Vibrations and Energy

Last blog I explored one of the key ideas behind quantum physics: "Information Equals Reality". As I often do, I started with that basic hard science fact and then ran with it far past the edges of where most mainstream scientists would be comfortable, taking it through the ideas of Richard Dawkins and on out into the metaphysical fringe. Why do I keep doing that? Why do I suggest that there should ever be any links between reality as depicted by mainstream science and, for instance, ancient philosophy? Well, as I often say, I'm not a physicist and I'm not pretending to be one: as long as fans of the tenth dimension project understand that we're exploring ideas that are beyond the periphery of the mainstream, just for the joy of playing with ideas, then speaking personally I see nothing wrong with getting creative.

Persons who criticize this project because it's not about what is currently being taught in mainstream physics, then, are totally missing the point. As it says on the back of my book, this is "a mind-expanding exercise that could change the way you view this incredible universe in which we live". You might as well walk into your favorite bookstore and level the same criticism at almost every book in the place - "these books are not about mainstream physics, they don't claim to be about mainstream physics, so I'm going to criticize them because they're not about mainstream physics!" - what a strange line of reasoning to pursue.

Now, here's a link to a serious physics blog called "The Reference Frame", which showed its readers my introductory animation last week. The blog is hosted by Luboš Motl from the Czech Republic, and he describes his blog this way: "The most important events in our and your superstringy Universe as seen from a conservative physicist's viewpoint".

I'm grateful to Luboš for giving his serious physics readers a chance to see and comment on my fanciful way of imagining the dimensions, and for his generosity in calling it a "fun clip". The comments were plentiful, some from those who appreciated my intentions, but a number were critical. Let me quote from the very first comment, posted by "Bee":

I've seen that before... Well, I guess it depicts problems one runs into with higher dimensional mind maps :) Either way, if I recall the ads on the website correctly it was a pseudo-scientific explanation of 'how you can influence your future and be happy ever after', obviously only if you buy this book, or purchase this CD or whatever. This is in a certain sense the saddest outcome of scientific research I can imagine. Being abused to sell crap.

Here is a note I posted there, not specifically in response to Bee's comment above, but in recognition that she set the tone for those comments that were the most negatively disposed:

Hi, I'm the guy who created this video. I have always been careful to say that my video is not the accepted explanation for string theory (as per the text at the end of the animation). Also, if you visit the tenth dimension website you will easily find a "Preamble" and a "Forum" link where I immediately make it clear what the intent of this project is: a discussion of a new set of ideas, some of which are connected to mainstream physics and some of which are connected to philosophy, and many of which attempt to straddle both worlds.
My book is called "Imagining" the Tenth Dimension, subtitled "A New Way of Thinking" About Time and Space, and the description at online bookstores says "not about mainstream physics": I really don't know how I could make this more clear.
Am I one of those crazy people who think that there is ultimately going to be an explanation for the universe that encompasses the multiverse, string theory, quantum mechanics, memes, ancient philosophy, and the "observer" role our consciousness plays in all this? Yup, that's me. But I'm not a physicist, I'm a composer, and this project for me started as a set of 26 songs I had written about my intuitions as to how this all fits together. The booklet I started to write to accompany the CD became the popular book my website is promoting.
I welcome all the comments above from people who have criticisms of my ideas and the way I present them: because that's what I'm interested in, the discussion of ideas. My project does seem to have struck some sort of chord with people, as the tenth dimension website continues to attract an average of over 1.7 million hits per month...

Meanwhile, I have my own hopes that the many science-curious kids and teens out there who watch my video and find it fascinating will find they like thinking about those "really big picture" ideas, and follow the links I regularly provide to books by the mainstream experts from cosmology and quantum mechanics on these topics.

I do find Bee's comment about this being "a pseudo-scientific explanation of 'how you can influence your future and be happy ever after'" to be interesting: pseudo-scientific is fair enough, since I'm not a scientist and I'm presenting new ideas, but there's actually very little of what she calls "happy ever after" talk in this blog, in my book, or on the tenth dimension website. Nonetheless, I find it hard to imagine how anyone can argue with simple statements like "attitude affects outcome". Is it really pseudo-scientific to say that a negative/depressed mindset causes people to choose less favorable paths for themselves, and a positive outlook causes people to make more optimistic choices? What is so dangerous about expressing simple and self-evident ideas like these? Still... if, as David Deutsch's team at Oxford have now proven, the branching possibilities of choice, chance, and circumstance can be equated with the wave functions of quantum mechanics, then all I am suggesting here is that for each of us our choices are selected from the available probability space, which I believe is an obvious outcome of the Deutsch team's proof.

Last blog I talked about the energy/matter dichotomy, and how the quantum mechanics idea of "Information Equals Reality" allows us to see not just how great art and music can be plugged into this way of imagining, but also how metaphysical ideas like auras and vibrations could be seen as patterns within the Information that is ultimately our reality. My song "Positive Vibes" takes that pseudo-scientific hippy-dippy idea and frames it within the context of my way of imagining the dimensions.




A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZp1KYboC3Q

POSITIVE VIBES
words and music (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

Positive vibes, I will be sending
Positive vibes your way
Sure can’t hurt, and it just might help
To send you positive vibes - every day

And isn’t it a mystery
How it all goes together
Looking back through history
Have you ever wondered whether
When a country falls
Or somebody succeeds
What was causin it all
Was it just their deeds?
Or was there something more in behind?

Positive vibes, I will be sending
Positive vibes your way
Sure can’t hurt, and it just might help
To send you positive vibes - every day

Not tryin to get all mystical
But I’ve always had a suspicion
That there’s more than just the physical
Hidden in the composition
Of the things we do
What we think and feel
I believe it’s true
I believe it’s real
That we can help to make things all right

With positive vibes, I will be sending
Positive vibes your way
Sure can’t hurt, and it just might help
To send you positive vibes - every day

There are things that we can never know
There are places we can never go
There are things we have to just believe
And this is what works for me:

Positive vibes, I will be sending
Positive vibes your way
Sure can’t hurt, and it just might help
To send you positive vibes - every day


Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Thankful 2

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvROwf2KeOg

Now that over two million unique visitors have been to the Tenth Dimension website, I'd like to pause for a moment and look at where we're at.

Fans of the original flash animation will be pleased to know that we have now opened a "Digital Items Store", where a self-contained flash (versions for PC and for Mac), plus a high resolution quicktime can now be downloaded. In addition, an eBook file of the revised second edition of my book plus various versions of some of the songs attached to this project are also available there.

I'm thankful to all of the fans of this project who continue to share their ideas at the tenth dimension forum. I'm thankful to people like John Daniels Riveros who have embraced the interactive chat broadcasts we're doing with unbounded enthusiasm. I'm also thankful for all the critics: it's important that people understand that when my book is called "Imagining the Tenth Dimension", subtitled "a new way of thinking about time and space", and its brief description at online bookstores like Amazon includes the phrase "not about mainstream physics", those are important bits of information. But do I think it's fair then, that online reviewers of the book are allowed to give my book a thumbs down because it's not about mainstream physics? To the extent that they feel they were misled about the content, that's fair... but buying a book without reading its description and then complaining when the content is not what you expected does seem somewhat misguided to me. Oh well... there are also many people who have posted positive reviews of the book as well, and this project certainly does seem to be one of those that elicits a strong response, whether that be negative or positive.

The online listing for my book ends with this sentence: "Imagining the Tenth Dimension is a mind-expanding exercise that could change the way you view this incredible universe in which we live." What does this mean? It means that the implications of what we begin exploring in the eleven minute animation are expanded in a large number of directions throughout the book's eleven chapters. Ultimately, what we are trying to find here is a way to tie together disparate schools of thought - not just from cosmology, from quantum mechanics, and from the probability space of the multiverse - but also from philosophy, spirituality and ancient mysticism. For anyone who believes in only one of those ways of looking at the world, my quest for finding the unity behind all of these ideas may indeed seem foolish.

But I am thankful for all of the encouragement I have received from people around the world (and the very positive review of my book in What Is Enlightenment? magazine comes to mind here), who believe that I just may be on to something... and that's pretty darn cool.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton


THANKFUL
words and music (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

In this improbable world
In this impossible life
At the end of infinite happenstance
Leading back to the big bang

I am thankful for what I have
I am thankful for what I’ve been given
I am thankful for those I love
And for this life I’m livin

And in the multitude of paths
That could have ended before now
I am grateful for the unseen hand
Which led us here somehow

I am thankful for what I have
I am thankful for what I’ve been given
I am thankful for those I love
And for this life I’m livin

The universe is beautiful
More complex than we can believe
And praisable for what it holds within
A tapestry of threads
That each of us must weave
From each and every moment that we’re in

In this improbable world
In this impossible life
At the end of infinite coincidence
Leading back to the big bang

I am thankful for what I have
I am thankful for what I’ve been given
I am thankful for those I love
And for this life I’m livin

Living in the Fifth Dimension

We live in the fifth dimension. Kaluza proved it way back in 1919, and Einstein eventually agreed: the field equations proposed by Einstein and Maxwell for gravity and light can be united if they are calculated in the fifth dimension. But what does that mean to us? And why do most of us continue to believe that our universe exists within four rather than five dimensions?

