Physical Dimensions

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K_MgAfeZkk

Last time, in "A Hug From Another Dimension", we returned to Edwin Abbott's imaginary 2D creatures, the flatlanders, and the idea that a 3D person passing through the flatlander's plane would appear very strange indeed to the flatlander. It has been rightly pointed that in my original 11 minute animation I show the flatlander world not as they would see it, but as we would see it viewing from "above" their plane. While that perspective is boggling enough, the "lines all in the same plane" that a flatlander would really see is even more difficult for people new to these concepts to try to imagine.

Why do we talk about flatlanders? Because with this project we're talking about spatial dimensions: the ways that our 3D reality relates to the flatlander's 2D reality gives us some useful clues to the relationship between any spatial dimension and the next. Since the extra dimensions beyond spacetime that physicists talk about are all spatial dimensions (or "space-like" as some prefer to say), thinking about how the simplest spatial dimensions relate one to another gives us tools for imagining the more complex ones. The key to remember with all this is that each additional spatial dimension is at "right angles" to the one before: so each new dimension allows an observer to see "around the corner" in a way that was unattainable from the previous dimension. This time, let's work through the dimensions with that idea in mind.

We start with a point of indeterminate size. We can imagine this point to be any size we choose, and it can exist in any dimension. Let's say that's all you really are - a point. What will it be like for you to exist within each of the spatial dimensions?

You are a point on a one dimensional line. You can look in either direction on your line, but whatever's nearest to you obscures your ability to see anything beyond. If there were nothing else on your line to get in the way, you would be looking towards infinity in either direction.

What if you wanted to see what lies beyond any nearby objects on your line? You would need a way to move on your line. For you, "time" would be a direction in the second spatial dimension, and it would be what you use to change from state to state, from position to position, which would allow you to see "around the corner" to what lies beyond. Think about what the third dimension would be like for you on this one dimensional line - it would be omni-directional, all around you.

Now you're a point on a two-dimensional plane. You can look in four directions on your plane, and the new directions are at "right angles" to the previous ones. If there were nothing else on your plane, you would be looking towards infinity in four directions.

What if there were nearby objects that were obstructing your view and you wanted to see around them? You would need a way to move within your plane. For you, "time" would be a direction in the third spatial dimension, and it would be what you use to change from state to state, from position to position, which would allow you to see "around the corner" to what lies beyond. Think about what the fourth dimension would be like for you on this two dimensional plane - it would be omni-directional, all around you.

Now you're a point within a three-dimensional space. You can look in six directions from within your space, and the new directions are at "right angles" to the previous ones. If there were nothing else within your space, you would be looking towards infinity in six directions.

What if there were nearby objects that were obstructing your view? Since we're already living in a 3D world, this is the easiest for us to picture. If that object were a building, for instance, and you wanted to see what was on the other side of the building, you would need a way to move within your space. For you, "time" would be a direction in the fourth spatial dimension, and it would be what you use to change from state to state, from position to position, which would allow you to see "around the corner" to what lies beyond. Think about what the fifth dimension would be like for you within this three dimensional space - it would be omni-directional, all around you.

Up to now this has been fairly simple to visualize, because we're so familiar with these dimensions from our basic day-to-day experience. But this logic continues to work all the way up. Understanding what that means to us is an important key to understanding the connections between the quantum world, Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation, and the multiverse landscape.

Now you're a point within a four-dimensional "hyperspace". You can look in eight directions from within your hyperspace and the new directions are at "right angles" to the previous ones. If there were nothing else within your hyperspace, you would be looking towards infinity in eight directions.

What if there were nearby objects that were obstructing your view and you wanted to see around them? You would need a way to move within your hyperspace. For you, "time" would be a direction in the fifth spatial dimension, and it would be what you use to change from state to state, from position to position, which would allow you to see "around the corner" to what lies beyond. Think about what the sixth dimension would be like for you within this four dimensional hyperspace - it would be omni-directional, all around you.

