Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Scientific American on Rob Bryanton

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.
Rob’s videos demonstrate the medium being used as an engaging way of explaining complex scientific ideas.
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 (edit: as of the end of June 2012 he's now up around 250 million!). It was Tom who recommended to Ben Good that he take a look at my project.  Thanks Tom! Near the end of his article, Ben returns to the discussion of my videos, and offers this:
While the respect for professional scientists is important and understandable, it shouldn’t be at the expense of amateur scientists and enthusiasts... YouTube began life as a place for amateur film makers to show their wares, it would be a shame if in its rise to becoming a media dominant force it lost the considered lay people like Rob.
Well said, Ben!. 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

Monday, December 26, 2011

Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs - December 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 . 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

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

New Video - Imagining the Sixth Dimension


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

Next: Scientific American on Rob Bryanton

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Quantum Weirdness and Water

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

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Gravity and Light from the Vacuum

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

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs- November 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 . 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

Friday, November 25, 2011

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Monday, November 21, 2011

Friday, November 18, 2011

We are All Quanta


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpT5btw_paY

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

Friday, November 11, 2011

Duality and Consciousness

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

Saturday, November 5, 2011

Observers and Addictions

Last time, we looked at a recurring idea that comes from a number of different schools of thought: that there is a physical world, a world created by observation/participation, and an underlying realm of information. This time, let's look at one of those ideas 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

Monday, October 31, 2011

Psychedelics and Surprises

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

Saturday, October 29, 2011

Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs - October 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 . 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

Friday, October 28, 2011

Happy Hallowe'en!


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

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Timelessness and the Ultimate Ensemble

"The brighter the light, the darker the shadow. Our universe arises from a breaking of an underlying symmetry."
- Rob Bryanton

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?

The video for Imagining the Ninth Dimension provides one way of thinking about this – it shows how each dimension, perceived in its entirety as a single timeless point, becomes a point on the surface of a finite but unbounded hypersphere in the next dimension. Physicist and author Frank Wilczek recently put forth two papers which add a very interesting spin on this idea of extra-dimensional patterns that reside within a timeless whole as well. Wilczek proposes that just as there are naturally emerging crystal structures in the third dimension, this same effect could be happening within what he calls “Time Crystals” as well. Does a phrase like Time Crystals sound like science fiction? You bet it does, but Frank Wilczek is a Nobel prize-winning physicist so we should take a serious look at this creative new idea.

And speaking of novel approaches to visualizing reality, next entry is going to be called Psychedelics and Surprises. Enjoy the journey! 


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

Sunday, October 23, 2011

What is Life?

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. Love and Gravity is a blog entry from a year ago 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
Here's a video showing the letters "I" and "J" from that book, you can see a lot more if you go to omniverse.tv

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA_epL_rEW4

Next: Timelessness and the Ultimate Ensemble

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

Tenth Dimension Vlog playlist