Friday, April 30, 2010

Our Universe Within the Omniverse

This has been an interesting month for new theories being advanced about how our universe fits in with the omniverse. Regular readers of this blog will recall that "omniverse" is the term I've come to prefer for referring to the set of all of the underlying information, all of the multiverses, all universes, and all parallel universe versions of those universes, as a single concept. The terms "multiverse" or "multiverse landscape" also can refer to this same idea, but not as decisively: there are actually many different "flavors" of multiverse being proposed from various camps. As noted in the wikipedia article on "multiverse", physicist Max Tegmark prefers to use the term "ultimate ensemble": omniverse is another way of thinking about this same over-arching idea.

On April 8th, Paul Howard Frampton submitted a paper to arxiv.org which, in his words, presents "a simple, and hopefully convincing, discussion of a solution to the dark energy problem, which arises because the visible universe is well approximated by a black hole." Here is a link to his announcement, and here is a link to the pdf of his paper. Interestingly, his paper contends that there is no need for gravitons to exist, an idea we've explored several times lately in this blog. For instance, the poll question we were running here at the tenth dimension blog last month ended up split absolutely evenly: 50% agreed that gravitons will never be observed because they don't exist, and 50% disagreed.

Last month, in Holograms and Quanta, and Strength of Gravity, Speed of Light, we looked at a new theory from Dr. Erik Verlinde of the University of Amsterdam, which suggested the same idea: just as there are no "liquidons" imparting the quality of liquidity to a collection of H2O molecules, Dr. Verlinde suggests that gravity is also something that arises naturally from our position with the omniverse.

On April 12, the journal Physics Letters B published a new paper by Indiana University physicist Nikodem Poplawski. The Science Daily article about this new theory included the graphic at left, which is a depiction of an Einstein-Rosen bridge, a theoretical construct which could be used to connect one universe to another. Dr. Poplawski's theory appears to be related to this concept. In the National Geographic article about his new theory, author Ker Than described it like this:

Like part of a cosmic Russian doll, our universe may be nested inside a black hole that is itself part of a larger universe.

In turn, all the black holes found so far in our universe—from the microscopic to the supermassive—may be doorways into alternate realities.

According to a mind-bending new theory, a black hole is actually a tunnel between universes—a type of wormhole. The matter the black hole attracts doesn’t collapse into a single point, as has been predicted, but rather gushes out a “white hole” at the other end of the black one, the theory goes.
Isn't it funny to see a concept that science fiction fans have been reading and watching stories about for decades being discussed as if it's a new idea? In comments at my blog and discussions at the tenth dimension forum, I've mentioned a great science fiction novel by John Cramer called "Einstein's Bridge", which is about what happens when a particle accelerator opens up a connection to another universe.

The difference here, of course, is that Dr. Poplawski is proposing new equations that help to explain how this process could actually occur.

Which takes us back to the beginning of this entry: if science is starting to understand how all of these different universes could be connected together, all equally real, all existing simultaneously, and if the distinction between past present and future is meaningless (as Einstein liked to say), then that web of all connections is a way of thinking about the Omniverse. We'll continue looking at this idea of how all these universes fit together next time with an entry called Our Universe as a Dodecahedron.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs - April Report

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 .

Based upon number of views, here are the top blogs for the last thirty days. As always, the number in brackets is the entry's position in the previous month's report.

1. Polls Archive 54 - Is Time Moving Faster? (new)
2. Fourth Spatial Dimension 101 (new)
3. Magnets and Morality (new)
4. Polls Archive 55 - Lying to Children (new)
5. Polls Archive 60 - Quantum and Macro a Continuum? (new)
6. The Forest (new)
7. Polls Archive 59 - Placebos and our Interface With Reality (new)
8. Polls Archive 57 - Will 10-10-10 Be Significant? (new)
9. Polls Archive 58 - Finite But Unbounded (new)
10. Polls Archive 56 - What's Augmented Reality's Future? (new)


And as of April 26th, 2010, 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. Creativity and the Quantum Universe (2)
3. What's Around the Corner? (3)
4. An Expanding 4D Sphere (4)
5. Just Six Things: The I Ching (5)
6. Mandelbulbs (7)
7. Roger Ebert on Quantum Reincarnation (8)
8. Augmented Reality (6)
9. Poll 44 - The Biocentric Universe Theory (11)
10. The Holographic Universe (9)
11. Slices of Reality (10)
12. Poll 43 - Is the Multiverse Real? (12)
13. Alien Mathematics (13)
14. When's a Knot Not a Knot? (15)
15. Seeing Time, Feeling Colors, Tasting Light (14)
16. The Quantum Solution to Time's Arrow (16)
17. The Big Bang is an Illusion (19)

