Physical Dimensions

Zero is powerful because it is infinity's twin. They are equal and opposite, yin and yang. They are equally paradoxical and troubling. The biggest questions in science and religion are about nothingness and eternity, the void and the infinite, zero and infinity.

- Science Writer Charles Seife, in his book Zero: the Biography of a Dangerous Idea

Last August I started a more in-depth series about the nature of each dimension, but I started with Imagining the Second Dimension. Some people have asked why didn't I go right back to the beginning, so let's try that now. Here's how I would start this discussion:

With Imagining the Tenth Dimension, we start from a zero, which some would call a "zeroth" (or "zero-th", if you prefer) dimension, and we move to the first, second, and beyond using a repeating logical structure to eventually end up at a timeless ultimate ensemble.  When you get right down to it, that's what every respectable TOE (Theory of Everything) needs to describe: some underlying "thing" that all else is derived from. Otherwise, you're back to the "turtles all the way down" joke that often comes up in these discussions. Reconciling this timeless everything (which with my project I'm calling the tenth dimension in its unobserved state) with the zero that we start from (a point of indeterminate size) is the mind-blowing concept we arrive at with my project once we have imagined all ten dimensions.

We began this entry with a quote from Charles Seife's Zero: the Biography of a Dangerous Idea, a book which discusses the relatively recent origin of this most powerful of numbers. Why does Seife call zero a dangerous idea? As an example, his preamble chapter includes an anecdote about a billion dollar warship that was suddenly dead in the water when a software bug resulted in a "divide by zero" error which completely crashed the computers running the ship. Then, chapter one begins with these thoughts:

     The simplest most straightforward way of summing all numbers is to sum the equal but opposite numbers together as shown above. So for a moment we will imagine that the correct sum of all numbers does sum up to and equal zero. Except this means that we need to change the value of zero away from being "no" things. We need to treat zero as the largest value in the mathematical system which actually includes the two already vast infinities of positive and negative numbers. Suddenly zero has become an infinite whole that contains all other numbers. Every positive and every negative number on the real number plane is summing or combining together to form an ultimate number of absolute value. Obviously this is not math as we know it. This is a math without time, without process, a math of truly infinite values.

    So we have made a dramatic change and the next step is to see the effect that changing the value of zero has had on the value of other numbers. If we are going about this bravely, as if we are imaginatively exploring a series of ideas, and so the brain is actually working, we notice that the values of other numbers have also changed, transformed in the same shift that we have taken with zero. Ordinarily the nothing of zero is a foundational axiom. Our foundation has shifted dramatically. What now is the value of one or two?

    If zero is seen to contain all other numbers, then logically all other numbers must have a lesser value than that of zero. If zero is the largest value, the only way there can be lesser values is if we remove some measure of value from the whole of zero. For example, suppose that we take away a (-1) from zero. What remains in the absence of that (-1)? Zero is still very large but zero is no longer an absolute value containing all other numbers. Something has been removed from it. But what value does zero transform into to show that loss?

    The answer is simply that zero minus (-1) equals 1. The missing (-1) causes zero to transform into the value 1. If zero contains all numbers within it, and we take away a value, zero then contains all numbers except the removed value. If we remove a negative one from zero the value of zero records that loss by transforming into a positive one. It still contains all other numbers besides (-1). So it is still a very large number like zero. But it is no longer the complete whole of all numbers. It is one. A very large number one.

    So if we treat what just happened as the logical rule we can now discover the values of other numbers in this system. For example, one is the sum of all numbers, so it contains within it all numbers, except (-1) is removed. The number two is the sum of all numbers except (-2) is missing, so it is also near zero but its content is less than zero and less than one. The number three contains all other numbers except (-3) so it is very large but smaller than two, one, and zero. And so on, and so on. The transformation that has happened is not simply an inverse reversal of ordinary mathematics, rather in this mathematical system, the value of a number decreases as we count toward greater numbers, since more of the negative numbers are being removed and placed somewhere else.

