Thursday, June 28, 2012

Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs - June 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
. January 12 . February 12 . March 12 . April 12 . May 12 .


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

1. Poll 87 - Many Worlds, Fossils and Dinosaurs
2. Poll 89 - Is Many Worlds as True as Natural Selection?
3. Poll 90 - Neutrinos and the Laws of Physics
4. Time Crystals
5. Imagining the "Zeroth" Dimension
6. Imagining the First Dimension
7. Cadbury Eggs and the Sixth Dimension
8. Poll 91 - Free Energy Within Ten Years?
9. New video - Connecting Zero to Ten
10. New video - Wrapping It Up Part One.



And as of June 26th, 2012, 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. The Pencil Visualization (2)
3. What's Around the Corner? (3)
4. New Video - Imagining the Eighth Dimension (8)
5. Is Reality an Illusion? (5)
6. Mandelbulbs (4)
7. Bees and the LHC (7)
8. Quantum Weirdness and Water (14)
9. 10-10-10 Look Before You Leap (10) 
10. Gravity and Love (9)
11. The 5th-Dimensional Camera Project (6)  
12. Brain Pickings (25)
13. Time Travel Paradoxes (12) 
14. Vibrations and Fractals (11)
15. Gravity and Light from the Vacuum (18)
16. An Expanding 4D Sphere (13)
17. Light Has No Speed (16) 
18. Just Six Things: The I Ching (15)
19. Thrive Movement (19)
20. Changing Your Brain (17) 
21. Duality and Consciousness (new)
22. Roger Ebert on Quantum Reincarnation (20)
23. Poll 85 - No Quantum/Classical Divide? (new)
24. Photons and Free Will (22)
25. Our Universe Within the Omniverse (21)
26. Magnets and Morality (23)


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

 Simultaneous Inspiration (24)
 How to Time Travel (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

Thursday, June 21, 2012

What makes 7th and 8th Dimension Unique?

Here's an excellent question that was passed on to me from "Sevireth" via YouTube's messaging system. With Sevireth's permission, I'm publishing their question and my response.

I am trying to propagate your system of visualizing the higher dimensions to other people, but due to limited time and attention provided by a conversation (and everybody having ADD nowadays, especially on the internet) I have to come up with laconic ways of describing each dimension. In this way I come up with easy to present and understand concepts of what moving in each dimension makes a quantum observer observe changing around them.
It goes as follows: movements in first three dimensions usually need no explanation, so there's little to that.
Movement along the line of 4th dimension will make an observer see the universe around them change — turn younger or older depending of direction within the dimension. Actually -seeing- is only allowed in space-time, not just space, due to light taking its sweet time there's all that too.
Movement in the 5th dimension will allow the observer to choose a 4D path among all of the possible ones, will allow them to see the twists and turns of the 4D line caused by choice, chance and choice of others.
Movement in the 6th dimension is not principally different from movement in the 5th, it's still changing the same universe, but here the observer is not hindered by cause-and-effect relations, and is capable of freely choosing to observe any possible state of the given universe.
Movement (of a 6D universe at this point) along a line in the 7th dimension will change the universe itself — to a different one, with different physical constants. If a universe were to move too far in the 7th dimension, it would break apart, as at a certain point physical laws will become too screwed up to allow a coherent system to represent itself. Even though somewhere even farther on that line universes exist, they're just bizzarely different.
Moving a universe in the 8th dimension will change it just as well, but this time in some other way; if we assume movement in 7D will change, say, the constant of the speed of light, then moving in the 8th dimension will change the strength of gravity or some other important constant. As you mentioned in your videos, 7th and 8th dimension are more about the scope of reference, the values an observer chooses to observe changing.

This is where my imagination hits a wall. I realize it's not really possible to move in or even observe the 10th dimension, but I don't quite understand the ninth. I grasp something along the lines of "the ninth dimension somehow deciding which systems of physical laws would represent a coherent universe and which won't", but how a point (a 6D universe) would change if it were to shift its position in the 9th dimension? Would a universe that previously worked just fine fall apart because it's physical laws, however sensible a moment before, suddenly stop making sense only because they're in a different 9D position?
If it only provides an additional degree of freedom — like the 6th dimension does, allowing us to ignore limitations of causality — then what limitations does it allow to transcend? What ARE limitations of the 7th and 8th dimensions?

Here's my answer:
Good job! Here's how I think about it.

We always have to keep in mind with each of these dimensions that there are different "versions" or "states" for each. There's not just one third dimension, there's a series of third dimensions that make up a 4D duration. You understand this but we have to keep that in mind as we move through the extra dimensions (physicists prefer "extra" to "higher" because it's not like if we look into the sky we're seeing higher dimensions and down to the ground we're seeing lower ones, it's just semantics really but that's something to keep in mind).