18. Beer and Miracles (18)
19. Urban Garden Magazine (17)
20. Poll 46 - Big Bang an Illusion? (20)
21.
Norway's Reverse Deja Vu (22)

22. Monkeys Love Metallica (new)
23. Consciousness in Frames per Second (new)
24. Modern Shamans (21)
25. Polls Archive 45 - Conscious Computers? (26)
26. The Long Undulating Snake (new)

Which means that these worthy submissions are leaving our top 26 of all time list this month:

The Comedian (23)
Scott McCloud and the Brothers Winn (24)
The Shaman (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. And as always, here's a reminder that the Tenth Dimension Forum is a good place to converse with other people about these ideas.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Our Universe Within the Omniverse

Sunday, April 25, 2010

Audiobook Part 2 - Introduction on YouTube


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee5HAgqxx8s

Next: Our Universe Within the Omniverse

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Tenth Dimension, the Audiobook, on Youtube


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8yWBJ3QlYU

This audiobook is available for download at www.tenthdimension.com/digital. The audiobook is in non-copy-protected mp3 format. You can also download the entire book, Imagining the Tenth Dimension, third edition with additional notes at the end of each chapter, from the same link.

Next: Audiobook Part 2 - the Introduction

Monday, April 19, 2010

Vibrations and Fractals

Last time, in "Vibrations" we returned to the idea that if our reality is defined by extra-dimensional patterns, then some of these will be repeating or oscillating, and the subject of vibrations follows naturally from that idea.

Another idea that comes up regularly when talking about the nature of reality is fractals. Thinking about fractals as recursive, repetitive patterns also gives us a way to think about how a fractal pattern could be thought of as a vibration.

Does this talk seem too nebulous? Here's a youtube movie demonstrating a fascinating program called Photosounder which turns pictures into sound, and sound into pictures. Check it out!


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8MCAXhEsy4

I'm particularly fascinated with moments like these:

0:27 - this is a picture (turned on its side) of a waterfall. At this moment, when the player passes over the water we change to a completely different "glassy" audio texture
1:36 - this image is a representation of DNA, it's what is called a "DNA gel". Ever wonder what your DNA "sounds" like?
1:44 - I love the vaguely industrial connection between the visual and the sound on this image
2:42 - the strangely beautiful "song" of a spider's web
The above movie is really only the tip of a much larger iceberg. The Photosounder channel at youtube and the Photosounder Blog give you lots of additional demonstrations of what's possible with this powerful program, which is available from Photosounder.com (and hey, I'm not affiliated with the company, I just think this is cool software!).

Other blogs where we've talked about fractals, Sierpinski Triangles, Koch Snowflakes, the Golden Ratio, and sacred geometry include Nassim Haramein, Monkeys Love Metallica, The Invariant Set, Just Six Things: the I Ching, and Dreaming of Electric Sheep.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Imagining the Tenth Dimension, the Audiobook, on YouTube

Friday, April 16, 2010

Vibrations


In Fourth Spatial Dimension 101, we said this:

That "long undulating snake" imagery we've used really is a gross oversimplification - the complex web of atoms and molecules, water and energy, choices taken and not taken, and all the potential "worldlines" representing a single person is a vastly more complex shape than a simple hypercube. In both cases, that extra dimensional pattern casts a shadow into the third dimension which moves in specific ways: but a rotating hypercube casts a much more predictable and essentially unchanging shadow than the 3D shadow cast by a living and breathing human being!
In You Are the Point, we looked at the following three illustrations of vibrating strings which are found in Chapter Three of my book. Please refer back to that blog entry if you'd like to read the text that accompanied these illustrations in the book. Afterwards, I said this:

"Looking at the second of these three images, then, helps us to imagine the symmetry we're thinking about here - when the left hand side of that waveform is going up, the right hand is going down, and so on. But let's be clear: even when the string is vibrating freely as in the top image, all those other vibration modes are happening. A high-speed strobe light set to very specific frequencies would be able to reveal (though interference between the frequency of the strobe and the patterns of the vibrating string) the other vibration modes such as the two we're picturing here."

