physical interface that allowed you to take the tenth dimension journey using an interface like the one Jeff Han is demonstrating would be equally illuminating: defining your most basic laws as you descend from the ninth through the seventh dimension, picking the point in the seventh dimension that represents our universe and all of its timelines, then zooming in to explore the sixth dimension and all the timelines that could have occurred up to now that didn't, stepping down to all of the fifth dimensional choices currently available but not taken, and down to the time and space that we see as our universe would be a thrilling journey. Then, zooming back out to the seventh dimension and above, and re-entering at some other point to explore the expressions of time and space that that unique "other-different-initial-conditions" universe could hold, with expressions from the sixth dimension and down to the first that are just as real but completely inaccessible to our own, I believe we would have a tool that allows people to imagine how something as daunting as a "multiverse of universes" could actually exist.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob