Imagining the Tenth Dimension

Brain Pickings

2012-01-27T04:07:00.001-06:00

"A kind of scientific expressionism and creative exploration of curiosity, Imagining the Tenth Dimension might not rewrite the theories of Stephen Hawking, but it is certain to give you pause."

- Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

Brain Pickings (www.brainpickings.org) has just posted a nice review of my book, here's a link to the article:

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/01/25/imagining-the-tenth-dimension/

And here's some info about Brain Pickings from their site:

Brain Pickings is the brain child of Maria Popova, a cultural curator and curious mind at large, who also writes for Wired UK, The Atlantic and Design Observer, among others. She gets occasional help from a handful of talented contributors.

Brain Pickings is a human-powered discovery engine for interestingness, culling and curating cross-disciplinary curiosity-quenchers, and separating the signal from the noise to bring you things you didn’t know you were interested in until you are.

Thanks for your kind words, Maria!

Next: Poll 87 - Many Worlds, Fossils and Dinosaurs

New Video - Imagining the Eighth Dimension

2012-01-24T04:57:00.002-06:00

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

Next: Brain Pickings

Poll 86 - Impossible to see the 3rd dimension?

2012-01-20T06:57:00.001-06:00

Poll 86 - "The third dimension is space without time. This means it's actually impossible for us to see the third dimension by itself, because even with our hand in front of our face it takes a certain amount of "time" for the light to travel to our eye." Poll ended October 6, 2011. 80.9% agreed, while 19.1% disagreed.

This was an idea discussed in Imagining the Third Dimension, and I'll end today's blog with the video for that entry for those of you who haven't watched it yet. This speaks to how easy it is for us to forget that "time" is part of what we're looking at every moment, so seeing space by itself is really impossible - the space we're looking at has to have a duration or it's not possible for us to see it.

With the way this poll question is phrased, it seems to me that it should be an open-and-shut case, but nearly one out of every five persons answering this poll question don't agree. Is it possible to ask this question any more simply? If the third dimension is space without time, and the fourth dimension is space with time, how can we talk about the third dimension by itself? In other words, how can we view anything in the third dimension without taking a certain amount of "time" to do so?

Sure, we can have abstract discussions about 2D objects that have length and width but no depth, but there still have been many hours of debate over whether it would be possible for anyone to see something that has no depth, to the point where some people say this means the second dimension can't exist. By the same token we can talk about 3D objects that have length width and depth while we ignore the fourth dimension. But if a 3D cube had no duration, shouldn't exactly the same question come into play?

A way out of this conundrum would be to suggest that we're assuming that an abstract object like a 3D cube has infinite duration: like the original description of a meme as defined by Dawkins, the cube would then be an information pattern which can be transmitted across time and space, from one mind to another, instantaneously. Does that mean that it would be safe to assume that a 2D object has infinite duration in the third dimension, and that's how we would be able to see and talk about such an object? If we're talking about abstract forms similar to a plane or a cube, that reasoning follows.

But what about 3D objects like a human being, or a planet? Clearly, they don't have infinite duration, they have a point where they start to exist, and another point where their existence ceases. This, then, is where we can get into difficulties of language. If I say "this is a cube", am I referring to an abstract concept, or am I referring to a physical object like a child's building block? "This is a cube" could apply to either, but the two have very different expressions within the dimensional constructs that we're exploring here.

This confusion continues as we add dimensions: a tesseract is a four-dimensional hypercube. If I say "this is a tesseract", what am I referring to? A concept? Or something that really exists as an object which has a specific duration within the fifth dimension? Therein can lie some of the pitfalls of language - we need to make it clear which interpretation we're using, or these discussions can sometimes seem contradictory.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-D4swzK4sKk

So remember - the next time someone tells you the second dimension can't exist because something with no depth is impossible, tell them the third dimension has the same problem. If you're talking about something that has length, width and depth, but no duration in the fourth dimension, then that would be impossible for us to see. And clearly, what you and I are a looking at right now with our eyes and their "3D" atoms and molecules, is something larger than the third dimension.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: New Video - Imagining the Eighth Dimension

Poll 85 - No Quantum/Classical Divide?

2012-01-15T03:41:00.005-06:00

Poll 85: "Do you agree with this idea from the June '11 issue of Scientific American? The division between the quantum and classical worlds appears not to be fundamental...few physicists now think that classical physics will ever really make a comeback at any scale." Poll ended September 8, 2011. 71.2 % agreed, while 28.8% did not.

This has been an interesting metamorphosis: in 2006, when my book was published, a number of people criticized it for being so cavalier with taking the concepts of quantum mechanics and applying them to our "warm and wet" macro/classical world. What does Feynman's sum over histories have to do with the choices you and I make? How do the instantaneous connections of quantum entanglement relate to consciousness and life? These questions do not seem quite as far "out there" now as they did back then, and the burgeoning field of quantum biology is a great example of the kind of paradigm shift we're talking about here.

For more discussion about these ideas, here's a link to Poll 60, which back in March 2010 asked whether people accepted that the so-called "dividing line" between the quantum and macro world is a completely artificial construct. The results were similar: a very large majority agreed with this idea back then as well. I would also refer you to an entry from a couple of months ago called "We are All Quanta", in which I said this:

No matter where we end up, we need to acknowledge that quantum mechanics is the most successful theory of reality devised so far, so whatever Theory of Everything we're trying to get to, we should keep in mind the truth about the underlying quantum nature of the universe we're in.

Ultimately, we are all quanta. We are created by constructive interference, so saying that we're wavicles also works, but each of us is a unique pattern, and a subset of something larger.

Is Imagining the Tenth Dimension a Theory of Everything, a TOE? At best it points the way to where a theory might lie, which is why I prefer to call it a "new way of thinking". But if classical physics is really destined to never "make a comeback", then it seems apparent that any self-respecting TOE has to acknowledge the underlying quantum nature of our reality, end of story.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Poll 86 - Is it Impossible to See the Third Dimension?

Poll 84 - The Multiverse and Many Worlds

2012-01-09T08:30:00.000-06:00

Poll 84: "Physicists Leonard Susskind and Raphael Bousso say in their new paper that the multiverse and the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics are formally equivalent. Do you agree with them?" Poll ended August 11, 2011. 87.1% agreed, while the remainder disagreed.

I've used this quote from Raphael Bousso before, this comes from an article published in the October 2008 edition of Seed magazine: "This may seem laughable, but without the multiverse our finest theories predict that empty space should contain about 10 to the power of 123 times more energy than it actually does. This has been called the 'worst prediction in the history of science' and the 'mother of all physics problems'.”

And in entries like Holograms and Quanta and The Holographic Universe, I've talked about related theories by Leonard Susskind. To see these two leading-edge cosmologists put their heads together to come up with a proof that ties directly to the contentions of my project was a great thrill for me in 2011.

Are we a shadow of the fifth dimension, an extra-dimensional version of Plato's Cave? That is the conclusion I believe we can draw from these Holographic Universe theories. And as we saw in my video Imagining the Fifth Dimension, if Everett believed that the different parallel universe outcomes for our universe reside in a subspace which is orthogonal to space-time, isn't that also another way of describing how our reality comes from the fifth dimension? This is still a controversial idea from my project, but I believe Bousso and Susskind are pushing us closer towards reaching that understanding, and I'm happy to see how many visitors to this blog accepted the basic thesis of their paper.

The Scientific American blog entry describing my project so favorably was also a great thrill for me in 2011. As we now begin the fabled year of 2012, I can't wait to see what happens next. Enjoy the journey!

Rob

Next: Poll 85 - No Quantum/Classical Divide?

New video - Imagining the Seventh Dimension

2012-01-04T04:46:00.001-06:00

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FWRndF01xI

Next: Poll 84 - The Multiverse and Many Worlds

Top 100 Tenth Dimension Blogs - 2011 Report

2012-01-01T14:50:00.005-06:00

Other reports on this blog:
. April 08 . May 08 . June 08 . July 08 . August 08 .
. September 08 . October 08 . November 08 . December 08 .
. Top 100 - 2008 Report . End of 1st Quarter 09 . May 09 .
. June 09 . July 09 . August 09 . September 09 . October 09 .
. November 09 . December 09 . Top 100 - 2009 Report .
. January 10 . February 10 . March 10 . April 10 . May 10 .
. June 10 . July 10 . August 10 . September 10 . October 10 .
. November 10 . December 10 . Top 100 Entries of 2010 .
. January 11 . February 11 . March 11 . April 11 . May 11 .
. June 11 . July 11 . August 11 . September 11 . October 11 .
. November 11 . December 11 .

Here we are at the end of 2011, with a quick recap of another exciting year for this project. Some of the highlights:

The Imagining the Tenth Dimension website has now had over 7 million unique visitors!
My YouTube channel is currently at over 21,000 subscribers, and my videos have seen six million views. I'm currently at 403 uploaded videos.
I was interviewed by Ben Good for a piece he wrote for Scientific American: Has Science Gone Viral?
I was interviewed on live talk shows by Anthony Peake (The Peake Experience) , Rea Wilkie (Your Life Now), and the team of Jake Kettle and Rob Wood (Truth Transmission).
More of my videos were translated into Spanish, including Language and the Mind and Changing Your Brain. A German version of my original animation was also released.
After receiving a number of requests to do so, I've gone back to the style of my original animation and am now releasing a series of videos which explain my approach to visualizing each dimension in more detail. The first in the series is Imagining the Second Dimension, and these videos will work all the way up to the ninth dimension over the next couple of months.
Just for fun, I released a series of videos for songs from my 1983 album Rob Bryanton - Alcohol and Other Drugs. This album, a collection of pop/rock songs featuring my good friends Jack Semple on guitar/bass and Cal Harle on drums, was quite innovative for its time: songs from the album received radio playlist airplay, but the album was recorded on four-track cassette. Check it out, I'm still very proud of this album.
As we saw in The 5th Dimensional Camera Project, a team of scientists at Oxford were introduced to my way of visualizing the extra dimensions by Anab Jain and Jon Ardern, and one of those scientists participated in a video explaining the fifth dimension as our "probability space", a concept I promote with this project.
It was also very exciting to see that in 2011 well-known physicists Leonard Susskind and Raphael Bousso published a proof equating the branching probabilistic outcomes of Everett's Many Worlds with the string theory multiverse. This is one of the central assumptions of my project, that the extra dimensions of string theory have a way of relating to Everett's Theory of the Universal Wavefunction. Here's a link to Sean Carroll's blog entry about the new proof, and here is a link to the paper as it was published at arxiv.org.
My company Talking Dog Studios continued to develop expertise in Augmented Reality, and created a set of kiosks which are on permanent display at the Mall of America, in an installation called Create Your Mayo Clinic Health Experience. Meanwhile, our Augmented Reality game ScavengAR Hunt, which can be played on iPhones and Android Phones, is continuing to develop a worldwide audience, and other smart phone demonstrations like our Halloween AR have also been popular.
O is for Omniverse, my followup book created in collaboration with visual artist Marilyn E. Robertson continues to be available at Omniverse.tv, and other Imagining the Tenth Dimension books, t-shirts, and DVDs are available at www.tenthdimension.com/store. Meanwhile, at www.tenthdimension.com/digital, various files are available for download, including high quality versions of the original animation, books in non-copy-protected pdf format, mp3s of various songs, and the audiobook version of Imagining the Tenth Dimension. The first two sections of the audiobook (the Preamble and the Introduction) are also posted on YouTube.

As we see up at the top here, I've been posting monthly reports with "top ten blogs of the month" and the latest top 26 blogs of all time for almost four years now, and at the end of 2008, 2009, and again at the end of 2010 I published a Top 100 Tenth Dimension list. I'd like to continue that tradition this year, so the list below is in the same format as the last two years, showing the month the blog entry originates from. Also, just for interest's sake, I've put a number at the end of each line indicating the position that blog entry held in our 2010 report. Thank you tenth dimension fans for your support!

1. Jumping Jesus (October 09) (1)
2. What's Around the Corner? (October 09) (2)
3. Mandelbulbs (December 09) (3)
4. The 5th-Dimensional Camera Project (May 10) (8)
5. Is Reality an Illusion? (April 10)
6. An Expanding 4D Sphere (August 09) (4)
7. Just Six Things: The I Ching (August 09) (5)
8. Gravity and Love (December 10)
9. Bees and the LHC (December 10)
10. Light Has No Speed (September 10) (10)
11. Vibrations and Fractals (April 10) (11)
12. Roger Ebert on Quantum Reincarnation (August 09) (6)
13. Time Travel Paradoxes (December 10)
14. 10-10-10 Look Before You Leap (October 10) (20)
15. Changing Your Brain (February 11)
16. Our Universe Within the Omniverse (April 10) (14)
17. The Pencil Visualization (June 11)
18. Magnets and Morality (April 10) (16)
19. How to Time Travel (December 09) (9)
20. Dancing on the Timeline (February 10) (13)
21. Creativity and the Quantum Universe (February 09) (7)
22. Simultaneous Inspiration (August 10) (23)
23. Complexity from Simplicity (September 10) (30)
24. Monkeys Love Metallica (January 10) (15)
25. Polls Archive 54 - Is Time Moving Faster? (March 10) (21)
26. What is Reality? (February 11)
27. Consciousness in Frames per Second (December 09) (17)
28. Language and the Mind (February 11)
29. Infinite Division (December 10)
30. Poll 44 - The Biocentric Universe Theory (September 09) (12)
31. Photons and Free Will (January 11)
32. Flow (January 10) (25)
33. The Quantum Mind (February 11)
34. Fourth Spatial Dimension 101 (April 10) (33)
35. Timelike Entanglement (January 11)
36. The Quantum Observer (February 11)
37. Three Becomes One (May 10) (37)
38. Entangled Neurons (May 10) (35)
39. You Are the Point (January 10) (29)
40. At Right Angles to Spacetime (January 11)
41. Psychedelics and Spacetime (November 10)
42. Poll 43 - Is the Multiverse Real? (August 09) (18)
43. Extra Dimensions and OBEs (November 10)
44. Alien Mathematics (July 09) (19)
45. Thinking Biggest (November 10)
46. Seeing Time, Feeling Colors, Tasting Light (September 09) (22)
47. Our Universe as a Dodecahedron (May 10) (47)
48. Living in a Simulation (January 11)
49. Entangled Awareness and OBEs (May 10) (49)
50. Poll 65 to 68 - Thinking Big (October 10) (66)
51. Cymatics, Gravity and Light (September 10) (68)
52. Constructive Interference and the Quantum Observer (September 10) (71)
53. When's a Knot Not a Knot (August 09) (24)
54. Neurons and Extra Dimensions (November 10)
55. The Quantum Solution to Time's Arrow (September 09) (26)
56. Evidence for Seeing the Future? (December 10)
57. Our Universe as a Point (May 10) (52)
58. Placebos Becoming More Effective? (January 10) (43)
59. Playing Games in Extra Dimensions (January 10) (45)
60. Is Spacetime Flat or Curved? (January 11)
61. Time is in the Mind (December 09) (40)
62. Beer and Miracles (September 09) (27)
63. Theatre of the Mind (May 10) (65)
64. Poll 46 - Big Bang an Illusion? (September 09) (32)
65. Time's Illusions (January 11)
66. Threes (December 10)
67. The Forest (April 10) (58)
68. Augmented Reality (January 09) (28)
69. The Big Bang is an Illusion (July 09) (31)
70. Love and Gravity (July 10) (82)
71. I'm You From the Future (February 10) (54)
72. Vibrations (April 10) (72)
73. Just Geometry (November 10)
74. Norway's "Reverse Deja Vu" (August 09) (34)
75. Dancing in the Omniverse (October 10)
76. Polls Archive 60 - Quantum and Macro a Continuum? (April 10) (73)
77. Holograms and Quanta (March 10) (67)
78. Extra-Dimensional Geometry (October 10)
79. Nothing is Real (January 10) (62)
80. Life is But a Dream (December 09) (53)
81. Strength of Gravity, Speed of Light (March 10) (81)
82. We Start (August 10) (94)
83. Global Coherence (October 10)
84. Alien Life and Sea Dragons (November 09) (46)
85. Poll 45 - Conscious Computers (September 09) (39)
86. Skhizein (January 10) (70)
87. Placebos and Biocentrism (September 10) (98)
88. Changing Reality (May 10) (90)
89. Poll 69 - Bees and Tangential Thinking (November 10)
90. Novelty (February 11)
91. The Fifth Dimension if Spooky (October 09) (44)
92. Dark Flow, Gravity and Love (September 10)
93. The Map and the Territory (August 09) (41)
94. Biosemiotics: Monkeys, Metallica and Music (September 10)
95. The Long Undulating Snake (July 09) (42)
96. ExpandAR - Augmented Reality (February 10) (89)
97. Flow and the Now (August 10)

98. The Statistical Universe (September 09) (48)
99. 3 Books That Could Change Your Life (February 10) (95)
100. Poll 61-64: Gravity and Free Will (June 10)

To everyone out there, I send you my best wishes and fond regards for the upcoming year. I particularly want to thank the continuing stream of people who write to me every day thanking me for changing the way they think about reality: I am grateful for your kind words of encouragement. Enjoy the journey in 2012!

Rob Bryanton

Next: New video - Imagining the Seventh Dimension

Scientific American on Rob Bryanton

2011-12-27T05:16:00.005-06:00

This summer I was completely swamped with my company's work designing the software for some kiosks for Create Your Mayo Clinic Health Experience, a new installation at the Mall of America. But during that time, I was also interviewed by Ben Good, a blogger who writes for Scientific American, and the resulting article was called "Has Science Gone Viral?". Here's a few paragraphs to whet your appetite, please follow the link for the whole article.

Wikipedia defines a virus as “a small infectious agent that can replicate only inside the living cells of organisms”. The use of viral terminology to describe the movement and sharing of online content is very apt. However, whilst science has given the phenomenon its name, the question persist as to whether or not it has truly ‘gone viral’ in online video.

As a source of media YouTube is a titanic entity. With 3 billion videos watched per day it is the most popular place to try and create an online visual phenomenon. Science does form a proportion of the millions of hours of video on the site. But, according to Kevin Allocca, YouTube Trends Manager, “there is a huge opportunity [for science] that we haven’t quite seen taken advantage of yet”.

Whilst it may not have gained the view counts of Justin Beiber, or people getting hit in the face or kittens, there are people out there who are producing high quality science content. One such individual is Rob Bryanton, whose physics videos have had over 6 million views, with his ‘Imagining the 10th Dimension‘ video receiving particular praise and attention. “The project was born from a personal obsession I have had since I came up with this idea in the early 1980′s. I imagined a way to be able to visualise the extra spatial dimensions. And when I then discovered that with string theory there were ten spatial dimensions, I created this video so I could give people a way to visualise it, that was launched in July 2006 and it immediately took off…” he said.

Thank you so much for your support, Ben, and also to Tom Ridgewell, the hugely popular youtuber whose TomSka channel is currently at almost 150 million views. It was Tom who recommended to Ben Good that he take a look at my project. Thanks Tom!

Next time, we're going to take a look back at 2011 and list some of the other exciting things that have happened with Imagining the Tenth Dimension this year. Till then, enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs - December Report

2011-12-26T03:10:00.003-06:00

Previous lists:
. April 08 . May 08 . June 08 . July 08 . August 08
. September 08 . October 08 . November 08 . December 08 .
. Top 100 Blog Entries of 2008 . May 09 . June 09 . July 09
. August 09 . September 09 . October 09 . November 09 .
. December 09 . Top 100 Blog Entries of 2009 .
. January 10 . February 10 . March 10 . April 10 . May 10 .
. June 10 . July 10 . August 10 . September 10 . October 10 .
. November 10 . December 10 . Top 100 Entries of 2010 .
. January 11 . February 11 . March 11 . April 11 . May 11 .
. June 11 . July 11 . August 11 . September 11 . October 11 .
. November 11 . December 11 . Top 100 Entries of 2011 .

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

1. Poll 80 - What is "Now"?
2. New video - The Pencil Visualization
3. Imagining the Seventh Dimension
4. Imagining the Eight Dimension
5. Poll 83 - Is Energy Not Conserved?
6. Imagining the Ninth Dimension
7. New video - Poll 80 to 82 - Right Angles and Reality
8. Wrapping it Up in the Tenth Dimension
9. Why Only Ten?
10. New video - Poll 83 - Is Energy Not Conserved?

And as of December 28th, 2011, here are the twenty-six Imagining the Tenth Dimension blog entries that have attracted the most visits of all time. Items marked in bold are new or have risen since last month.

1. Jumping Jesus (1)
2. What's Around the Corner? (2)
3. Mandelbulbs (3)
4. The 5th-Dimensional Camera Project (4)
5. Is Reality an Illusion? (7)
6. An Expanding 4D Sphere (5)
7. Just Six Things: The I Ching (6)
8. Gravity and Love (10)
9. Bees and the LHC (12)
10. Light Has No Speed (9)
11. Vibrations and Fractals (8)
12. Roger Ebert on Quantum Reincarnation (11)
13. Time Travel Paradoxes (13)
14. Changing Your Brain (14)
15. 10-10-10 Look Before You Leap (16)
16. Our Universe Within the Omniverse (15)
17. The Pencil Visualization (new)
18. Magnets and Morality (18)
19. How to Time Travel (17)
20. Dancing on the Timeline (20)
21. Creativity and the Quantum Universe (19)
22. Simultaneous Inspiration (21)
23. Complexity from Simplicity (23)
24. Monkeys Love Metallica (22)
25. Polls Archive 54 - Is Time Moving Faster? (24)
26. What is Reality? (26)

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

Consciousness in Frames per Second (25)

By the way, if you're new to this project, you might want to check out the Tenth Dimension FAQ, as it provides a road map to a lot of the discussions and different materials that have been created for this project. If you are interested in the 26 songs attached to this project, this blog shows a video for each of the songs and provides more links with lyrics and discussion. The Annotated Tenth Dimension Video provides another cornucopia of discussion topics to be connected to over at YouTube. Also, a lot of people are enjoying discussing these ideas with me on my facebook page: facebook.com/rob.bryanton .

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next - Scientific American on Rob Bryanton

New Video - Imagining the Sixth Dimension

2011-12-13T11:01:00.005-06:00

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

Next: Scientific American on Rob Bryanton

Quantum Weirdness and Water

2011-12-08T02:08:00.020-06:00

Here's a link to a great article that was published last month in New Scientist magazine: Quantum Weirdness Makes Life Possible. Written by Lisa Goodman, here's the opening paragraphs:

WATER'S life-giving properties exist on a knife-edge. It turns out that life as we know it relies on a fortuitous, but incredibly delicate, balance of quantum forces.

Water is one of the planet's weirdest liquids, and many of its most bizarre features make it life-giving. For example, its higher density as a liquid than as a solid means ice floats on water, allowing fish to survive under partially frozen rivers and lakes. And unlike many liquids, it takes a lot of heat to warm water up even a little, a quality that allows mammals to regulate their body temperature.

But computer simulations show that quantum mechanics nearly robbed water of these life-giving features. Most of them arise due to weak hydrogen bonds that hold H₂O molecules together in a networked structure. For example, it is hydrogen bonds that hold ice molecules in a more open structure than in liquid water, leading to a lower density. By contrast, without hydrogen bonds, liquid molecules move freely and take up more space than in rigid solid structures.

Yet in simulations that include quantum effects, hydrogen bond lengths keep changing thanks to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which says no molecule can have a definite position with respect to the others. This destabilises the network, removing many of water's special properties. "It breaks down big time," says Philip Salmon of the University of Bath in the UK.

How water continues to exist as a network of hydrogen bonds, in the face of these destabilising quantum effects, was a mystery.

Please read the whole article to learn about the delicately balanced role of the quantum world in water and its unique properties.

My song Change and Renewal helps to show how important I believe water is to the whole mystery of life, consciousness, and the patterns that exist across the extra dimensions that allow the universe we are witnessing right this moment to spring into existence. Likewise, with entries like The Big Bang and the Big O, and Creativity and the Quantum Universe, we've talked about water and its fascinating role in life and reality, and also how it ties to the burgeoning field of quantum biology. In Holograms and Quanta and We Are All Quanta, we looked at a number of the new discoveries that relate to this field. But now with the new information provided in the above article, it behooves us again to marvel at the complex series of events that have caused our universe to be selected from an omniverse of possible patterns. And it's moments like these that make me Thankful for the amazing, beautiful, and unlikely world we see around us every day.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIfN1RM9X6I

Sing along, and enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: New Video - Imagining the Sixth Dimension

Gravity and Light from the Vacuum

2011-12-04T08:21:00.004-06:00

My friend Lee Price recently sent me two interesting articles that have appeared at physorg.com over the last couple of weeks, here's the links:
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-11-quantum-vacuum-dark.html
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-11-scientists-vacuum.html

The above graphic comes from the first article, which was published November 17, 2011. Here's a few paragraphs:

Scientists at Chalmers University of Technology have succeeded in creating light from vacuum – observing an effect first predicted over 40 years ago. The results will be published tomorrow (Wednesday) in the journal Nature. In an innovative experiment, the scientists have managed to capture some of the photons that are constantly appearing and disappearing in the vacuum.

The experiment is based on one of the most counterintuitive, yet, one of the most important principles in quantum mechanics: that a vacuum is by no means empty nothingness. In fact, the vacuum is full of various particles that are continuously fluctuating in and out of existence. They appear, exist for a brief moment and then disappear again. Since their existence is so fleeting, they are usually referred to as virtual particles.

Chalmers scientist, Christopher Wilson and his co-workers have succeeded in getting photons to leave their virtual state and become real photons, i.e. measurable light. The physicist Moore predicted way back in 1970 that this should happen if the virtual photons are allowed to bounce off a mirror that is moving at a speed that is almost as high as the speed of light. The phenomenon, known as the dynamical Casimir effect, has now been observed for the first time in a brilliant experiment conducted by the Chalmers scientists.

“Since it’s not possible to get a mirror to move fast enough, we’ve developed another method for achieving the same effect,” explains Per Delsing, Professor of Experimental Physics at Chalmers. “Instead of varying the physical distance to a mirror, we've varied the electrical distance to an electrical short circuit that acts as a mirror for microwaves.

Please read the whole article for an explanation of the above graphic and a description of the process they used to make these photons appear. The other article, written by Lisa Zyga and published November 28th at PhysOrg, looks at a theory which is only just beginning to be developed, which suggests that the gravitational effects of dark matter could be coming from the quantum vacuum as well. Here's the opening paragraph:

Earlier this year, PhysOrg reported on a new idea that suggested that gravitational charges in the quantum vacuum could provide an alternative to dark matter. The idea rests on the hypothesis that particles and antiparticles have gravitational charges of opposite sign. As a consequence, virtual particle-antiparticle pairs in the quantum vacuum form gravitational dipoles (having both a positive and negative gravitational charge) that can interact with baryonic matter to produce phenomena usually attributed to dark matter. Although CERN physicist Dragan Slavkov Hajdukovic, who proposed the idea, mathematically demonstrated that these gravitational dipoles could explain the observed rotational curves of galaxies without dark matter in his initial study, he noted that much more work needed to be done.

Gevin Giorbran, of course, author of the brilliant Everything Forever, loved theories like this which point to the underlying symmetry state from which our universe or any other springs. This same idea of there being an underlying sea of potential information which can be thought of as a point of indeterminate size, a perfectly balanced "outside the system" where Everything Fits Together, is central to my project as well. Most recently, in Imagining the Ninth Dimension, and earlier in entries like Elvis and the Electrons and Imagining the Omniverse, we've talked about the idea proposed by John Wheeler, that there is a quantum foam in the supposedly empty vacuum: a churning mass of particles which appear and disappear. Last week, we looked at a project called the "Thrive Movement" which advances the cherished notion that there is free energy there for the taking within this underlying indeterminate quantum structure of our reality. How crazy is that idea? If gravity and light come from this vacuum, why not energy as well?

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Quantum Weirdness and Water

Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs- November Report

2011-11-30T04:29:00.001-06:00

Previous lists:
. April 08 . May 08 . June 08 . July 08 . August 08
. September 08 . October 08 . November 08 . December 08 .
. Top 100 Blog Entries of 2008 . May 09 . June 09 . July 09
. August 09 . September 09 . October 09 . November 09 .
. December 09 . Top 100 Blog Entries of 2009 .
. January 10 . February 10 . March 10 . April 10 . May 10 .
. June 10 . July 10 . August 10 . September 10 . October 10 .
. November 10 . December 10 . Top 100 Entries of 2010 .
. January 11 . February 11 . March 11 . April 11 . May 11 .
. June 11 . July 11 . August 11 . September 11 . October 11 .

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

1. Imagining the Fifth Dimension
2. Imagining the Third Dimension
3. Imagining the Fourth Dimension
4. Imagining the Sixth Dimension
5. Poll 83 - Is Energy Not Conserved?
6. New video - The Pencil Visualization
7. Imagining the Seventh Dimension
8. New video - Poll 80 to 82 - Right Angles and Reality
9. Imagining the Eight Dimension
10. Imagining the Ninth Dimension

And as of November 28th, 2011, here are the twenty-six Imagining the Tenth Dimension blog entries that have attracted the most visits of all time. Items marked in bold are new or have risen since last month.

1. Jumping Jesus (1)
2. What's Around the Corner? (2)
3. Mandelbulbs (3)
4. The 5th-Dimensional Camera Project (5)
5. An Expanding 4D Sphere (4)
6. Just Six Things: The I Ching (6)
7. Is Reality an Illusion? (7)
8. Vibrations and Fractals (9)
9. Light Has No Speed (10)
10. Gravity and Love (11)
11. Roger Ebert on Quantum Reincarnation (7)
12. Bees and the LHC (12)
13. Time Travel Paradoxes (18)
14. Changing Your Brain (20)
15. Our Universe Within the Omniverse (14)
16. 10-10-10 Look Before You Leap (16)
17. How to Time Travel (13)
18. Magnets and Morality (19)
19. Creativity and the Quantum Universe (15)
20. Dancing on the Timeline (17)
21. Simultaneous Inspiration (22)
22. Monkeys Love Metallica (21)
23. Complexity from Simplicity (23)
24. Polls Archive 54 - Is Time Moving Faster? (25)
25. Consciousness in Frames per Second (24)
26. What is Reality? (new)

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

Poll 44 - The Biocentric Universe Theory (26)

By the way, if you're new to this project, you might want to check out the Tenth Dimension FAQ, as it provides a road map to a lot of the discussions and different materials that have been created for this project. If you are interested in the 26 songs attached to this project, this blog shows a video for each of the songs and provides more links with lyrics and discussion. The Annotated Tenth Dimension Video provides another cornucopia of discussion topics to be connected to over at YouTube. Also, a lot of people are enjoying discussing these ideas with me on my facebook page: facebook.com/rob.bryanton .

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Gravity and Light from the Vacuum

Thrive Movement

2011-11-26T11:49:00.002-06:00

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3uTqhwK76s

www.thrivemovement.com
facebook.com/thrivemovement
youtube.com/thrivemovement

Next: Gravity and Light from the Vacuum

New video - Imagining the FIfth DImension

2011-11-25T07:17:00.010-06:00

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eN24Sv0qS1w

Next: The Thrive Movement

New video - Imagining the Fourth Dimension

2011-11-23T07:17:00.006-06:00

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

Next: New video - Imagining the Fifth Dimension

New video - Imagining the Third Dimension

2011-11-21T07:16:00.009-06:00

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-D4swzK4sKk

Next: New video - Imagining the Fourth Dimension

We are All Quanta

2011-11-18T04:17:00.016-06:00

In the quantum description of reality, nothing is continuous. Do you remember the term "wavicles"? Everything that appears to act as a wave is actually a particle, or a "slice" of reality, when you get down to the quantum view.

This project keeps coming back to quantum mechanics: the fact that our reality is divided into quantum "frames" and not continuous, the branching probabilistic outcomes of Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, and the idea that everything is potentially connected within the underlying quantum world is central to this "new way of thinking about time and space". Ultimately, does everything fit together through instantaneous quantum superposition across space, across time, and across all of the different versions of our universe or any other? Is it startling to think that the point of indeterminate size that we start from is also equal to the unimaginably gigantic concept we end up with this project, and to consider that the nested hyperspheres of each additional dimension can also be encompassed by this point of indeterminate size?

No matter where we end up, we need to acknowledge that quantum mechanics is the most successful theory of reality devised so far, so whatever Theory of Everything we're trying to get to, we should keep in mind the truth about the underlying quantum nature of the universe we're in.

Ultimately, we are all quanta. We are created by constructive interference, so saying that we're wavicles also works, but each of us is a unique pattern, and a subset of something larger.

So as we think about there being a duality to our awareness (a left brain/physical, and a right brain/metaphysical), it's interesting to think of our physical existence as it's defined by branching paths within the fifth dimensional probability space and the quantum wave function. In a blog entry called Entangled Neurons, we looked at a new scientific study indicating that quantum entanglement is intrinsic to the process of memory creation, and in Entangled Awareness and OBEs, I said this:

...right at this instant, I am part of a cloud of probabilistic "me"s that are all continuing on the same general path, the same branch. That's true at the quantum level, and it's true at the macro level: all of the tiny random occurrences and inconsequential decisions (shall I put my hand here or here when I push that door open?) tend to cancel each other out, to keep us moving in the same trajectory. It's only when our choice, or chance, or the actions of others create an event that really does split us onto a new fifth-dimensional path that a long-term memory is created.

For years, scientists have been fond of saying that quantum physics has nothing to do with the warm and wet world of living things, but that opinion is now changing. A paper published last year at arxiv.org suggests that DNA is held together using quantum entanglement. In other blog entries like The Quantum Observer and Creativity and the Quantum Universe, we've looked at new evidence that photosynthesis and bird navigation are also utilizing quantum processes. Ideas such as these are the first inklings of a new science called quantum biology, and this all ties very nicely to the idea that life itself is a unique process which is engaged with our space-time in ways that transcend the limits of the "here" and the "now", in the same way that quantum entanglement and superposition seem supremely mysterious until we accept that there is more to the universe than the limited space-time reality we see around us.

Likewise, the new buzz around the evidence that neutrinos have been detected that arrived 60 billionths of a second earlier than the speed of light is very interesting, but I would caution people who says this disproves Einstein's Theory of Relativity: in my opinion, this would only be the case if you don't believe in the existence of extra dimensions. But if these neutrinos somehow took a tiny shortcut outside of spacetime, and essentially "burrowed" through the fifth dimension to arrive a little earlier, that would not violate relativity, and if this effect were proved and confirmed by other experimenters this could well be the first direct evidence of the existence of extra dimensions. How cool would that be??

As I say in song number 1 of the 26 songs I created for this project: Everything Fits Together. I hope that this project has helped to awaken your senses to the possibilities of just how true that phrase really is.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nAS2trDuck

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: New video - Imagining the Third Dimension

Previously in this series:
Wrapping it Up in the Tenth Dimension
Imagining the Ninth Dimension
Imagining the Eighth Dimension
Imagining the Seventh Dimension
Imagining the Sixth Dimension
Imagining the Fifth Dimension
Imagining the Fourth Dimension
Imagining the Third Dimension
Imagining the Second Dimension

Duality and Consciousness

2011-11-11T11:11:00.024-06:00

Happy 11/11/11!

One of the 26 songs I attached to this project is called "Automatic". In it, I talk about the powerful idea put forth by Julian Jaynes in his groundbreaking book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". Jaynes proposed that until about 3,000 years ago, humans lived their lives with their conscious and subconscious minds fully integrated. When the subconscious developed a plan or had an intuition, humans heard this as a "voice" inside their heads, which they often interpreted to be the voices of gods or ancestors. Then something happened: the "narrator" voice of the conscious mind assumed dominance, and the subconscious mind's processes became more submerged. Still, there are a great many activities which we perform better when we can quiet our "narrator voice": driving a car, hitting a golf ball, playing a musical instrument or typing on a keyboard all go better when we can get our narrator voice to stop conducting traffic, saying "do this, now do that", and just let things flow. And yet, despite the advantages of this mode of operation, most of us have been taught to be suspicious of those moments when we stop narrating: we're told to stop daydreaming, get our minds back in the game, and so on.

Most of us are comfortable with the idea that there is some kind of duality to our consciousness. The difference between left brain/right brain approaches to processing the data coming in from our senses is well documented. And with this project, we've often talked about the "me" that is attached to the physical body, and the other parts of our awareness that are more connected outside of space and time. Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's book My Stroke of Insight is amazing to me because it blends these two ideas so beautifully - is the right brain more connected to those larger patterns that are outside of our physical reality? Dr. Taylor provides a compelling personal narrative that tells us this is so.

Here again is where we get into those more metaphysical ideas: what I call "me" is much more than the collection of memories attached to my physical body, and instinct, intuition, inspiration, creativity, and the underlying processes of life itself are part of the gigantic patterns that exist outside of our physical reality. This is a dynamic system we're talking about, with each of us assuming new patterns of awareness, discarding old ones, becoming entrained and entraining others with the wave-like interactions of constructive and destructive interference that are occurring within the extra dimensions to create our observed reality. Is it possible for these patterns to exist completely separate from a physical body? Proponents of out-of-body experiences and lucid dreaming would say yes, and anyone with a sufficiently convincing supernatural story to tell will also be much more likely to accept this possibility.

Anthony Peake's work puts a tighter focus on these ideas - in his 2008 book The Daemon, he offers evidence that each of us have a left brain/physical consciousness called the Eidolon; and we each have a right brain/metaphysical awareness called the Daemon, which has the foreknowledge of what is to come and sometimes "steers" the physical body into better outcomes. In terms of Everett's Many Worlds and my approach to visualizing the dimensions, could this Daemon be an awareness operating from the sixth dimensional phase space of all possible outcomes for our universe, traveling from conception to death with each version of a unique individual as they physically navigate the possible world lines of their fifth dimensional probability space?

I had the pleasure of being interviewed on Anthony's show last month, here's a look at that video again.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0kZG5pGCPk

In entries like Aren't There Really Eleven Dimensions and Why Only Ten, we've talked about how there are ways in which M-Theory's 11 Dimensions are functionally equivalent to the Tenth Dimension: another duality. And of course with our base ten number system, the two "one"s beside each other create another dualistic image. You'll note that for fun, I published today's entry at 11:11 am (my time) on 11/11/11.

Next: We Are All Quanta

Previously in this series:
Wrapping it Up in the Tenth Dimension
Imagining the Ninth Dimension
Imagining the Eighth Dimension
Imagining the Seventh Dimension
Imagining the Sixth Dimension
Imagining the Fifth Dimension
Imagining the Fourth Dimension
Imagining the Third Dimension
Imagining the Second Dimension

Observers and Addictions

2011-11-05T04:11:00.063-06:00

Let's look at this idea more carefully: "a world created by observation/participation". In Imagining the Eighth Dimension, we mentioned a concept from a paper published by Lee Smolin and others at arxiv.org, which proposes that we can have a deeper understanding of general relativity if we accept that "different observers construct different spacetimes, which are observer-dependent slices of phase space". And with this project, we keep returning to Everett's idea that there is an unchanging "set of all possible states" or "phase space" which exists outside of spacetime, and that quantum mechanics makes the most sense when we understand that this is not a process of collapse we are talking about here, it is only a process of observation. Does that mean then that we, as quantum observers, are each creating our own reality? And if so, how much control do we have?

There's no question that each of us is at the center of the observed universe, and even though that might sound like a return to ancient thinking that the sun revolves around the earth, the cosmological horizon is real, and this fact would be just as true for an observer on the other side of our currently observed universe - they too would find themselves to be at the center of a space-time sphere, with their very own unique version of the cosmological horizon.

So here I am in a unique universe created through my participation as a quantum observer, which is part of a 5D probability space (as we discussed in Imagining the Fifth Dimension). Does that mean I'm a part of Wheeler's self-excited circuit, the universe observing itself? Does that make me part of a universal creative force, or as Einstein referred to it, "the Old One"? In fact, am I an aspect of God, observing some unique aspect of My creation? Or am I part of an underlying life force which creates pockets of negative entropy, pushing against the natural decline of the universe? These are all different ways of thinking about the same idea, use whichever one you're the most comfortable with if you feel so inclined. For me, the most important part of this discussion is not what label you place upon this process, but the fact that this way of visualizing our reality presents a strong argument for free will. Yes, there is ultimately only one underlying form, one underlying geometry, but you and I (and all living things) are within something much more interesting. We are each moving points within a fifth dimensional probability space, observing a shared consensus reality which connects us all together, but also each observing our own unique version of that space.

For persons trapped in negative loops of abuse or addiction, this is particularly important to understand. If free will is an illusion, then how can we hope to break out of these patterns? The fifth dimension shows the way. As I say in my song Addictive Personality:

Every day is a new day
Every day you’re back to one
And today can be the new day
When you say you’re finally done

Not all habits are bad, of course, and it's in our nature to be attracted to things that make us feel good. The addictions we're talking about here are the ones that are the opposite of the universal creative force, the ones that conspire to extinguish that "spark" of life which Schrödinger described. Each of us, with our free will, have to be the one to decide whether we're on the path we want to be on, and to recognize that we have the power to change that path if we choose to do so. Does that mean we're magical creatures, capable of changing anything about our reality? Does it mean a starving child in Africa can become rich and famous simply by thinking better thoughts? No. But it also means that we are not the powerless automatons that the hard determinists would have us believe ourselves to be, and that there is a constantly evolving "best possible version" of ourselves that already exists within our fifth dimensional probability space which we each have the potential to get to with the choices we're able to make.

Last entry, in Psychedelics and Surprises, we looked at an article published a few days ago in New Scientist, entitled Drug Hallucinations Look Real in the Brain. The article talks about a new study which demonstrates that - as far as the brain is concerned - there is no difference between what a person sees with their eyes, and what a person sees when taking ayahuasca, a psychoactive drug used weekly by some Brazilian religious groups, and which we talked about in David Jay Brown and Psychedelics. The New Scientist article goes on to explain that ayahuasca shows good promise in the treatment of addiction, which reminded me of this interesting coincidence: as regular readers of this blog will know, I have lived in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan all my life. My province was where some of the most leading edge research into the use of psychedelics to treat addiction was conducted back in the 50's and early 60's, until the new "war on drugs" made it impossible for that research to continue back then.

With my project, I have tried to promote drug-free ways of visualizing what's "outside" of our reality. As a person who has never taken psychedelics and has no plans to do so, I am fascinated by the possibility that having a deeper intuitive understanding of the extra dimensions might actually help someone dealing with addiction or depression. But as I've said before, I'm also grateful to psychedelic experts like David Jay Brown who have embraced this project as another way into a deeper understanding of reality and our participation within its construction.

Next: Duality and Consciousness

Previously in this series:
Wrapping it Up in the Tenth Dimension
Imagining the Ninth Dimension
Imagining the Eighth Dimension
Imagining the Seventh Dimension
Imagining the Sixth Dimension
Imagining the Fifth Dimension
Imagining the Fourth Dimension
Imagining the Third Dimension
Imagining the Second Dimension

Psychedelics and Surprises

2011-10-31T04:11:00.010-06:00

Happy Hallowe'en! One of the surprises for me with this project was how many people from the psychedelics community have embraced this way of visualizing the dimensions: for instance, author and research scientist David Jay Brown, a world-renowned expert on psychedelics, said this about my book: "Imagining the Tenth Dimension is one of the most brilliantly-conceived and mind-stretching books that I've ever encountered." With no psychedelics experience myself, I find this particularly fascinating: in this blog, I've talked about Graham Hancock's amazing book Supernatural, which advances the idea that persons around the world and throughout human history have had experiences and visions when they are in altered states of consciousness (whether those are self-induced trance states, or through the use of psychoactive substances) that show remarkable similarities. Do such experiences "lift the veil" so to speak, and allow people to see actual aspects of the extra dimensions? It's a possibility I find very attractive. In my book and this blog I've explored many other more "out there" concepts that can tie to this: are prescience, deja vu, out of body experiences, lucid dreaming, perhaps even ghosts and spirit voices all examples of how there are patterns of awareness which exist outside of our limited space-time window into reality?

Another of the surprises for me with this project was the people who looked at my helix logo and presumed this was all about Kabbalah, because of the similarities to The Tree of Life (pictured at left). Yes, I see the connections, but I don't recall ever seeing the Tree of Life until after my book was published and comments started to come my way about this coincidence. What I find particularly interesting is that there are schools of thought within the Kabbalah which teach that we can divide our reality into three triads, which can be summed up as the material, the moral, and the intellectual. In the last chapter of my book, I reached a similar conclusion that there are three systems interacting through constructive interference, all of which in their unobserved state can be assembled into the tenth dimension as a "point" of indeterminate size. Those three systems are 1) the physical world, 2) the quantum observer who through constructive interference is actively engaged in observing specific aspects of the other two systems, and 3) the "information equals reality" world of memes, patterns of grouping, or waveforms. Likewise, it's interesting to relate this to Popperian cosmology: philosopher Karl Popper proposed that there are three worlds: the physical, the mind which observes, and mental patterns of information (I talked about all this in greater detail in my blog entry Three Becomes One). Is this recurring idea that there is a physical world, a world created by observation/participation, and an underlying realm of information another example of how Imagining the Tenth Dimension plugs into some deeper truths about our reality? I believe it is. And constructive interference is an important phrase to keep in mind through all this, as it applies to quantum mechanics, the universe as a hologram, Wheeler's self-excited circuit, and the role of life and consciousness in creating this universe or any other.

Next: Observers and Addictions

Edit: The day after this blog was published, my friend Pete Chema pointed out a new article that really ties nicely to this discussion about whether some psychedelics visions might be glimpses into something that is real but "outside" our spacetime reality. Here's a link to the article: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20978-drug-hallucinations-look-real-in-the-brain.html

Previously in this series:
Wrapping it Up in the Tenth Dimension
Imagining the Ninth Dimension
Imagining the Eighth Dimension
Imagining the Seventh Dimension
Imagining the Sixth Dimension
Imagining the Fifth Dimension
Imagining the Fourth Dimension
Imagining the Third Dimension
Imagining the Second Dimension

Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs - October Report

2011-10-29T04:44:00.019-06:00

Previous lists:
. April 08 . May 08 . June 08 . July 08 . August 08
. September 08 . October 08 . November 08 . December 08 .
. Top 100 Blog Entries of 2008 . May 09 . June 09 . July 09
. August 09 . September 09 . October 09 . November 09 .
. December 09 . Top 100 Blog Entries of 2009 .
. January 10 . February 10 . March 10 . April 10 . May 10 .
. June 10 . July 10 . August 10 . September 10 . October 10 .
. November 10 . December 10 . Top 100 Entries of 2010 .
. January 11 . February 11 . March 11 . April 11 . May 11 .
. June 11 . July 11 . August 11 . September 11 .