This returns us to the string theory idea that our reality comes from superstrings that are vibrating in the tenth dimension, and the important idea that Kaluza convinced Einstein of: our 4D reality is really resolved at the 5th dimension. But vibrations, waveforms, and repeating patterns are an important idea whether you are talking about physics or metaphysics, and the subject has come up again and again with my project as we explore different ways of thinking about how the reality around us is being created by extra-dimensional patterns that are "outside" the limits of our 4D spacetime.

Which leads us to this charming video that was forwarded to me by my friend Pete Chema of Ten Feet Deep, and ties all of the above together in a simple but profound manner. The speaker heard in this video is British philosopher and writer Alan Watts, an influential thinker who lived from 1915 to 1973, and who devoted his life to finding ways to blend Eastern mysticism with modern science. This video is less than five minutes long, please give it a listen and think about the ideas and pictures we've been looking at in today's blog entry.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWFhMEeGgl8

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Vibrations and Fractals

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Augmented Reality - Faceball

This time we're going to take a little side trip back into the fascinating world of Augmented Reality. Here's a movie demonstrating an interesting little experiment my team at Talking Dog Studios created a couple of days ago. It's a followup to our Expandar and Alice in Wonderland pages which use face tracking, for a form of Augmented Reality that doesn't require you to print out a marker. This one adds the marker back in now, which gives you another layer for possible interactions with the face tracking. By the way, you can find the Faceball page here if you want to try this out yourself.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSGmlmtFmt0

As you'll see, this one works in different ways depending upon whether you have a marker visible to the webcam. We're calling the above video "Faceball Demo 1" because we see this as just the beginning for where this could lead. We're imagining all the fun characters that could be created using this technique, and possibilities for interactive story telling or gaming. Now check out "Faceball Demo 2".


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKIv3Pt6zjI

This time, rather than using a ball, we're mapping the viewer's face in real time to a 3D head. Pretty unusual looking, wouldn't you say? Again, this is just an experiment, but we see some good opportunities coming up for where this idea could take us.

Please comment on the video over at youtube or here at the blog and let us know what you think. The augmented reality division of Talking Dog Studios is constantly working to hone its tool box and your feedback really helps us as we decide what avenues to pursue next. While we're at it, here's a few more Augmented Reality demos we've posted in the last little while:

How Big is the TV?
Shopping for a new big screen TV? This site lets you try out different models and sizes in your home before you go to the store. Or if you click on the "Buy Now" button you can see which retailer is offering the best price for a certain model. Go to www.howbigisthetv.com to try it out yourself.

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

Trend Face
With Imagining the Tenth Dimension, we're always talking about how memes rise and fall over time, creating shapes in the extra dimensions. "Trend Face" lets you look into your webcam and see what words are currently most popular in twitter, or display the latest tweets from a particular account or about a certain search term. If you see something you'd like to keep a memory of, click the photo button and immortalize the moment to your hard drive or share it with your friends on facebook. You can try this one out at www.talkingdogstudios.com/ar/trendface .

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

Augmented Reality Watch
Here's a page that demonstrates how AR could simplify watch shopping. There's a nice little bit of code in this one that allows the marker to disappear, by pasting a bit of the video either side of the marker over top of it in real time. We're expecting that a watch manufacturer is going to see this one and ask us to do an Augmented Reality store for them. If you want to try the demo out yourself go to www.talkingdogstudios.com/ar/watch .

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArXyFFr8n18

May all your days be augmented ones!

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next - Vibrations

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Magnets and Morality

Here's the opening few paragraphs of an amazing article published at MSNBC on March 29th. The article, written by Eric Bland, is entitled "Study: Magnets Can Alter Morality":

Magnets can alter a person's sense of morality, according to a new report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Using a powerful magnetic field, scientists from MIT, Harvard University and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center are able to scramble the moral center of the brain, making it more difficult for people to separate innocent intentions from harmful outcomes. The research could have big implications for not only neuroscientists, but also for judges and juries.

"It's one thing to 'know' that we'll find morality in the brain," said Liane Young, a scientist at MIT and co-author of the article. "It's another to 'knock out' that brain area and change people's moral judgments."

Please read the whole article, this study reaches some surprising conclusions.