Quantum mechanics tells us that the building blocks that create our reality are wavefunctions being observed in certain states. At the quantum level, these particles can exist simultaneously in multiple states, but by the time we view our physical reality we are only witnessing one state or another. What causes the dividing line between the strange world of quantum physics and our observed physical reality? This has been one of the great mysteries of the past one hundred years.

As Richard Feynman demonstrated, at any moment in time there is always a probability space that shows what the most likely paths are for how a subatomic particle got to its current position, and where it is most likely headed from here.

What happens if we imagine that the probability space of the quantum world exists within the fifth dimension? If we believe that those other possible states for all of the particles in our universe do actually exist, then we can see how the act of observation collapses the indeterminate state of those particles within the fifth dimension into the specific fourth dimensional line that we perceive ourselves to be on. And if we believe, as many physicists have proposed, that time really is an illusion, then we have a way to imagine how the line of time that we are moving on right now is really just a cross-section out of a multiverse of possible quantum states which continue to exist, but which are decoherent and therefore inaccessible to our own physical reality.

But quantum mechanics goes even further than that. In his book “Programming the Universe”, quantum computer scientist Seth Lloyd shows us how reality and information are interchangeable at the quantum level, and that the big bang can be thought of as the very first binary yes/no of the quantum computer that is our universe and the multiverse it is within. So now let’s take that idea and superimpose it on our fifth-dimensional probability space.

Let’s start with the indeterminate sea of quantum information which exists prior to (or more correctly, "outside of") the big bang – all possible states for all possible particles existing simultaneously within timelessness. Even though this fabric contains the potential for every possible universe within it, Seth Lloyd points out that it would take zero bits to describe. Now, let’s imagine the big bang – the longest lowest wavefunction that joins the beginning of our universe to the end of our universe across the probability space within timelessness. What appears to be a multi-dimensional field of vibrations, though, can also be seen as a binary push/pull, with our fifth-dimensional node always being the dividing point between what is currently possible and what is inaccessible from within our specific observed universe. In this way, we can see how the dimensions above the fifth are unavailable to us because they are part of the binary push away from our reality, while the dimensions below are part of the push back towards the beginning, which from our vantage point appears to be the big bang.

Finally, consider this. If we bend the fabric of a particular dimension, it takes on aspects of the dimension above. Bend a one-dimensional line and it takes on a two-dimensional aspect. Bend a two dimensional plane and it takes on a three-dimensional aspect. What happens if we are imagining Einstein's image of gravity causing a bending of fourth-dimensional spacetime? Aren't we imagining that our fourth-dimensional spacetime is taking on a fifth-dimensional aspect through that bending? Since Kaluza, Einstein, and later Kaluza-Klein all agreed on our existence within the fifth dimension, I would propose that is exactly what Einstein was trying to get us to imagine. I would also propose that the fifth dimension is where the probability space of the quantum wavefunction comes from, since it gives us a way to see how multiple simultaneous branches (or quantum wavestates) could be accessible from our fourth dimensional spacetime.

We live in the fifth dimension.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

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

Physics or Philosophy?

That's this week's poll question, folks: "Is Imagining the Tenth Dimension about Physics or Philosophy? Or both?".

"Or neither?", some might suggest, should be the fourth answer, but I would argue that quantum mechanics tells us that's the same thing as "both". The simultaneous yes/no that we spring from in the "outside the system" realm of indeterminacy may sound like it has a zen-like yin/yang to it, but it can also be described thusly: "both the yes and no occur, and we have no way to know this information any more than that". This is one of the concepts explained so well in Seth Lloyd's book, "Programming the Universe": Seth is one of the pioneers in quantum computing. Is the universe really just a giant quantum computer, processing the information that is reality? I believe my proposed framework for imagining reality is very compatible with this idea.

Which gets to the basic question: is Imagining the Tenth Dimension a useful tool for helping to envision the nature of reality, even though it was created by someone who's not a physicist, and is not even pretending to be one?

Here's the thing: of course there are going to be other ways of imagining reality which happen to agree with physics! It would be far far stranger if there weren't other ways that science and art, or cosmology and philosophy/spirituality happened to agree on things that are essentially true about where our reality comes from and why we're here.

People from an astonishingly diverse range of backgrounds, then, who are drawn to the Imagining the Tenth Dimension animation and my book tell me they recognize things they know are essentially true, and this is what connects all of the fans of this project together. Today (Monday, July 23rd '07) we started a new experiment: the Live Chat window at the tenth dimension site now also has a Live Video feed within it, where I can converse with people in real time. A recording of today's first live camera feed can be found here, and a transcript of the text chat portion can be found here. This is just the beginnings of an experiment, but it shows lots of promise. Hey, new experiences are what life's all about!

A couple of weeks ago I had a new and humbling experience with a faith healer named Jason, who is an old friend who has now become a minister: we laid hands on my mom (thank you everyone for your prayers and good wishes), he prayed and sang, and mom cried and laughed at the same time at the power she felt pulsing into her from his hand on her. "A beautiful expression of the immense power of positive visualization, and one of the best parts about any faith-based belief system" was probably how I would have eventually filed the experience away. But then something changed the experience for me.

I was talking to my mom later that evening, who was still feeling energized by the session - and I remarked that I could see that as soon as Jason laid his hand on her forehead we could all see had an immediate and intense reaction. "Oh no, Robbie", says she, "it wasn't that hand, it was the other one, down in the middle of my back." Well, without even thinking about it I immediately told her the truth: that wasn't Jason's hand in the middle of her back, because that's where my hand was.

What can I say? Much as my mom has loved the occasional back rub over the last few months, there's never been a time I've put my hand on her back and she burst into tears at the beautiful and powerful energy she felt. Which leads me to my next physics/philosophy/all-of-the-above idea. Just for fun, let's try to imagine Jesus now as being an aspect of a powerful meme, a shape in the ninth dimension, that is carved out from the indeterminate yes/no choices of the information vs. reality realm the big bang has divided out for us down here in the fifth dimension. Does this smack of the dangerous blending of science and religion that Richard Dawkins has been trying to eliminate?

I am a huge Richard Dawkins fan, and I am a firm believer in our existence being the result of the selfish genes and the selfish memes that got us here today. But by keeping his focus so narrow on science and science alone, Mr. Dawkins runs a risk: deny that there is a spiritual aspect to our reality which is also true, and you give the impression that you believe there is no morality to our existence, no right or wrong.

Find the simultaneous yes/no and quantum mechanics tells you you've found the underlying truth about our existence. And I believe that leaves room for some optimism that we are actually headed towards something good within the timeless multiverse my animation portrays. Is that such a bad thing to imagine?

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.

Conspiracies and quantum mechanics

Last blog I mentioned "Quantum Enigma", a book by two physics professors from the University of California at Santa Cruz, Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, which takes a serious look at the role of consciousness in quantum physics. Here are a couple of interesting quotes from the website dedicated to their book:

"Quantum mechanics is the most battle-tested theory in all of science. Moreover, one third of our economy depends on things designed with it. Fine! But it also tells us that by your conscious choice you can bring about either of two contradictory situations. This is so far demonstrated only with small things, but it is today being shown true for larger and larger objects. And it is generally accepted by physicists that quantum mechanics applies to everything."

"For the most part, in our teaching of quantum mechanics we tacitly deny the mysteries physics has encountered. We hardly mention Niels Bohr's grappling with the encounter between physics and the observer and John von Neumann's demonstration that the encounter is, in principle, inevitable. We largely avoid the still-unresolved issues raised by Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Eugene Wigner, David Bohm, and John Bell. Outside the classroom, physicists increasingly address these issues and often go beyond the purely physical. Consciousness, for example, comes up explicitly in almost all of today's proliferating interpretations of quantum mechanics, if only to show why physics need not deal with it. The many worlds interpretation, for example, is also referred to as the many minds interpretation, and a major treatment of decoherence concludes that an ultimate understanding of the implications of quantum mechanics would involve a model of consciousness."

Now I'm not for a moment suggesting here that Rosenblum and Kuttner subscribe to my visual way of imagining the dimensions, but there are many direct parallels between what they are describing above and the conclusions I reach in my book.

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". If what we are navigating through right now is a sea of information across the dimensions, observing one slice out of all the possible slices as we travel down our limited line in the fourth dimension, then the patterns we are observing have as much to do with our role as quantum observers as they do with the sequence of events that got us to today.

So, if there is a multiverse of universes out there, and apparently infinite branching timelines within each of those universes, then there should always be a sequence of events that we could track from the beginning of the universe to now that tells us why "this is the way things are" as opposed to "this is the way things aren't". I'm only being somewhat frivolous in my book (and in my song "The Anthropic Viewpoint") when I say that we are living in the Hydrogen Conspiracy: what hidden agendas and preferences for one reality over another caused hydrogen to be the most popular atom in our universe?