The other thing that happens consistently is with each version of a dimension if you can think of it in its entirety, or as its "phase space", then that becomes a point in the additional spatial dimension, which is at right angles to the one you're currently examining. So the entirety of 3D space becomes a point in the fourth dimensional duration. The entirety of a 4D timeline connects to a probability space of 5D causally connected outcomes. The entirety of a 5D "spacetime tree" becomes part of the 6D phase space of all possible states for a physical universe such as ours, which includes all the non-causally connected durations. This 6D phase space becomes a point in the 7th dimension. If that point were to move, it would be moving to a point representing some other universe with different physical laws, or a universe which somehow remains coherent while some aspect of its physical laws is changing. Ignoring for a moment that some physicists have produced evidence that  our universe's laws may have changed somewhat back at the very beginning before settling in, we know that our universe is now an unmoving point within the seventh dimension and beyond, because our universe has locked in physical constants which do not change.

So from here on we're not talking about our own universe because it's "locked in" at the seventh dimension, and that's interesting to compare to the string theory idea that our universe is embedded within a d7 "brane", or membrane.

So let's imagine a line in the seventh dimension connecting to a point representing some other universe. If there was just one constant (like gravity) changing along that line, then other universes with the same gravity as ours would not be on that line. If some or all of the constants were changing proportionally along that line, there would still be lots of other universes not on that line, so we need the additional degree of freedom afforded by the 8th dimension to be able to freely slide through this 8D phase space representing all possibly physical universes.

So now we get to the 9th dimension, and it's just like thinking about the limitations of the previous ones. Our "flatlander ant" needed the third dimension to pop from one position to another within his 2D plane. As I'm moving through 4D space-time I can't suddenly be on the other side of the planet because there are things which are impossible - I would need to use the fifth dimension to pop from one point to another without traveling through the intermediate duration. Or we would need the 7th dimension to pop from one 6D universe's phase space to another. So likewise, the 9th dimension is what you move through to pop from one position to another within the 8D phase space representing all possible physical universes, and the 9th dimension includes patterns which cannot be expressed as physical universes at all.

When you take the entirety of the ninth dimension's phase space and perceive that as a single unchanging point, you are in the tenth dimension, which is ten dimensions of space without time. M theory says there are ten spatial dimensions plus time and counts that as 11. I say time isn't really a dimension, it's just a direction, and as soon as you add "time" to the tenth dimension you are spilled back into the other dimensions to create a universe such as ours or any other.
That's my two bits, good luck!
I appreciate your interest, and you're ongoing support, Sevireth. Many thanks!

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

Monday, June 18, 2012

New video - We are All Quanta


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvGXyturX3Q

Also check out this recent video from my YouTube channel - Duality and Consciousness:
A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpT5btw_paY

Next: What Makes the 7th and 8th Dimensions Unique?

Friday, June 15, 2012

Where'd All the Dark Matter Go?

Here's a link to an article published at phys.org, entitled "Serious blow to dark matter theories? New study finds mysterious lack of dark matter in Sun's neighborhood". The following image and caption also accompanied the article:

This annotated artist’s impression shows the Milky Way galaxy. The blue halo of material surrounding the galaxy indicates the expected distribution of the mysterious dark matter. New measurements based on the movements of stars show that the amount of dark matter in this region around the Sun is far smaller than predicted and have indicated that there is no significant dark matter at all in our neighbourhood. The blue sphere centred on the Sun’s position shows the approximate size of the newly surveyed volume, but not its precise shape. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada
 The opening paragraph of the article pretty well sums it up, for more please follow the link:
(Phys.org) -- The most accurate study so far of the motions of stars in the Milky Way has found no evidence for dark matter in a large volume around the Sun. According to widely accepted theories, the solar neighbourhood was expected to be filled with dark matter, a mysterious invisible substance that can only be detected indirectly by the gravitational force it exerts. But a new study by a team of astronomers in Chile has found that these theories just do not fit the observational facts. This may mean that attempts to directly detect dark matter particles on Earth are unlikely to be successful.
And the final note appended to this article gives us this very specific information:
Theories predict that the average amount of dark matter in the Sun's part of the galaxy should be in the range 0.4-1.0 kilograms of dark matter in a volume the size of the Earth. The new measurements find 0.00±0.07 kilograms of dark matter in a volume the size of the Earth.
Hmm, quite the head scratcher! It's almost like the act of observing dark matter changes its nature, from something indeterminate and amorphous to something much more specific. Now what, what does that remind us of?