As regular readers of this blog know, I love to propose new ideas for how my approach to visualizing the dimensions might reflect back upon the reality we see around us. But every now and then I come across new ideas like the one above which take these ideas in new directions I simply hadn't foreseen but still seem to have a logical connection.

Let's step back for a minute.

In my book, I talked about how some people seem to be able to entrain the thoughts and feelings of others, a sign of a good salesman, an effective politician, or a charismatic leader. Are some persons more likely to be transmitters of strong vibrations which allow them to entrain the thoughts and feelings of those around them, while some others are more likely to become followers because they are more attuned to receiving rather than transmitting?

In Information Equals Reality, we talked about how easy it can be to change your energy, and I described a very simple visualization tool for increasing your alertness that a number of people have told me they found surprisingly effective. In Crossing Your Arms to Change Your Trajectory, we looked at a study which demonstrated that people who cross their arms are more likely to continue to try to solve a difficult problem: more evidence of the strong connections between the mental and the physical. But these connections go surprisingly deep! In entries like Placebos Becoming More Effective?, Placebos and Nocebos, The Placebo Effect, Changing Your Genes, and Changing Your Genes Part 2, we've explored various studies that indicate that not only can changes in attitude and lifestyle change your health (the most obvious result), but this can also change which genes are expressed, and even influence which genes are passed on to your offspring!

In an entry called Magnets and Souls, I quoted Rupert Sheldrake from David Jay Brown's wonderful book Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse. Here's part of what Rupert had to say:
Interestingly, up until the seventeenth century, everyone thought that magnets had souls. The magnet was believed to have a soul, which was how it attracted and repelled other magnets at a distance. In fact, what's happened in science is the old idea of souls has been replaced by fields. The magnetic soul became the magnetic field.
So here we are now with a new scientific study that indicates magnetic pulses applied to a specific position within the brain can disrupt a person's sense of morality: the test subjects appear to be more likely to look at outcomes rather than the moral reasons a person might pursue one path of action over another. Morality seems like one of those high-level functions that should be distributed throughout the mind, but this study appears to reveal that it resides at the junction between the temporal and parietal lobes. I find that to be amazing!

How much concern should we all have about this discovery that a magnetic field can disrupt moral judgment? How big of a worry should this be for those of us in particular who live in big cities where we are continually bathed in increasingly high levels of electromagnetic energy? Definitely, this is a concern worthy of further scientific study.

Last week, in Fourth Spatial Dimension 101, I suggested that our extra-dimensional selves would be an ornate web of interacting patterns, something much more complex than the "long undulating snake" that we start off with in the original animation. Visualizing the energy field that represents a person's physical presence, and their consciousness, and how that might interact with a magnetic field, adds yet another layer of complexity that it appears we now need to consider if we're looking at the whole picture.

Next week we're going to get a little more metaphysical again as we continue this exploration of vibrations and energy: the entry is called "Vibrations".

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Augmented Reality - Faceball

Thursday, April 8, 2010

The Forest


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeILNHXU9zo


This comic is from xkcd.com, a lovely bunch of thought provoking comics are found there. A direct link to this particular one is at http://xkcd.com/721/ . Thank you to my facebook friend Jeffry Sommer for forwarding this one on to me!

Most of the daily emails, facebook messages, and tweets I get surrounding this project are from fans, wanting to discuss the ramifications of all this or just wanting to thank me for opening their minds to new possibilities. In addition, every few weeks I get interesting comments from the occasional teacher. For instance, three weeks ago I heard from Mitchell Daar, a Middle School Math Teacher at Bernard Zell Anshe Emet Day School in Chicago. Mitch had this to say:

"...your video has been an excellent catalyst for real, poignant, outside the box conversations in my classroom... the conversations that your movie sparked were some of the best I have ever experienced as a teacher."

Then, at the end of March a visitor to the tenth dimension forum, calling themselves "Redmirian", posted a very nice analogy for visualizing the enfolded nature of spatial dimensions, with each new dimension affording a new degree of freedom that was unavailable from the one before. I emailed Redmirian asking for permission to quote the analogy in this blog and possibly produce an animation of it some day. I received this message back and discovered that "Redmirian" was the handle for yet another teacher, this one from England:

"Thanks for the email and the comments about my analogy.