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

1. Imagining the Second Dimension
2. New video - Poll 77 - Living in a Simulation
3. New video - Poll 78 - LHC and Extra Dimensions
4. New video - Poll 79 - Gravity from the 5th Dimension?
5. Imagining the Fifth Dimension
6. Imagining the Third Dimension
7. Imagining the Fourth Dimension
8. New video - The Pencil Visualization
9. Imagining the Sixth Dimension
10. New video - Poll 80 to 82 - Right Angles and Reality

And as of October 26th, 2011, here are the twenty-six Imagining the Tenth Dimension blog entries that have attracted the most visits of all time. Items marked in bold are new or have risen since last month.

1. Jumping Jesus (1)
2. What's Around the Corner? (2)
3. Mandelbulbs (3)
4. An Expanding 4D Sphere (4)
5. The 5th-Dimensional Camera Project (5)
6. Just Six Things: The I Ching (6)
7. Roger Ebert on Quantum Reincarnation (8)
8. Is Reality an Illusion? (7)
9. Vibrations and Fractals (10)
10. Light Has No Speed (9)
11. Gravity and Love (11)
12. Bees and the LHC (14)
13. How to Time Travel (12)
14. Our Universe Within the Omniverse (15)
15. Creativity and the Quantum Universe (13)
16. 10-10-10 Look Before You Leap (17)
17. Dancing on the Timeline (16)
18. Time Travel Paradoxes (18)
19. Magnets and Morality (19)
20. Changing Your Brain (20)
21. Monkeys Love Metallica (21)
22. Simultaneous Inspiration (22)
23. Complexity from Simplicity (24)
24. Consciousness in Frames per Second (23)
25. Polls Archive 54 - Is Time Moving Faster? (25)
26. Poll 44 - The Biocentric Universe Theory (26)

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

By the way, if you're new to this project, you might want to check out the Tenth Dimension FAQ, as it provides a road map to a lot of the discussions and different materials that have been created for this project. If you are interested in the 26 songs attached to this project, this blog shows a video for each of the songs and provides more links with lyrics and discussion. The Annotated Tenth Dimension Video provides another cornucopia of discussion topics to be connected to over at YouTube. Also, a lot of people are enjoying discussing these ideas with me on my facebook page: facebook.com/rob.bryanton .

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Psychedelics and Surprises

Happy Hallowe'en!

2011-10-28T07:59:00.001-06:00

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeDNdBl6PV4

Here's a little augmented reality gag for your iPhone or Android phone from my studio, Talking Dog. Go to www.talkingdogstudios.com/ar/halloween and use your phone to scan the QR tag there to get started. Happy Hallowe'en!

Next: Psychedelics and Surprises

Timelessness and the Ultimate Ensemble

2011-10-27T04:09:00.002-06:00

If the universe had the least amount of entropy at its beginning, and Schrödinger described life as a unique process which creates "negative entropy", does that mean that in a sense he thought the universe was the most "alive" back at its beginning? Gevin Giorbran's remarkable insight, in his book Everything Forever, was that we're not moving from low entropy to high entropy with our arrow of time: instead we're moving from a high grouping order to a high symmetry order. I like this because it allows for a way to imagine a universal creative force which expresses itself throughout the world line of the universe, and which makes sense when we view our universe as a single data set from a timeless perspective. From our own vantage point, then, both time and anti-time represent the same thing: a naturally occurring return to balance. Ultimately our universe or any other arises from a breaking of symmetry, and "outside" of this system is a return to the underlying fabric of reality: the unobserved tenth dimension, the Ultimate Ensemble, the Teilhardian Omega Point, the Godelian "outside the system", the computational underpinnings behind digital physics or Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, ultimate enlightenment, or the Omniverse. And that's what we're visualizing with every single dimension in this project - how can we perceive any dimension from "outside" of itself, from the truest perspective, which is timelessness?

Next: Psychedelics and Surprises

Previously in this series:
Wrapping it Up in the Tenth Dimension
Imagining the Ninth Dimension
Imagining the Eighth Dimension
Imagining the Seventh Dimension
Imagining the Sixth Dimension
Imagining the Fifth Dimension
Imagining the Fourth Dimension
Imagining the Third Dimension
Imagining the Second Dimension

What is Life?

2011-10-23T04:07:00.001-06:00

If we're trying to build an image which reflects "all aspects of reality", how do life and consciousness fit into this picture? Erwin Schrödinger's definition of life is that it's "a unique process which creates pockets of negative entropy". Physicists talk about the beginning of the universe being the most highly ordered/lowest entropy version of our universe, and how the "arrow of time" represents an overall climb in the amount of entropy, despite the efforts of life within these little pockets where (as Dylan Thomas put it so beautifully) it 'rages against the dying of the light'. This theme of life and consciousness being like a fire, a spark, that somehow engages with space-time and our fifth-dimensional probability space to keep itself moving forward is the theme of a number of the 26 songs I created for this project. I talked about those songs and this way of thinking about life and creativity in a blog entry called Novelty.

The phrase "self-excited circuit" comes from a paper published in 1979 by physicist John Wheeler, you can read about it in the wikipedia article on Digital Physics. As part of his "Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU)", Christopher Langan (who some readers will know as "the smartest man in America") has published an animated version of the simple drawing Wheeler created for his paper on the self-excited circuit, showing a "U" (standing for universe), incorporating an eyeball representing the quantum observer, looking at its "tail" that represents the "information" side of the "information equals reality" concept that we talk about regularly with this project. Wheeler also coined the phrase "'it' from 'bit'"which ties nicely to these discussions.

So is the universe itself a self-excited circuit, that was most excited at the big bang and is slowly winding down from there? Or was the universe in a superposition of possible states until life first emerged somewhere, and began observing more organized versions of the universal wave function from that point on in the world line? The Biocentric Universe theory supports the latter idea. Perhaps Stuart Kauffman's God 2.0 supports the former? I think there's interesting evidence for both ideas, but ultimately I lean more towards the idea that there are organizing patterns in the extra dimensions which exist outside of time and space which have selected this (or any other) universe, and which keep the universe from dissolving into chaos. Gravity and Love is a blog entry from this past December which takes this idea out to a more metaphysical level if you're interested. I have used similar logic to argue for dark matter and dark energy as evidence of extra dimensions.

In my follow-up book to Imagining the Tenth Dimension, which is a collaboration with visual artist Marilyn E. Robertson called O is for Omniverse, we devoted the letter "J" to John Wheeler:

j is for John Wheeler, a famous physicist
who drew a strange eyeball looking at its tail
as a way to imagine that some branches of our line
might be changed in the past as we look back from today
so the branching tree that extends from "now"
is even more surprising: it branches either way