Which is not to say that conspiracies are bogus, but rather that if quantum physics requires us to abandon the distinction between information and reality, then there will always be two ways of looking at how we got to our current situation, only one of which requires us to believe in conspiracies. Personally, I'm inclined to agree completely that our consensual reality in the last hundred years has been manipulated by the powerful to make themselves even more powerful. I also believe that we are nearing the end of that time - as we and web 2.0 wake up, it's going to become increasingly difficult for games that got our world to the precipitously bad situation it is currently in to be played any longer.

In my song Everything Fits Together, there is a chant section that sums this idea up:

There’s a reason why, there’s a reason why
There’s a reason why you feel the way you do
There’s a reason why you do the deeds you do
There’s a reason why you feel the needs you do
There’s a reason why, there’s a reason why

Which is not to say that we are helpless, but rather that the knowledge of how we got to where we are right now can help us to understand what is our own fault and what is the result of other forces acting upon us. The question then becomes: what do you want to change? As Joe Jackson so eloquently put it, "You Can't Get What You Want Till You Know What You Want". I would say those are wise words indeed.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=du86lNCvOdA



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfe_3bEH-jE



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcdjX72VcKI





A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nAS2trDuck

Gravity and Light

In an ideal world, every interface should be able to be boiled down to a simple interplay between only two currently available choices, so that even a very limited input device (one operated by a physically challenged person, for instance) can navigate, right from the very first yes or no. Finding what the most basic choice is can be the hardest part of designing an interface!

Some people are not comfortable with the idea of "Thoughts Become Things", because it feels so counter-intuitive to the observed physicality we see around us. Is everything just vibrations and constructive interference patterns? Is a person's consciousness and our physical reality all just a reflection of a complex vibration across the dimensions? In the model proposed in "Imagining the Tenth Dimension", we begin by talking about the geometric concept of a point. Later in the book, it becomes clear that this "starting point" can be in any dimension we choose to imagine it (if it's in the third dimension it could be at position x,y,z; in the seventh dimension it could be at position t,u,v,w,x,y,z; and so on). If the tenth dimension encompasses all aspects of indeterminacy, then no matter which of the nine dimensions you choose to place that first "point", its position collapses out a particular reality from the multiverse... in other words, it becomes the first yes/no, and by its selection it is already reducing the available options to a certain subset of the indeterminate whole.

I would argue that no matter what dimension you place that first point, the first thing that point defines is the value (or range of values) for gravity in the universe (or universes) that you are selecting. Physicists tell us that gravity is the only force that travels across all dimensions. Therefore, even if the information is irrelevant to the discussion at hand, any reality (ours included) can't have an indeterminate value for gravity. What do I mean when I say this information could be irrelevant? Well, for instance, if I define a set of co-ordinates in the third dimension to create a cube, I can determine the volume of that cube. Whether that cube exists in our universe or in some other universe with a different value for gravity, I can still determine its volume. But as soon as I am imagining a cube that physically exists, I am defining it as being in a real three-dimensional universe, which means that even though I am only assigning the x,y,z co-ordinates and values for this cube, its existence as a real object necessitates that it also be part of an implied subset drawn from the wave of quantum indeterminacy: a reality defined from the ninth down to the first dimensions. If gravity is everywhere, then any subset of reality must be limiting the available choices for gravity.

What if the point I'm thinking about is in the seventh through ninth dimensions? Then we can imagine our point, because it is of indeterminate size, as encompassing multiple values for gravity. Whether it would actually be possible to create a three-dimensional reality from a seventh-dimensional point encompassing a range of values for gravity is a science fiction question, a challenge for the imagination.

The second thing that can be locked in is the value for how close one point can be to the next in the reality we are choosing to examine. For our universe, this value is known as the planck length, and its value tells us why nothing in our universe can travel faster than the speed of light, and why our reality breaks down into quantum indeterminacy when we try to examine things that are closer to each other than the planck length - it's because "time" is not continuous, it is granular. Time gives us this illusion of being a continuous fourth-dimensional line, but it's actually being created by a series of three-dimensional points each representing our universe in a particular state-space, and each of those points is one planck length away from the next. While it's entirely possible to imagine a universe constructed from points that are closer together or further apart than the one we live in, they would be part of some other subset of the multiverse.

But how can something as complex as physical reality be boiled down to just a vibration across the dimensions? Here's an analogy: think about a sound wave. Using the interplay of only two factors, amplitude and frequency, we can create something as simple as a sine wave, or as harmonically complex as the human voice, or as dynamic as a thunderstorm. In the digital realm, the degree of accuracy with which a sound can be represented is reflected by the number of bits used to represent the amplitude, and the sampling rate used to represent the frequency. Once the bits and sampling rate are high enough (and any audio geek will tell you these numbers should therefore be much higher than the 16 bits and 44.1K sample rate of a CD), any sound imaginable can be properly represented.