I would be flattered if you used it in a blog entry and I am quite happy for you to quote it and discuss it and included references to me.

My actual name is Nigel Evans. I am a science teacher (head of chemistry) at an independent co-ed boarding school in Oxfordshire in the UK. The school is Bloxham School.

I have been fascinated by the physical sciences all my life and in particular the ideas of multi-dimensionality. I saw your video on youtube and then visited your website. I found the video truly enlightening as it brought the 10 dimensions to life in a new way. I was discussing it with my wife and children which is how the analogy of forest came about."

Here's the analogy Nigel came up with, see what you think. And once you're done reading this, you can go to his entry at the tenth dimension forum where you'll see that he has proposed some other interesting analogies as well.
The first 3 dimensions are easy for people to understand but then we need some assistance. To imagine the 4th dimension, we think of walking in a forest along a footpath. That could be thought of as being our experience with the footpath being the 4th dimension of duration. We walk along the footpath as we age from the past to the future. We cannot back-track along the path. As we walk along we see there are other paths along the footpath which branch off and we have to make decisions about which route to follow. Once we have passed a junction we cannot go back and choose another path. This is our reality.

The junctions along our path lead to alternative 'parallel' places and so these are in the 5th dimension. We cannot reach these parallel places once we have passed the junction but if we could back-track then we could return to a junction and branch off.
Alternatively, it is possible to leave our foot path and walk through the forest directly to the parallel places. These routes through the forest are in the 6th dimension and allow us to travel directly to the alternative parallel places at the end of the paths which branched off from our path.

So if we can travel in the 4th dimension we can only move along one path in one direction.

If we could travel in the 5th dimension we could back track to a junction and change a decision and head off on another path.

If we could access the 6th dimension then it would be like having a map of the forest which showed us all the paths and where they lead to. This would allow us to move freely through the forest from place to place and get to places which are not directly connected to where we are on our path by using the 6th dimension.

The 7th dimension is our entire forest and through the 7th dimension we connect to other forests via other paths. If we were able to access the 7th dimension we could stand at the edge of our forest and see paths leading to other forests. We follow one path heading for another forest and we are traveling in the 7th dimension. We pass other paths leading off our path which lead to still more forests but we cannot see exactly where they are heading and which forest we are going to. These other paths branching off and leading to the other forests are the 8th dimension.

If we were able to see a much larger map of all the forests and where they were in relation to each other and how to get from one to another directly that would be the 9th dimension. A 9th dimensional being could move to anywhere on the 'map' at will.
The 10th dimension would be all the forests and all the paths all taken as one. I guess a 10th dimensional being would exist in all parts of all the forests simultaneously.
Thank you Nigel for this delightfully simple analogy. And thank you to all the teachers I've heard from in the almost four years since I've launched this project who have enjoyed the "philosophy of physics" discussions with their students that my project has been able to stimulate.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next - Magnets and Morality

PS - Here's a demo video for that "Miegakure" video game mentioned in the XKCD comic:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhBoY6s-Fhw

Monday, April 5, 2010

Fourth Spatial Dimension 101


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

The above video makes it very clear in its description at youtube that its author believes this has nothing to do with our concept of 4D as spacetime. Nonetheless, it shows multiple visual examples that apply to the "long undulating snake" concept I've talked about with my project from the outset. Am I a 3D shadow of my 4D self? And is that 4D self projected from a 5D hologram that includes many other possible versions of myself? That's the conclusion that seems to align with multiple theories of cosmology, while leaving room for more metaphysical discussions as well.

It's interesting to see how many comments there are on youtube from people suggesting that this video shows a way to understand how ghosts can appear and disappear, or pass through walls, or come from another time and place, another position with the 4D continuum. I suspect that such suggestions do not sit well with the creator of this video, but I of course have discussed similar possibilities from time to time.

But for me, I have to keep returning to this important point. I agree with this video! The fourth dimension is not time. Time is a direction, not a dimension. Saying that "time" is the fourth dimension would be like saying "forward" is the third dimension: both are directions, and both could be thought of as directions in any spatial dimension. "Forward" has its backward, "time" has its anti-time, and when you pair the two opposing directions you are thinking about a full spatial dimension using arbitrary labels.