If we think of the quantum wave function for our spacetime as existing within the fourth spatial dimension, we are in one of the "worlds" of Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation, and another phrase for what obstructs our view beyond our spacetime would be the cosmological horizon. For people who believe there is nothing more than the fourth dimension, it can be easy to assume that free will does not exist and that there is only one "world", one inevitable version of our universe which exists from its beginning to its end. If there's really nothing more beyond the fourth dimension then we are all like riders on a train, unable to change whatever we're about to observe. What if we wanted to get off that train track and see what lies beyond, see what other "parallel universe" versions of our universe are out there? The same logic continues to apply, so that's the fifth dimension. Because those other worlds are causally connected to our current one by the probabilities of the quantum wave function along with the choices that are made, let's call the fifth dimension our "probability space".

Now you're a point within a five-dimensional probability space. You can look in ten directions from within your probability space and the new directions are at "right angles" to the previous ones. If there were nothing else within your probability space, you would be looking towards infinity in ten directions.

What if there were nearby objects that were obstructing your view and you wanted to see around them? You would need a way to move within your probability space. For you, "time" would be a direction in the sixth spatial dimension, and it would be what you use to change from state to state, from position to position, which would allow you to see "around the corner" and see what lies beyond. Think about what the seventh dimension would be like for you within this five dimensional probability space - it would be omni-directional, all around you.

So what does "obstructing your view" mean when we're in a five dimensional probability space? Here's a couple of examples. Because the probabilistic outcomes for our universe's wave function of possible state are causally connected, no matter where we are in the fifth dimensional version of our universe there are going to be parallel universe versions which are "around the corner" and can't be seen from our current position. For instance, the version of our universe where it's 2010 and Elvis is still alive must exist within the set of all possible states, but no amount of choice or chance will allow us to see that version from here - it's just like our inability to see what lies on the other side of a building, we need to use the next dimension up to move to a different position if we want to be able to see that version of our universe. Also, quantum physicists talk about the wave function of our universe including the possibility of extremely unlikely events -- like one of us now disappearing here and reappearing on the moon. Why do we never see such events? Because they are like seeing the other side of a building: we need to move through the sixth dimension to be able to see that version of our universe, because those events lie outside of our cosmological horizon.

For we spacetime creatures our actual "now" is always really a point in the fifth dimension, being observed one planck frame at a time. This is why physicists suggest that the fifth dimension is "curled up at the planck length": not because the fifth dimension is small, but because the granular nature of spacetime only allows us to view the fifth dimension through our tiny little planck-length window. We look around us and see what feels like a solid, continuous reality, but physicists are now proving that this is an illusion. The fact that our spacetime reality is divided into planck-length "frames" is also part of the recent theories suggesting that our 4D universe is actually the shadow of a 5D hologram!

Now, as we move on to think about the sixth dimension we are thinking about the wave function for All Possible States for our particular universe. This wave function includes all the possible states for our universe, including those which are not causally connected to each other: the version of universe where it's 2010 and dinosaurs aren't extinct should have some possibility of existing, but that version is not connected to our own version of 2010. Because both chance and choice are participants in choosing what version of the universe we observe, this 6D space for our universe also would include versions of the universe that each of us would never choose to observe (like the one where I go crazy and kill my neighbors). And as we said, it also includes the states which we can't observe because the event is so unlikely it would take longer than the existence of the universe for the event to occur (like the version where one of us now disappears from here and reappears on the moon).

Now you're a point within a six-dimensional wave function space. You can look in twelve directions from within your wave function space and the new directions are at "right angles" to the previous ones. If there were nothing else within your wave function space, you would be looking towards infinity in twelve directions.

What if there were nearby objects that were obstructing your view and you wanted to see around them? You would need a way to move within your wave function space. For you, "time" would be a direction in the seventh spatial dimension, and it would be what you use to change from state to state, from position to position, which would allow you to see "around the corner" and see what lies beyond those nearby obstructions. Think about what the eighth dimension would be like for you within this sixth dimensional wave function space - it would be omni-directional, all around you.