The speed of light, then, shows us the "sample rate" for our universe, which determines what frequencies can be properly represented in the waveform of our physical reality. As we approach the speed of light or the planck length, reality breaks down, it can no longer be properly represented.

Consciousness, in its own way, can be boiled down to an interplay between gravity and light, but consciousness is not confined to the physical world, so those words can easily be used metaphorically. Still, an idea can have a certain gravity (or lack thereof), and a frequency (or mix of multiple frequencies) which, like the amplitude and frequency of any other waveform, allows us to create any idea imaginable. In Imagining the Tenth Dimension, I argue that the clouds of memes and spirit that exist across time are part of what we take on to become a unique personality, and because those factors are not rooted in the limited physical realm, they can be transmitted across generations, and also be responsible for simultaneous inspiration or the sudden ascendency of new memes. The biggest-picture-of-all memes which have existed since the beginning of our universe have such a long waveform that they could easily be represented by a much lower sample rate - but since time is really an illusion, what we are really talking about here is just another way of viewing our slice of the multiverse.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

P.S. - the new "Utopia" issue of What Is Enlightenment? magazine is now hitting the newsstands. Please flip to page 26 and read the fantastic article by Senior Associate Editor Tom Huston about the Imagining the Tenth Dimension project.



The link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfe_3bEH-jE



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7r2NJop0cs



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK29fTLXEf0



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nAS2trDuck

The Anthropic Viewpoint

Poor Ol' Anthropic Principle - it sure gets kicked around a lot. The first time I read about it in Stephen Hawking's writing it immediately clicked for me: for most of my life I had held the intuition that there are a multitude of other universes out there with different basic physical laws and different timelines than our own. Now that intuition had a name.

If you're not familiar with the term, you can read about the different variations of the Anthropic Principle at wikipedia. There are some variants listed in the article which I had not heard of before - I was familiar with the Weak Anthropic Principle ("WAP"), and the Strong Anthropic Principle ("SAP"), but I was amused to learn that there is also the "FAP" (Final) and the "CRAP" (Completely Ridiculous) versions of this concept as well.

If our universe really is only one of many in a multiverse of universes, then the anthropic principle is a no-brainer: it would be like asking how humans came to be so lucky as to live on land, because if we lived on the bottom of the ocean we would all have drowned. But the anthropic principle certainly has some passionate opposition - some people believe it is an argument in support of Intelligent Design, some dismiss it as unsupportable conjecture (and therefore not a scientific viewpoint), some people believe it proves there is no need for a Creator because every possible arrangement of matter and energy exists out there in the multiverse.

In my song "The Anthropic Viewpoint" I examine the ideas behind the anthropic principle - how did we end up in a universe whose basic laws have been uniquely tuned to support life as we know it? This song blends a number of ideas: determinism, free will, the voices of intuition, the multiverse as it relates to the Anthropic Principle, and Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems (which I also sometimes use to describe how my version of "dimension ten" is different from the other nine in my model). And it's got a good beat and you can dance to it.

THE ANTHROPIC VIEWPOINT
Music and lyrics by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain
The only thing that I know for certain
In everything that you say and do
The only thing you know for sure is you
Believe in that and you will be okay
You could live to fight another day, some day

Pay no mind to those tiny little voices
Every day you gotta make some choices
Make ‘em right and you can carry on
Make ‘em wrong and you will soon be gone
And if it seems just a little unfair
Get used to it, cause the stars don’t care, don’t care

In the anthropic viewpoint
The reason we’re here is because we’re here
And if it were impossible
Then we wouldn’t be

If there’s other worlds then we’ve just missed ‘em
No way to know what’s outside our system
We’re like goldfish livin in a bowl
What’s beyond it we can never know
All we can do is theorize
Cause we can never… get outside, outside

In the anthropic viewpoint…

So here we are in the Hydrogen Conspiracy
That’s the way that it certainly appears to be
What’s the reason, where’s the rhyme
How’d we end up on this line
All those other possibilities
They’re just as real, but they don’t have me
It’s no big deal, not worth a fuss
They’re just as real, but they don’t have us, have us

In the anthropic viewpoint
The reason we’re here is because we’re here
And if it were impossible
Then we wouldn’t be

And here is a cool video created by Ryan Hill, using as its starting point an extreme closeup of my ugly mug singing the song. Crank it up!



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=du86lNCvOdA


Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Everything Fits Together 1,2,3

Today we have posted three new videos for one of the songs from my book. All three are for the same song, but each is a very different visual take. You can find them at youtube.com. The videos are titled "Everthing Fits Together 1", Everything Fits Together 2", and Everything Fits Together 3". Individual links for these videos can also be found in the "Tenth Dimension Links" box over to the right.