Is the third dimension made from length, width, and depth? Sure, those labels work together. So do pitch, yaw, and roll. So could east/west, north/south, up/down: as long as you come up with three ways of thinking that are at right angles to each other, you're on the right track. But because these dimensions enfold one another, it's not really relevant to say that "forward" is only a direction in the third dimension: depending upon your frame of reference you could apply "forward/backward" to any spatial dimension, including the fourth. That goes for any spatial manipulation terms you can think of, which is why "branching" and "folding" have their usefulness in these discussions but they're only part of many ways of thinking about all this.

So. Some people think discussions of fourth-dimensional spatial objects like hypercubes have nothing to do with discussions of the fourth dimension as spacetime. In Playing Games in Extra Dimensions, we looked at a lovely iPhone/iPod app called Hipercubo. This game was created by Brazil's Roger Sodré, of Studio Avante. While Roger tells me he is a long-time fan of Imagining the Tenth Dimension, he is also another person who thinks spatial 4D is a separate concept from spacetime 4D. Here's one way of blending these two ideas together.

Try to imagine a 4D hypercube as viewed from the fifth dimension. The shape will be static and unchanging, the hypercube is always a hypercube. Now imagine the shape representing a human being from birth to death as viewed from the fifth dimension. That "long undulating snake" imagery we've used really is a gross oversimplification - the complex web of atoms and molecules, water and energy, choices taken and not taken, and all the potential "worldlines" representing a single person is a vastly more complex shape than a simple hypercube. In both cases, that extra dimensional pattern casts a shadow into the third dimension which moves in specific ways: but a rotating hypercube casts a much more predictable and essentially unchanging shadow than the 3D shadow cast by a living and breathing human being!

Let's close this entry by looking at the following video, which is my second most popular on youtube (after the three versions I've posted of my original Imagining the Tenth Dimension animation). It discusses the confusions surrounding 4D as four spatial dimensions that have nothing to do with time. It is built around the M-Theory claim that there are 11 dimensions, ten of which are spatial and one of which is "time": it's called "Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?".



Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: The Forest

Friday, April 2, 2010

Polls Archive 60 - Quantum and Macro a Continuum?

Poll 60: "The so-called 'dividing line' between the quantum and the macro realms is completely artificial, it is really all part of the same continuum." Poll ended March 17 2010. 93 % agreed, while the remaining 7 % disagreed.

This, of course, is one of the big ones. We keep reading mainstream science articles which suggest that the quantum world is completely separate from the physical world we see around us, but we also keep reading about scientists who have demonstrated quantum entanglement with larger and larger molecules. Where is the dividing line really, and why does it seem to keep moving more and more into our macro world? One of the commonly used arguments is that quantum effects have nothing to do with our "warm and wet" reality: but in entries like Creativity and the Quantum Universe and Holograms and Quanta, I've talked about (and provided links to) new observations and theories which suggest the natural world is using quantum effects for photosynthesis, migratory navigation, and perhaps even consciousness.

In addition, it does seem that this acceptance of a direct connection from the quantum to the macro world is being advanced more and more in leading theories of cosmology. As someone who has been beating that drum with this project for almost four years now, it's great to see the gradual shift in thinking that is happening.

The other part of this idea that I've been proposing, though, still remains to be embraced by the mainstream - in my book and in entries like The Fifth Dimension is Spooky, I've been insisting that the "strangeness" of quantum effects like entanglement and tunneling makes much more sense when we realize that our "now" is in the fifth dimension rather than the fourth. That additional degree of freedom that the fifth dimension provides, with it being at "right angles" to our spacetime, gives us a way to visualize how the spooky action at a distance that Einstein was so uncomfortable with only seems that way when we believe that our reality is confined to the limits of 4D spacetime.

I've talked before about how Einstein eventually embraced the theory proposed to him in 1919 by Kaluza, which says that the field equations for gravity and light are resolved at the fifth dimension for our 4D spacetime. Fully incorporating the implications of that statement into a reality where we realize that our 4D "now" is being observed one planck frame at a time from the wave function of possible paths which the fifth dimension provides gives, in my opinion, an intuitive way to understand the continuum between the the quantum and macro worlds which this poll question was examining.


And as I've been fond of pointing out, this also gives us a way to understand not just Everett's Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, but also why the fifth dimension from our perspective appears to be "curled up at the planck length": it's because of the tiny planck-length frames of the fifth dimension that we are moving within as we observe our 4D spacetime reality.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Fourth Spatial Dimension 101

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