What's outside of our wave function space? By the time we've imagined every possible state for our universe, no matter how unlikely some of those states might be, haven't we got everything covered? In other words, what's hidden from view within a point in the sixth dimension? Now we're starting to think about the multiverse landscape of other universes with different basic physical laws from our own. Up to now, no matter how we twisted and turned in the dimensions we were in, we were always confined to our universe, with its specific value for gravity, its specific planck length and speed of light. To look "around the corner" and see one of those other universes, we need to move through the seventh dimension.


Now you're a point within a seven-dimensional multi-universe space. You can now look in fourteen directions, and the new directions are at "right angles" to the previous ones. If there were nothing else within your multi-universe space, you would be looking towards infinity in fourteen directions.

What if there were nearby objects that were obstructing your view and you wanted to see around them? You would need a way to move within your space. For you, "time" would be a direction in the eighth spatial dimension, and it would be what you use to change from state to state, from position to position, which would allow you to see "around the corner" and see what lies beyond. Think about what the ninth dimension would be like for you within this seventh dimensional space - it would be omni-directional, all around you.

String theory suggests that our universe is embedded in a seventh-dimensional "brane". What if you moved to a different seventh dimensional brane to observe a completely different universe? Would that be the same as moving to a different 7D "point" within this way of visualizing the dimensions? That's what I'm suggesting. A different "point" might define a universe with a different strength for gravity, or a different speed of light. So once we defined any arbitrary second "point" there would be a line that passes through our point and this second one, but there would still be a huge number of other universes that would not be on the unique line we had just created. To get to those other universes not on our 7D "line" (a line that exists within a space defined by 7 pairs of directions all at right angles to each other!) would require us to travel through the 8th dimension. By the time we get to the 8th dimension, then, we are able to consider all possible universes that could have a physical expression, so what we're talking about by now is also sometimes called the "multiverse landscape".

Now you're a point within an eight-dimensional multiverse space. You can look in sixteen directions from within your multiverse space and the new directions are at "right angles" to the previous ones. If there were nothing else within your space, you would be looking towards infinity in sixteen directions.

What if there were nearby objects that were obstructing your view and you wanted to see around them? You would need a way to move within your space. For you, "time" would be a direction in the ninth spatial dimension, and it would be what you use to change from state to state, from position to position, which would allow you to see "around the corner" and see what lies beyond. Think about what the tenth dimension would be like for you within this eight dimensional space - it would be omni-directional, all around you.

Although Garrett Lisi's E8 rotation is not usually described as being a way to represent actual spatial dimensions, I think it's fascinating that his theory also suggests that interlocking 8 dimensional patterns would be able to describe any particle in our universe. What do we need to go beyond the 8th dimension for? Because there are still other ways of organizing the information that becomes reality that don't actually become physical realities (for more about the "Information Equals Reality" concept, look up digital physics).

That's why it's useful to think of the ninth dimension as being our information space.
Now you're a point within a nine-dimensional information space. You can look in eighteen directions from within your information space and the new directions are at "right angles" to the previous ones. If there were nothing else within your information space, you would be looking towards infinity in eighteen directions.

What if there were nearby objects that were obstructing your view and you wanted to see around them? You would need a way to move within your space. For you, "time" would be a direction in the tenth spatial dimension, and it would be what you use to change from state to state, from position to position, which would allow you to see "around the corner" and see what lies beyond. But because there are no actual physical objects within this nine-dimensional space, only information patterns, things are much more open-ended here, and in that sense the tenth dimension is also all around, and omni-directional to the ninth dimension.

In this way of visualizing the dimensions, we sometimes talk about the ninth dimension as being where the "big picture memes" reside: these would be the general organizing patterns that could result in a universe as specific as ours, or it could be an organizing pattern that expresses a preference towards one kind of order over another, or one kind of universe over another. Michael Shermer, well-known editor of Skeptic Magazine, has said that he is quite willing to accept this as a new way of thinking about what "God" could really be - an organizing pattern that chooses one kind of universe over another.