Does Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics allow for the possibility that observation causes something to not be observed? At first, this seems like a contradiction. But with this project we've talked often about how this logic works when applied to our physical reality: if all possible outcomes connected to "now" really do exist within the underlying quantum wave function, then observing one outcome doesn't mean the others somehow disappear, it only means that we're not observing them. By observing the version of the universe where I had an apple and half a protein bar for today's breakfast, it's now impossible for me to observe the version where I had bacon and eggs this morning.  But Everett's theory says that those "other" versions of the universe really do continue to exist even though we can't see them.

So what's unique about our solar system that would cause dark matter to disappear within our vicinity? Well, how about the fact that there are so many lifeforms actively engaged with the quantum wavefunction, not just passively observing random outcomes but sometimes actually choosing one path or another? Could such a concentration of observers be "adding focus", so to speak? Since the beginning of this project I've always maintained that dark matter will eventually be used to confirm the physical existence of the other universes that are "just around the corner in time", as I say in my song The Unseen Eye.

Think about this: the standard imagery used to describe gravity is to think of space-time as a flat rubber sheet, and to think about massive objects causing depressions in that sheet. And the standard description of the cosmological horizon is that no matter where an observer is in the universe, they will find themselves to be right at the center. So if I take these ideas and now think of our universe's fifth-dimensional probability space as a flat rubber sheet, here's what I'm visualizing: vast expanses of that sheet will lie undisturbed, as a superimposition of possible states. But here and there we'll see places where the sheet is distorted, and if we could observe the entire universe with the same degree of accuracy that the astronomers in the above article were able to achieve within the vicinity of our solar system, that would be our guide to finding the scattered locations throughout the universe where life has taken hold. And according to these new findings each of these distortions would be where there is less dark matter as a result of those concentrations of quantum observers!

Is this a flight of fancy, a conjecture, with no math to back it up? Of course! As always, please keep in mind this project is a creative exploration of ideas, food for thought being tossed out for other minds to munch on.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob

Next: New Video - We are All Quanta

Monday, June 11, 2012

Creating Wormholes - Getting Closer

Point. Line. Plane. Repeat. That's the point-line-plane postulate, the accepted methodology for visualizing any number of spatial dimensions.

Line. Branch. Fold. Repeat. That's the logic my project uses, and it really is the same idea, particularly in the way that you can start at any arbitrary dimension with any step in this three-step process, and continue on up from there.

But one of the sticking points for my project is this commonly asked question: how do you fold a dimension?

And the answer I usually give is to point people to the wikipedia article on wormholes, and the accompanying picture shown here which depicts a dimension being folded over on itself to create an instantaneous connection between two points that would ordinarily be widely separated. In my 2008 blog entry on the subject of wormholes I proposed that wormholes passing through one dimension or another would have different effects, based upon the logic of how one dimension's degree of freedom is different from another's based upon the logic of my approach to visualizing the dimensions. As you'll see in the article below, some wormholes have been proposed that would take us instantaneously to other universes with different basic physical laws, while others would allow us to jump to other points in the space or the space-time of our own universe.

Still, there are people who remain unconvinced. "Wormholes are science fiction", they say, "not something that can actually be done". And to the extent that no one has created a stable wormhole yet, that's correct, but wormholes are still a burgeoning area of research, as theoretical physicists develop and refine the ideas first put forth by some of the great minds of the twentieth century, including Einstein and Wheeler.

Now I'd like to show you some of the opening paragraphs from a recent New Scientist article, written by Marcus Chown, entitled Intergalactic Subway: All Aboard the Wormhole Express. Please click on the link to read the whole article.

You probably won't be surprised to learn that no one has yet come close to constructing... a wormhole. One reason is that they are notoriously unstable. Even on paper, they have a tendency to snap shut in the blink of an eye unless they are propped open by an exotic form of matter with negative energy, whose existence is itself in doubt.

Now, all that has changed. A team of physicists from Germany and Greece has shown that building wormholes may be possible without any input from negative energy at all. "You don't even need normal matter with positive energy," says Burkhard Kleihaus of the University of Oldenburg in Germany. "Wormholes can be propped open with nothing." 

The findings raise the tantalising possibility that we might finally be able to detect a wormhole in space. Civilisations far more advanced than ours may already be shuttling back and forth through a galactic-wide subway system constructed from wormholes. And eventually we might even be able to use them ourselves as portals to other universes. 

Wormholes first emerged in Einstein's general theory of relativity, which famously shows that gravity is nothing more than the hidden warping of space-time by energy, usually the mass-energy of stars and galaxies. Soon after Einstein published his equations in 1916, Austrian physicist Ludwig Flamm discovered that they also predicted conduits through space and time. 