    Now, I should point out, just for the sake of clarity, that switching to the negative, the number (-1) is a combination of all numbers except that a positive 1 is removed, which would otherwise create the balance of zero. And in removing a positive two the whole shows that loss by becoming the number (-2). Unlike ordinary math, where negative values are less than nothing at all, here the numbers (-1) and (-2) are very large. In fact the content of (-1) is equal but inverse to the content of (+1). In physics, matter and anti-matter particles are equally substantive yet inverse in form and structure.

Do you follow Gevin's logic here? Saying that zero minus negative one equals one really makes perfect sense in ordinary math, but framing this idea in terms of zero being "full" and any of the other numbers as being slightly less than that requires a powerful mental shift. This shift takes us to the understanding that the broken symmetry that creates our universe or any other is defined by what's "missing" from it. In the case of our own universe, we know there is much less anti-matter than would be expected if our universe is derived from an underlying symmetry state: so it is this absence of anti-matter which is one of the defining factors that resulted in our particular universe.

There's no question in my mind, Gevin Giorbran was a genius and I'm sad that he's no longer with us. And p.s., I really should remind everyone that Gevin's book is available in hard cover, soft cover or as a downloadable pdf from www.tenthdimension.com/store.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Imagining the First Dimension

Is everything about our reality accelerating? What do the impressions of childhood, that time moves very slowly from month to month, and our impression that time moves much more quickly from year to year as we get older, tell us about our reality? In Jumping Jesus, we looked at Robert Anton Wilson's ideas on the exponential growth of information and innovation that we are all now having to deal with. Over at the tenth dimension forum, Daniel McQueen recently submitted this thought-provoking post:

If you take a gravitationally-attracted body (IE, something with mass), and let it freely move about in 3-dimensions, it will tend to move with ever-increasing speed towards the strongest gravitational pull. Any child who has played the wood-box game of Labyrinth can attest to it. Furthermore, if there is only one such source, the object will move in a straight line.

In our observations, the three arrows of time all point from past to future. Without explaining the physics of each arrow (Pick up Michio Kako's book "Hyperspace" to read about time's arrows in detail), it is our observation that objects moving at non-relativistic speeds move in a constant velocity towards time(future) and away from time(past). Limiting the timeline to 1d (and ignoring alts or forbids), I pose this question.

Do we have temporal "mass"?

To a child younger than 3 years, minutes seem like hours, hours seem like days, and days seem like weeks. Any kid put in 5 minutes timeout or "quiet time" will tell you its an eternity. Birthdays seem to take forever to come around.

I am a few months away from my 29th birthday. I can remember most of my life, and I have to admit, the 1980s went by really slow (1981-1989), the 1990s went a little faster (my freshman year of high school seems like a long time ago, even though it was 1995), and the 2000s seem to have flown.

At the same time, my younger cousin, age 9, from my p.o.v. has grown up really fast. From her p.o.v., it seems to have been forever since she was in pre-school.

The point is this: My age in seconds (days, fortnights, or whatever time units you want to use) is quite higher than hers. I have more temporal "mass" one could say. Perhaps this is why I seem to move faster through the days than my cousin does? And even though this is purely a perceptional issue, I think it is an interesting one. Each week seems to go by faster to me than the last. Either I am imagining things, or I am incessantly rolling down a shallow hill towards my ultimate resting place (death).

That's an interesting idea, Daniel, thanks for posting it! The question, for me, becomes this - if everything about our reality is accelerating, then these questions all become relativistic. Someone born 9 years ago has been part of the most accelerated development in all of recorded history, in a universe that is continuously accelerating its expansion, and in a world where people are instantaneously connected together in ways that were science fiction a decade ago... and yet to that 9 year old person this time has taken an interminably long time. Is it the observer or the observed who are accelerating? Does the universe have more "temporal mass" now in the same way that each of us as individuals do, and that's where the impression that time and space are both accelerating is really coming from? And if the Biocentric Universe theories are correct, then does this tie into the idea that our observation is what creates spacetime, rather than the other way around?

Gevin Giorbran described our spacetime reality as being pulled at either "end" by two organizing forces: grouping order and symmetry order. If Information Equals Reality, then everything about our reality can be divided into two lists: "this is the way our universe is right now" and "these are the ways our universe isn't". Obviously, when we think about the remarkably unlikely configuration of mass and energy, organizing patterns and information that represents our universe at this instant, this means the second list is much much larger than the first. But time's arrow tells us that we are moving away from the highest grouping order (the past), and the traditional view has been that what we are moving towards is some gloomy kind of high entropy soup where all of that information becomes meaningless noise.

We keep returning to the idea that our universe, as stated in a Scientific American article by physicist Sean Carroll, is a "temporary deviation from symmetry". Symmetry is perfect balance, a natural process that happens all the time - things have a way of evening out. Starting from the work of physicist David Bohm, Gevin Giorbran showed how the highly-ordered beginning of our universe is one way of ordering the information, or showing perfectly-balanced symmetry, and the "ending" of our universe is not meaningless noise, but the other most balanced way of representing that information. To use an absurdly simple representation, let's say the information representing our universe is like a big handful of coins tossed on a table. With H for heads and T for tails, it's like the beginning of our universe would be where we threw HHHHHHHHHHHHHTTTTTTTTTTTTT, our current position in spacetime would be some random-looking collection of results (THHTTHTTTHHTTTTHTTTHTHHHT), and what we're moving towards is HTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHT. The beginning and the end, then, are two ways or representing the same thing, a perfectly balanced order, and what looks like a random assortment in the "middle" is really a causally-connected representation of one frame from within a process of gradually moving from the first set to the last set, from grouping order to symmetry order.

(Let me remind you, though, that when we're thinking about concepts like "past" and "future" and "before" and "after", these are useful for thinking about how things relate from one state to another, but we're not really thinking about the whole picture until we are visualizing how these events really already exist simultaneously within the timeless omniverse.)

Gevin suggested that gravity is a force that comes from the "past", from that highest grouping order, since gravity is what draws things together into groups. With his Timewave Zero and Novelty Theory, Terence McKenna suggested that what we are moving towards now is the highest "novelty". He proposed that we're on an exponential curve where eventually our timeline becomes so filled with possibilities that we jump to another level, where we can see the place where all of those potential states that we could now be moving towards exist simultaneously: and in my way of visualizing the dimensions that would be viewing our reality from the extra dimensions. When we get to that highest degree of novelty, we'll be at the highest symmetry order - absolutely every bit of information will have been appreciated along with its unique opposite, within that ultimate state of highest symmetry order which all enfolds together into a big beautiful zero that is not empty, but full of all those possibilities.

Thinking about Robert Anton Wilson's Jumping Jesus Phenomenon, Terence McKenna's Timewave Zero", and Daniel McQueen's idea of a "temporal mass", then, might be different ways of thinking about the very same thing. Is the future pulling us towards it at an increasingly accelerated rate? Signs point to "yes".

Enjoy the journey!

Rob

Next: O is for Omniverse A and B


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjR69ddBK78

Poll 46: "Many of the great physicists have said that "time is an illusion". In the same sense, does that mean the big bang is an illusion?" 47.9% agreed, while 52.1% disagreed. Poll ended August 20, 2009.

One of the quotes I've used most often with this project was this one from Einstein: " this separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion". Did Einstein accept that time was an illusion, and that there is a way of viewing our reality "outside" of time where everything happens simultaneously? You bet!

As regular readers of my blog will know, I was entrusted with the care of Gevin Giorbran's book "Everything Forever: Learning to See Timelessness" after his untimely death last year. Here's a blog from Gevin's website, everythingforever.com (which I am now paying to keep running as a tribute to Gevin's great ideas) which explores Einstein's attitude towards timelessness in much more detail:

Albert Einstein and the Fabric of Time

Surprising as it may be to most non-scientists and even to some scientists, Albert Einstein concluded in his later years that the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. In 1952, in his book Relativity, in discussing Minkowski's Space World interpretation of his theory of relativity, Einstein writes:

Since there exists in this four dimensional structure [space-time] no longer any sections which represent "now" objectively, the concepts of happening and becoming are indeed not completely suspended, but yet complicated. It appears therefore more natural to think of physical reality as a four dimensional existence, instead of, as hitherto, the evolution of a three dimensional existence.