Now you're a point of indeterminate size in the tenth dimension, which some people call the Omniverse. As soon as you try to move, or observe any aspect of the Omniverse, you are spilled back into the dimensions below. In that sense, the tenth dimension is the infinity that all of our other directions were pointing towards, no matter what direction and no matter what dimension we were considering.

The tenth dimension as described in this way of visualizing the dimensions is "outside the system" in the sense that
Gödel used the phrase. It's the unobserved wave function of all possible information states, all patterns, all universes, and it's the enfolded symmetry state that exists both "before" and "after" our universe or any other, as physicist Sean Carroll likes to say. As Gevin Giorbran described it, it's also like a big, beautiful, perfectly balanced "zero" which is not empty, but full of all the other possible states. This means that our universe, like any others, is just a temporary deviation from that symmetry, and symmetry breaking is what makes any universe more interesting than this unobserved whole.


I hope you've enjoyed our tour of the ten dimensions, a logical presentation of ideas that I believe will one day be embraced by mainstream science. In the meantime, even though this is not what you would currently be taught in a university physics class, the five million unique visitors who've been to the tenth dimension website show me that a great many people see resonances and connections between this approach and their own understanding of how reality works, and for that I'm truly grateful.

Thanks and enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

PS - here's a classic clip from Carl Sagan showing us his introduction to the Edwin Abbott concept of 2D flatlanders.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9KT4M7kiSw

Next: Jumping Jesus



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

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAxWs7noSKg

Last time, as we looked at the results from Poll 48, we discussed the possibilities that some supernatural or physic phenomena might be giving us evidence of some of the ways that our reality is connected together "outside" of spacetime. But we also had to acknowledge that for someone who has never seen direct evidence of such possibilities themselves, it's extremely easy to dismiss such ideas as bunk.

Here's the video for an entry published in June this year, called "Do Animals Have Souls?":

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rM5VFnirTmg

We've also started a new poll question over to the right that asks for people's opinions on this question. "Do animals have souls?" The three answers offered are (1): "yes", (2): "no, only humans have souls", or (3): "there's no such thing as a soul". Admittedly, there are many other more finely-nuanced answers people might like to give to this poll question.

Which leads us back to that age-old question, what exactly is a soul? In entries like Where Are You?, Creativity and the Quantum Universe, and You are Me and We are All Together, we've talked about how each of us is a unique quantum observer, right at the center of our own observer-region. And in entries like Alien Mathematics, An Expanding 4D Sphere, and The Statistical Universe, we've talked about how this observer-region extends in all directions to create what's known as our cosmological horizon. This horizon includes the CMB (the cosmic microwave background or "surface of last scattering" as it's sometimes called); and in The Holographic Universe we looked at how being the middle of the ocean gives us a way to visualize how no matter where we go in the universe we're always at the center: but the tricky part of this concept is we have to remember that the CMB and the cosmological horizon is not a space horizon but a spacetime horizon.

The idea that each of us is a unique quantum observer can lead us to some mind-boggling questions. What's real? What is invented within our minds as part of this observer process? In Local Realism Bites the Dust, we looked at the work of physicist Anton Zeilinger and his team in Vienna, who have convincing scientific evidence that our reality is much stranger than most of us can possibly imagine: essentially, their experiments have proved not only that distant events can instantaneously affect each other, but also that the world around us is nothing more than a probabilistic cloud until we observe it. Einstein asked, "Do you really believe that the moon only exists when you are looking at it?" He was reported to be equally uneasy with what he called the "spooky action at a distance" ideas of quantum entanglement, but the Zeilinger team's work is proving Einstein wrong in both cases.

So, what does it mean if the world around us is being created by our observation? I want you to look at a fascinating article from Scientific American called "Tasting the Light". Here's the opening paragraph of this article, which was written by Mandy Kendrick:

Neuroscientist Paul Bach-y-Rita hypothesized in the 1960s that "we see with our brains not our eyes." Now, a new device trades on that thinking and aims to partially restore the experience of vision for the blind and visually impaired by relying on the nerves on the tongue's surface to send light signals to the brain.