In a previous blog entry titled "Everything Fits Together", I discussed some of the thoughts that went into the creation of this song. Here now are the lyrics:

EVERYTHING FITS TOGETHER
music and lyrics (c) 2006 by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

It’s the age old question, it always stays the same
People turnin their eyes up to heaven and callin out names
Some may get an answer, some may turn away
When they don’t want to know too much, cause it’s easier that way
Hidden back between the pages, written in between the lines
There’s a spider’s web of connections there for you to find

Cause everything fits together, you may not see that now
But there’ll come a day, when you’ll see the way
There’s always a why and a how
Everything fits together, it’s all part of the show
Soon there’ll come a day when you’ll see the way
And you’ll know (there’s a reason why, there’s a reason why)
And you’ll know (there’s a reason why, there’s a reason why)
There’s a reason why, there’s a reason why
There’s a reason why you feel the way you do
There’s a reason why you do the deeds you do
There’s a reason why you feel the needs you do
There’s a reason why, there’s a reason why
(There’s a reason why, there’s a reason why)

In this world of wonder, in this world of pain
In this world of mysteries that still remain
There’s a hunger growing, we all would love the chance
To see the hidden strings that sing to make it all dance
Just when you thought the universe couldn’t be any more complex
You started climbing up through the levels, one to the next

Where everything fits together, you may not see that now
But there’ll come a day, when you’ll see the way
There’s always a why and a how
Everything fits together, it’s all part of the show
Soon there’ll come a day when you’ll see the way
And you’ll know
Everything fits together (everything fits together)
Everything fits together
Everything fits together (everything fits together)
Everything fits together




A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcdjX72VcKI






A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nAS2trDuck

Enjoy the Journey,

Rob Bryanton

Time as a spatial dimension

How is my "way of imagining" ten dimensions different from what a student of physics or string theory would be taught? The simplest answer is this: I start from the assumption that time is part of a full spatial dimension. Most of us have gotten used to the idea that time can be called the fourth dimension, and Einstein's theories of spacetime have shown us that we can imagine time as a dimension which can be bent by large masses or concentrations of energy to create gravity, or stretched by near-speed-of-light travel to create twins who are no longer the same age. However, even though a dimension which can be bent and stretched may sound like a spatial dimension, the traditional scientific position has always been to keep time as a separate quality which is overlaid on the other spatial dimensions: when string theorists have talked about a reality created in ten dimensions, they were really referring to nine spatial dimensions, plus one temporal dimension. Likewise, M-Theory's eleven dimensions are actually based on ten spatial dimensions, or eleven dimensions when time is added in.

When I propose that time is part of a full spatial dimension which we third-dimensional creatures are experiencing in a limited way because we are built from chemical reactions and processes that obey the thermodynamic laws of entropy, I go out on a limb where some are not willing to follow. By blending concepts from Edwin Abbott's famous book "Flatland: a Romance of Many Dimensions" with concepts from string theory, quantum physics, the anthropic principle, and Everett's "multiverse", and then throwing in concepts from Minsky's Society of Mind, Dawkins's theory of memes, and metaphysics/New Age concepts of souls/ghosts/reincarnation, I fully realize I am trying to blend schools of thought which to some might appear to be completely incompatible. Nonetheless, the feedback I have gotten on my book has been generally very favorable: I believe that this is in part because I have always been quick to acknowledge my position as a generalist, and that my framework for discussion extrapolates beyond what you would be taught in a physics class today. That is one of the reasons I was so pleased to have famous author Greg Bear give me his endorsement for my book: "a fascinating excursion into the multiverse--clear, elegant, personal and provocative". Having a Hugo and Nebula winning science fiction author acknowledge what I've created as being an interesting take on the nature of reality puts, to my way of thinking, just the right spin on the project: this is a work of imagination which many have found thought-provoking, but no one should feel they are being tricked into believing that this proposed framework is the currently approved teaching of mainstream science.

To be clear, the supposition that time and space are part of a larger system which we are experiencing in a unique way is not just science fiction. To quote from my book: "string theorists have been expressing concepts which we once expected to hear only from yogis and gurus. Nathan Seiberg, of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies was quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying 'I am almost certain that space and time are illusions'. Edward Witten (one of the most respected researchers in modern physics, and the man who first advanced M-Theory) has said that 'time and space may be doomed'. Viewpoints such as these hint that the way of looking at the dimensions we are exploring in this book may not be a outlandish as some might think."