Einstein's belief in an undivided solid reality was clear to him, so much so that he completely rejected the separation we experience as the moment of now. He believed there is no true division between past and future, there is rather a single existence. His most descriptive testimony to this faith came when his lifelong friend Besso died. Einstein wrote a letter to Besso's family, saying that although Besso had preceded him in death it was of no consequence, "...for us physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one."

Most everyone knows that Einstein proved that time is relative, not absolute as Newton claimed. With the proper technology, such as a very fast spaceship, one person is able to experience several days while another person simultaneously experiences only a few hours or minutes. The same two people can meet up again, one having experienced days or even years while the other has only experienced minutes. The person in the spaceship only needs to travel near to the speed of light. The faster they travel, the slower their time will pass relative to someone planted firmly on the Earth. If they were able to travel at the speed of light, their time would cease completely and they would only exist trapped in timelessness. Einstein could hardly believe there were physicists who didn’t believe in timelessness, and yet the wisdom of Einstein's convictions had very little impact on cosmology or science in general. The majority of physicists have been slow to give up the ordinary assumptions we make about time.

The two most highly recognized physicists since Einstein made similar conclusions and even made dramatic advances toward a timeless perspective of the universe, yet they also were unable to change the temporal mentality ingrained in the mainstream of physics and society. Einstein was followed in history by the colorful and brilliant Richard Feynman. Feynman developed the most effective and explanatory interpretation of quantum mechanics that had yet been developed, known today as Sum over Histories.

Just as Einstein's own Relativity Theory led Einstein to reject time, Feynman’s Sum over Histories theory led him to describe time simply as a direction in space. Feynman’s theory states that the probability of an event is determined by summing together all the possible histories of that event. For example, for a particle moving from point A to B we imagine the particle traveling every possible path, curved paths, oscillating paths, squiggly paths, even backward in time and forward in time paths. Each path has an amplitude, and when summed the vast majority of all these amplitudes add up to zero, and all that remains is the comparably few histories that abide by the laws and forces of nature. Sum over histories indicates the direction of our ordinary clock time is simply a path in space which is more probable than the more exotic directions time might have taken otherwise.

Other worlds are just other directions in space, some less probable, some equally as probable as the one direction we experience. And some times our world represents the unlikely path. Feynman's summing of all possible histories could be described as the first timeless description of a multitude of space-time worlds all existing simultaneously. In a recent paper entitled Cosmology From the Top Down, Professor Stephen Hawking of Cambridge writes; “Some people make a great mystery of the multi universe, or the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum theory, but to me, these are just different expressions of the Feynman path integral.”

(below is not in book)

What is still not quite resolved in modern physics is how to properly combine Quantum theory with Einstein's Relativity Theory. It appears evident that time is purely a direction in space but how then do we explain the uncertainty of quantum mechanics? Why does it appear that God plays dice with the world. The two theories, each having been proven by their usefulness, do of course tell the same story about this one universe, but we just haven't learned yet to hear the story right. The best modern theory going is probably the No Boundary Proposal, put fourth by Stephen Hawking and Jim Hartle. This theory introduces a second reference of time which has been inappropriately named Imaginary time. Hawking, writes of the no boundary proposal, "The universe would be completely self contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE."

In my book Everything Forever, and here at my website, I explain how fourth dimensional spatial directions travel through a series of independent three dimensional block-like spaces, which in science we call states, but they can also be thought of simply as patterns. Hawking has already proposed that imaginary time can be found at right angles to ordinary time. I further explain that it is possible in an objective way to understand the universe to be like a book or a movie film. Each moment is a separate universe just like each frame of a movie or page of a book is separate. Yet those separate states simultaneously form the larger whole of the movie or the book. Seeing each moment as a continually existing place sheds light on why particles would then travel as a quantum wave, rather than linearly from point a to point b. This is explained better elsewhere, but if each moment of ordinary time is a solid, static, "block of now", or field of space, then time each new moment is a distinctly different universe. What we call time is a spatial direction that travels through many static three dimensional universes.