"We see with our brains not our eyes": that's a powerful statement. You can substitute "mind" or "consciousness" or even "soul" into that sentence and still end up with a similar but profound idea which relates to the huge cloud of ideas we're playing with in this project.

Do you see, though, how someone learning to see with their tongue may not be that far away from someone with synaesthesia, an idea we explored in "Crossed Wires in the Brain"? Now check out this article from BBC science, which talks about a form of synaesthesia I had never heard of before, but which ties so wonderfully to the idea of the fourth dimension being spatial rather than temporal: the article, written by Victoria Gill, is called "Can You See Time?". Here's a few paragraphs from the article, which is about the work of Dr. Julia Simner, a psychologist from the University of Edinburgh:

In the case of time-space synaesthesia, a very visual experience can be triggered by thinking about time.

"I thought everyone thought like I did, says Holly Branigan, also a scientist at Edinburgh University, and someone with time-space synaesthesia.

"I found out when I attended a talk in the department that Julia was giving. She said that some synaesthetes can see time. And I thought, 'Oh my god, that means I've got synaesthesia'."

"For me it's a bit like a running track," she says.

"The track is organised around the academic year. The short ends are the summer and Christmas holidays - the summer holiday is slightly longer.

"It's as if I'm in the centre and I'm turning around slowly as the year goes by. If I think ahead to the future, my perspective will shift."

There are at least 54 different variants of synaesthesia and Dr Simner thinks this might be one of the most common ones.

"If you ask all the people at your work, or in your family, you're likely to find at least one person who has it," Dr Simner says.

I'm intrigued by this proposal that time-space synaesthesia might be one of the most common of all the variants of this fascinating condition. I would love to hear from people who feel they are able to "see" time, which might remind us of the conversations we've had about Kurt Vonnegut's fictional race of Trafalmadorians: for more about all that you might want to read Beer and Miracles, Connecting It All Together, and Dr. Mel's 4D Glasses. Of course, since I've spent so much time talking to people about my own unique way of visualizing space-time, perhaps I myself might have a form of space-time synaesthesia? Perhaps what I have really been trying to describe with my original Imagining the Tenth Dimension animation is my own visual perception of time and quantum probability? Since each of us is our own unique quantum observer, it's always hard to imagine how someone else's perception of the world around them might be fundamentally different from our own.

Here's a link to an article published by Pravda about a Russian man who says he can discern colors by touch. More evidence that our world is assembled together by our observation in ways that can boggle the mind? You be the judge.

Finally, here's a nice 10 minute clip from a documentary explaining how our reality is
constructed within our minds:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlP7Zy3ouNc

Next time, we'll go back to Einstein's misgivings about the implications of quantum mechanics, and how my way of visualizing the dimensions might have helped: the entry is called "The Fifth Dimension is Spooky".

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

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

In entries like The Map and the Territory, The Long Undulating Snake, Suffering in the Multiverse, Does the Multiverse Really Exist? and Nassim Haramein, I've talked about the idea proposed by physicists that there are actually ten to the power of 500 other universes with different basic physical laws from the universe we find ourselves within. Coincidentally, I just posted the video version of the Nassim Haramein blog to youtube a few days ago, take a look:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OZj1XAjcTY

Last October, Seed Magazine published a great article written by one of the two physicists who came up with that proposed number of ten to the power of 500 possible universes. Raphael Bousso is a theoretical physicist at The University of California, Berkeley. His article was called The Statistical Universe: please do check out the whole article. Here's a few paragraphs:

We cannot see farther into the universe because the big bang happened only 14 billion years ago and light from distant regions has not had enough time to reach Earth. Yet subtle clues are beginning to reveal some of the properties of the regions of space hidden beyond our cosmic horizon. Our world appears to be only a small part of a “multiverse,” an expanse vastly larger than the visible universe, and for the most part completely different from it.

The multiverse comprises a large number of distinct patches, each far bigger than our night sky. What observers see, therefore, also depends on where they find themselves. Most of the regions in the multiverse are inhospitable to life, and their properties will not be observed. But what exactly is life? In order to extract predictions from the multiverse, my colleagues and I have developed a statistical tool to find regions with observers: We look not for life itself but for the disorder left behind by the complex processes that its formation depends on. To understand the physical signatures of life in this way may help us finally to comprehend our own little corner of the multiverse.