What about the fashionable groundswell that has arisen lately saying that string theory is unprovable conjecture, and "not even wrong"? Where does that leave my way of imagining reality? Since the concept I am proposing was only distantly related to mainstream string theory in the first place (as a few string theorists have pointed out online), the question is not really relevant. I have proposed a way of imagining higher dimensions, based upon the unusual assumption that "time" is really just the way you move within a particular dimension from one state to another: for us, we experience time as the fourth dimension, but for a two-dimensional Flatlander, "time" would be the third dimension, and so on. Time exists in no dimension in particular, then, it is just a way of moving within whatever dimension you are currently examining, from one state to another.

One of the conclusions I reach in the book is that our reality is based upon a series of points that are no less than the planck length apart from each other, drawing the line that we experience as time. The simultaneous wave/particle nature of subatomic particles, then, would be a result of this process: waves of probability are observed in the assembly of slices that we are moving through, each "slice" representing a three-dimensional state of our universe, and each slice being a point on the fourth-dimensional line we are drawing from the available fifth-dimensional choices (and in quantum terms, each slice being an observed/collapsed state of those probability waves).

Last June, Scientific American released a wonderful special edition issue called "A Matter of Time". Lee Smolin's article in that issue, "Atoms of Space and Time" introduced me to "loop quantum gravity". I found this article very interesting because I could overlay it on my "way of imagining" quite easily. Loop quantum gravity is based upon the same supposition as mine: that our reality is defined by discrete packets of time and space, creating the illusion of continuous reality that we see around us (which in no way, of course, is intended to say that Lee Smolin would endorse my way of imagining the ten dimensions!).

Last week I started reading Mr. Smolin's book "The Trouble with Physics", which discusses some of the other theories of reality apart from string theory, and I would recommend this book highly as an excellent alternative to the books by Kaku, Greene, and Randall that I have recommended on my website.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

Welcome to Rob's Tenth Dimension Blog

This week, www.tenthdimension.com saw its one millionth unique visitor. What has drawn people to this site? Clearly, the 11 minute animation showing people how to imagine ten dimensions has been the biggest draw... here is a site that with virtually no promotion, has found a worldwide audience. The book that is associated with the website is selling well, first from this site only, and now from Amazon.com and trafford.com.

Book sales are gratifying, but this is not the reason I created this website:

I am interested in the discussion of ideas about the nature of reality. The Forum on this website has been a popular place for people to discuss the huge cloud of ideas that surround that central thought, and I see that a lot of new visitors to the site are just spending their time reading old posts, not bothering to even log in... which is fine, there is a huge amount of discussion that has already taken place and it is good that the ideas that have been posted by this site's forum community can continue to be enjoyed.

Now that I have posted the first six of my twenty-six songs about the nature of reality on the site, I am hoping that visitors will be able to use these songs as another way in to understanding my unique way of imagining the ten dimensions. Please stay tuned, as we are now working on ways for more people to participate in this creative process.

Thank you to the many students, profs, and deep thinkers who have written to me about my "way of imagining", and for those who are new to this site, let me end my first blog entry with a version of my standard disclaimer. Other versions of this disclaimer can be found in the front of the book, the Preamble link from this website, and beside my picture at the top of the tenth dimension forum:

Although I am 100 per cent committed to the ideas I have created for this project, and the way that it uses current mainstream thinking about the nature of our reality as its jumping off point, I feel it is important to note that the "framework for discussion" that I advance on this website and in the book "Imagining the Tenth Dimension" is not what you would currently be taught in a university physics class. Anyone wanting to know more about the currently established thinking behind physics and cosmology should refer to such excellent books as "Programming the Universe" by Seth Lloyd, "Parallel Worlds" by Michio Kaku, "The Fabric of the Cosmos" by Brian Greene, or "Warped Passages" by Lisa Randall. Other books that strongly connect to the ideas around this project are "I Am a Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter, "This is Your Brain on Music" by Daniel J. Levitin, "Linked" by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, "Quantum Enigma" by Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, and "Everything Forever" by Gevin Giorbran.

I invite you to think of this as a creative exploration that for some people will have a strong and thought-provoking connection to their impression of how the world, the universe, and our conscious perception of reality really works. If you go to tenthdimension.com/forum, you will have an opportunity to discuss and debate the cloud of concepts that surround this project. A list of frequently asked questions about this project can be found at tenthdimension.com/faq . The FAQ is part of my blog (tenthdimension.com/blog ) where you will find new ideas being posted regularly. Plus, we have an interactive chat room featuring video blog entries streaming 24 hours a day which can be viewed at tenthdimension.tv , or if you want to participate in the live discussions go to tenthdimension.com/chat . There is much to see and do here, please explore and enjoy. And thank you to the millions of fans of this project from around the world!

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

tenth dimension