In such a model, what we call time is created purely out of space. Special directions in space travel through each static three dimensional space, therein producing a new realm of space beyond three dimensions, which we call time. The interesting quality this produces, is how the inhabitants of this fourth dimension of space travel a linear path from past to future, but the surrounding environment of each path is shifting from one pattern to the next. This sends particles from one position in four dimensional space to the next without moving linearly. As a result, each individual observer in the fourth dimension experiences a continuous linear time, even though everything in their immediate environment is moving sequentially from place to place. Hence each temporal environment of four dimensional space is constructed relative to each independent observer.

One can imagine oneself smoothly traveling a direct and interconnected path through time, but in looking around at one's environment, one sees that all other directions of time are broken, causing particles to appear to sequentially leap from one place to another. Paradoxically, everyone observes their own path and experience of time to be linear, while all else around them is sequential. In fact, when we explore time as a direction through many 3D spaces, we find qualities of curvature, time dilation, and spatial contraction, precisely as relativity describes those qualities within our own spacetime.

There is one quote I have found from Einstein which is more or less a contemplative mental thought about the notion of infinite spaces, which doesn't directly relate to my own approach of describing a shape to all possible spaces, but it does at least open up the subject of an infinite number of spaces to speculation. And it also shows the open minded nature of Einstein's thoughts about empty space, which some have thought were closed.

When a smaller box s is situated, relativity at rest, inside the hollow space of a larger box S, then the hollow space of s is a part of the hollow space of S, and the same "space," which contains both of them, belongs to each of the boxes. When s is in motion with respect to S, however, the concept is less simple. One is then inclined to think that s encloses always the same space, but a variable part of the space S. It then becomes necessary to apportion to each box its particular space, not thought of as bounded, and assume that these two spaces are in motion with respect to each other...

Before one has become aware of this complication, space appears as an unbounded medium or container in which material objects swim around. But it must be remembered that there is an infinite number of spaces, which are in motion with respect to each other...

The concept of space as something existing objectively and independent of things belongs to pre-scientific thought, but not so the idea of the existence of an infinite number of spaces in motion relatively to each other. This latter idea is indeed unavoidable, but is far from having played a considerable role even in scientific thought.

I can testify that Einstein's speculations revealed here concerning infinite spaces in motion do at least carry us in the right direction in how they suggest space might have an unseen and possibly infinite content. Similar ideas were introduced by David Bohm, who claimed there are two kinds of order in nature, what he called explicate order and implicate order. Implicate order for Bohm was a way of acknowledging how quantum mechanics reveals a hidden order where our world is influenced by the whole of all possible states. However, that order is much more visible than Bohm ever realized, as explained in part two.

Unfortunately it wasn't until Einstein died that scientists began to consider the Many Worlds Theory in science. It's safe to say that in Einstein's time we were still getting used to the idea of the Big Bang, adjusting to the ever more visible vast sea of other galaxies, and the possibility of alien life on other planets. The universe and reality were still primarily considered purely solid and material based. Quantum theory, which eventually led to the theory of many worlds, had not yet fully withstood the test of time. Einstein even rejected its implications, saying "God does not play dice" with the world, even as he himself established that there is more to the universe than a single evolving moment of now.

In my explorations of timelessness I reveal that ordinary space is not merely full of other empty spaces, but empty space is actually the whole of all physical realities; all the universes of the many worlds theory. Profound as it may be, if the theories I propose are correct, space is full, rather than empty. Material things are less than the fullness of space. In fact, it may be that space must include all possibilities in order to seem empty to us. So in summary, the universe we see is just a fragment nested in a timeless (everything) whole, rather than a single material world magically arisen above some primordial nothing. All universes exist without beginning or end in the ultimate arena of time, and each moment we experience exists forever.

Find out more about timelessness at:

EverythingForever.com

Gevin's words still carry a lot of weight for me, and regular readers of my blog will recognize how connected Gevin's ideas are to my own. If you'd like to buy a copy of Gevin's book, it's available at online book sellers, or I have it at my tenth dimension store. I also have a downloadable pdf version of it available at the tenth dimension digital items store. Profits from the sale of Gevin's book will go to the Gevin Giorbran Memorial Fund.

Enjoy the journey.

Rob Bryanton

Next: Polls Archive 47 - In Science, are Pictures More Important Than Mathematics?