String theory is the leading candidate for reconciling two very fundamental laws — gravity and quantum mechanics. But to accomplish this feat requires at least nine dimensions of space, when we see only three. In order for six dimensions to have remained undetected, they must be tied up into loops too small to see under our best microscopes. In physics there are fundamental laws and local laws, which depend on the environment. Iron and carbon are made from the same elementary particles but assembled differently. As a result local properties like density and conductivity differ widely. The fundamental laws of string theory also appear as different local laws, depending on how the extra dimensions are tied up. If we could open the knots and tie them differently, then supposedly “fundamental” phenomena, like neutrons or the electric force, would disappear and be replaced by an utterly different set of particles and forces.

Because extra dimensions need not be tied up the same way everywhere, physical laws may vary from place to place. Inflation makes each “legal district” much larger than the visible universe, giving us the illusion that particles and forces are the same everywhere. But beyond our cosmic horizon, inflation allows the universe to grow so enormous that it contains every set of possible laws that can be constructed from string theory. Eight years ago, Joe Polchinski and I estimated that the number of possibilities is truly enormous: a one with roughly 500 zeros behind it (10⁵⁰⁰).

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVA871NjJ0k

Have you got 16 minutes? Then take a look at the following movie, divided into two parts.

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


A direct link to the above movie is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKwAS5omW_w

Last blog, in "An Expanding 4D Sphere", we talked about how tricky it can be to imagine extra dimensions. I mentioned the recently proved Poincaré Conjecture (which would now more correctly be known as the Poincare Theorem), which says our universe is a 3D sphere on the surface of a 4D hypersphere! That's not an easy image to hold in the mind. These ideas and the above videos are all related to the study of topology: and since all of the extra dimensions are spatial, looking at topology as a way to help us imagine extra-dimensional shapes and patterns makes perfect sense.

The wikipedia article on Knot Theory takes these ideas about n-dimensional shapes and patterns even further, if you're interested in the explorations above please read that article.

For me, the point of looking at these extra-dimensional shapes is it helps us to imagine how extra-dimensional patterns representing memes, genes, and spimes could rise and fall in the same way that a hypercube would grow, mutate, and shrink as it passed through our 3D world. In one of my most-discussed blogs of all time, Hypercubes and Plato's Cave, I showed an animation of a rotating 4D hypercube, check that blog out if you're not familiar with those kinds of visualizations. How would our own reality look if you could see more than just 3D? Watch this interesting video and think about how similar it is to watching a rotating hypercube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yPkGJMizOY

Have you got 10 minutes to just meditate on some interesting images that tie into these ideas about imagining shapes that are outside of our normal spacetime? This video was created by a youtube user called 77GSlinger, and it is related to Walter Russell's idea of twin opposing vortices that create our observed universe and its underlying patterns.

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

Imagining the rotating helix used for my project's logo as incorporating these ideas is something I talked about in my blog entry on Nassim Haramein: while the other dimensions are involved in the creation of more specific patterns, at the core of this image is a line joining the zero to the ten, and we can think of the zero as representing the drive towards the infinitely small and the ten as representing the drive towards the infinitely large. Everything else is just cross sections, interference patterns created by those two interlocking patterns. Though neither of these gentlemen are talking about extra dimensions, Nassim Haramein and Walter Russell appear to be talking about similar ideas to mine in that regard: and in The Holographic Universe, we took a look at an example of just how far this idea of our reality coming from interference patterns can be taken.

77GSlinger attaches the following note to the above video:

The physics of Russell's Cosmology also explains the Free Energy Implosion Technologies of the great Austrian Water Wizard, Viktor Schauberger. Schauberger invented Implosion Turbines in the 30's and 40's in Austria and Germany.

This implosion physics defies academic physics and makes academic theory provably obsolete and the professors pushing these socially engineered lies as well.