But it was Einstein himself who made detailed investigations of wormholes with Nathan Rosen. In 1935, they concocted one consisting of two black holes, connected by a tunnel through space-time. Travelling through their wormhole was only possible if the black holes at either end were of a special kind. A conventional black hole has such a powerful gravitational field that material sucked in can never escape once it has crossed what is called the event horizon. The black holes at the end of an Einstein-Rosen wormhole would be unencumbered by such points of no return. 

Einstein and Rosen's wormholes seemed a mere curiosity for another reason: their destination was inconceivable. The only connection the wormholes offered from our universe was to a region of space in a parallel universe, perhaps with its own stars, galaxies and planets. While today's theorists are comfortable with the idea of our universe being just one of many, in Einstein and Rosen's day such a multiverse was unthinkable. 

Fortunately, it turned out that general relativity permitted the existence of another type of wormhole. In 1955, American physicist John Wheeler showed that it was possible to connect two regions of space in our universe, which would be far more useful for fast intergalactic travel. He coined the catchy name wormhole to add to black holes, which he can also take credit for. 

The trouble is the wormholes of Wheeler and Einstein and Rosen all have the same flaw. They are unstable. Send even a single photon of light zooming through and it instantly triggers the formation of an event horizon, which effectively snaps shut the wormhole. 

This article continues with an excellent overview of the different advances in this field, bringing us to more detailed discussion of these most recent theories around the promise of us actually being able to create stable wormholes.

What's a wormhole? I would describe it as "what happens when you fold a dimension". What a simple idea, and yet what profound implications for the future that idea holds!

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

Next: Where'd All the Dark Matter Go?

Saturday, June 2, 2012

Poll 93 - One Inevitable Future?

Poll 93 - "Martin Rees says 'if the Earth's history were re-run, it could end up with a quite different biosphere.' This means that for each of us our future is not inevitable, and both choice and chance are part of this equation." Poll ended May 30, 2012. 89.8% agreed while the remainder did not.

At first glance it might seem that this poll is asking the same question as the previous one, since both use the same quote from Sir Martin Rees. The previous poll asked for people to agree or disagree with this statement: "In his book 'Just Six Numbers', cosmologist Martin Rees says this: 'if the Earth's history were re-run, it could end up with a quite different biosphere.' This demonstrates that there is not just one inevitable timeline for our universe."

Why ask such similar questions? What I was trying to discern was whether visitors to this blog would be more inclined to disagree if I specifically brought "choice" into the discussion. After all, couldn't someone still argue that free will is an illusion while acknowledging that the quantum wave function and cosmology allow for randomness to occur? As it turns out, the responses to both of those polls saw very similar results, and if anything we saw a slight increase in agreement when the word "choice" was added.

Clearly, this skewing has more to do with the fact that people who are fans of my "new way of thinking about time and space" are the ones more likely to be answering these poll questions. I do find it interesting, though, to see the scientific studies which indicate that our decision-making processes happening "behind the scenes" choose one action over another substantially sooner than when our conscious minds feel they are making the decision. For these studies to say free will is an illusion, though, they have to ignore the probabilistic nature of our quantum reality, insisting that only one possible outcome exists, so no matter how far back in time we trace the electro-chemical processes that resulted in a decision being made, we have to assume that only one outcome could possibly have occurred.

There is a way to acknowledge these probabilistic outcomes that we've talked about before: it's called decoherence. There is a wave function of possible outcomes. One outcome is observed, at which point the other outcomes no longer matter because they are now "decoherent" to the universe we are observing. But the very same logic works for discussing free will: by choosing to turn left at this intersection, I am now not part of the universe where I chose to turn right. Everett's Many Words Interpretation says both universes continue to exist, while the dogma embraced by the majority of quantum physicists in the twentieth century was that the wave function is collapsed, and those other possibilities disappear.

Which viewpoint is correct? I'm with Everett on this one, which will be no surprise to anyone familiar with this project. Why does it matter? Because Everett was willing to accept that these branching timelines were still probabilistically connected. Which means that even if I made a decision that turned out to be wrong today, I can still choose a different action tomorrow, and eventually end up in the universe where I did make the right choice right from the beginning. Until some major "cusp" event occurs which splits me apart irrevocably, I continue on as a part of a probabilistic cloud of possible "me"s that Everett says really do exist. For me, that gives me hope for the future, and a reason to believe that what's occurring right here and right now is not just randomness. Embrace your probability space!

And enjoy the journey.

Rob Bryanton

Next: Creating Wormholes - Getting Closer

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