For a detailed account of the free energy technologies of Viktor Schuaberger and Walter Russell, Implosion Physics, Bio-mimicry, Scalar Mechanics and the many types of Free Energy Technologies currently in existence please see:

http://www.feandft.com/

As regular readers of this blog know, I wrote 26 songs to accompany this project about ways of imagining how our reality is created. To finish, let's look at my most popular youtube music video: this one is about conspiracies, and the patterns that underlie our universe. As I've said elsewhere: when we're looking at these complex interactions, sometimes it can be hard to extricate what is really a conspiracy and what is "just a bunch of stuff that happened".

And likewise, sometimes it can be very difficult to say when a knot is not a knot. What's keeping you from getting to the best possible you that already exists within the multiverse?

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Secret Societies:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Br3lpVmids

Next: Polls Archive 41 - Is Creativity a Quantum Process?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKh2y93hwa4

How old is the universe? Most scientists currently peg it at around 13.7 billion years. A light year, of course, is the distance light travels in one year. If I look through a telescope, then, what's the furthest I should be able to see? Intuitively, we would presume it to be no more than a distance of 13.7 billion light years. Here's a video that explains how cosmic expansion complicates this: because everything is moving away from everything else as the universe expands, currently observable particles can theoretically be as far away as 42 billion light years in any direction, and early stars can be as much as 36 billion light years away in any direction.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zO2vfYNaIbk

In The Holographic Universe, I showed a way of visualizing how our spacetime is not completely flat, but instead has a very slight curve to it. It's easy to confuse this statement to think we're saying that space has a slight curve to it, and this can be the start of some confusion. In the above video we see that we're at the center of a 3D sphere with a radius of as much as 42 billion light years. If we're thinking about 4D spacetime, though, we're thinking about how that 3D sphere is on the surface of a 4D hypersphere (this relates to the recently proved Poincare Conjecture, which we talked about in "Why Do We Need More Than 3 Dimensions?"). In the video for The Holographic Universe, I showed how this slight curvature could create the observable universe horizon that we're talking about above - if time has a slight curve to it, then it's like we're in the middle of the ocean, and the horizon we see around us is the furthest distance back in time we're able to see. In the wikipedia article on The Cosmological Horizon, it says this:

it has been said that the observable universe is many orders of magnitude smaller than the greater universe that lies beyond the limits of our perception.

Imagine that the entire cosmological horizon is modeled by a sphere that is the diameter of a quarter (24.26 mm in diameter). If Alan Guth's inflationary model of early era cosmology is correct, the universe that lies beyond this “quarter-sized” horizon would conservatively be a sphere as large as the Earth globe itself.

If this is really the scale of curvature we're talking about here, then spacetime for our purposes is flat: if our universe were the size of a quarter and its curvature was the equivalent of the curvature of the earth's surface, imagine how sensitive a measurement you would have to make to be able to register that curvature! But spacetime does indeed have a slight curve to it, and that's an important piece of the puzzle we're putting together.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMLVjFrtq6Q. You can watch the video from about 5:50 if you want to jump to the section where I show a way of visualizing how our spacetime is curved.

In What's South of the South Pole? and The Map and the Territory, we looked at how tricky it can be to create useful visualizations of concepts like these. Visualizing a 3D sphere on the surface of a 4D hypersphere boggles the mind. The beauty of the approach I'm using with this project is that these are all really spatial dimensions that we're talking about: this means that as per the point-line-plane postulate, which can be used to visualize any number of spatial dimensions, we can simplify this concept to imagine that our 3D universe is a point, moving on the surface of an expanding 4D plane, and that plane has a slight curvature to it which takes it into the fifth dimension. That slight curvature gives us the impression that our universe has a certain size, but that size is an illusion - like the boat in the middle of the ocean, looking at a horizon all around them, we have to understand that there is still much more beyond that horizon which exists -- even though we can't see it from our current point of observation.

In Where Are You? I made the point that each of us is right at the center of our own version of the universe, and as metaphysical as that may sound, the above discussions show a scientific reason for why this is so.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: When's a Knot Not a Knot?