Physical Dimensions

One of the very first questions that was asked at the tenth dimension forum back when it started over three years ago went something like this: "If all these different branching universes exist, what does that have to do with me? My life still sucks."

Coincidentally, a very successful project called "The Secret" about how our thoughts create our reality was launched within months of the launch of my website and book Imagining the Tenth Dimension. Last time, in Ringing in the Brain, and in previous entries like The Biocentric Universe and The Biocentric Universe Part 2, we've looked at just how far science is willing to take the idea that our observation is creating the reality we see around us.

While I have tried hard not to position my own project as being "use the power of the tenth dimension to find your way to happiness and riches" (because it's not really as simple as that), such ideas still do relate to what we're talking about here - if a "best possible you" (however you choose to define that phrase) already exists within the current probability space of Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation, then how do you get there? In Now vs. the Future, I talked about how phrases such as "attitude affects outcome", "healing starts from within", "eye of the tiger", and other positive visualization techniques make even more sense in the context of the Many Worlds Interpretation. I also talked about the experience many of us have had personally with elderly family members, and which many health care providers see on a regular basis: when people lose their interest in tomorrow and their will to carry on, death is on its way.

In the last few blog entries (including Beer and Miracles, Conscious Computers?, Seeing Time, Feeling Colors, Tasting Light, and The Fifth Dimension is Spooky), we've been dancing around the connection between the quantum wave function and consciousness, or what some people prefer to call "the soul". What carries on after we die, and what does that have to do with quantum mechanics? Here's a link to an interesting wikipedia article on "Quantum Suicide and Immortality".

In Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?, I quoted from cosmologist Max Tegmark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

The critique of many worlds is shifting from 'it makes no sense and I hate it' to simply 'I hate it'.

The wikipedia article we're talking about now relates to a thought experiment proposed by Max Tegmark (and a number of others according to wikipedia) which is sometimes referred to as "quantum suicide". It's basically just a re-telling of the Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment, but Tegmark makes it much more personal.

A person holds a gun to his head, which is hooked up to a quantum detector looking at a subatomic particle. The gun is designed to fire only when a certain spin is detected. The person pulls the trigger, and in half of the parallel universes resulting from the moment, the gun fires. But in many of the remaining universes, he pulls the trigger again. This process can be repeated indefinitely: each time with the person surviving in half of the remaining universes. This scenario then takes us to a realm similar to Zeno's Paradox - even though the number of universes where the gun doesn't fire are halved with each additional pull of the trigger, there should always be branching universes remaining where the gun doesn't go off, no matter how many times the trigger is pulled.

What I've been trying to get people to understand is that anyone who is alive right now and reading this blog is just as much an example of this same thought experiment - when you think about all the silly risks taken, all the near-miss accidents or malicious acts, all of the things that could have conspired to end anybody's life before now, you are thinking about Everett's Many Worlds. In a great many of those other parallel universes you are already dead, and in many more universes than that you never existed at all! The fact you are alive in the universe you're observing right now really is a statistical marvel, such an unlikely quantum outcome when you consider all the possible outcomes, that we should each be amazed at our continued existence every moment of every day.

What Tegmark would be horrified to hear, I'm sure, is that some on the internet are now saying that if you were in one of the universes from his thought experiment where you took the bullet and you died, your consciousness would leap into one of the parallel universes where the gun just clicked, hence the phrase "quantum immortality". While I'm quite willing to discuss the possibility of ghosts as manifestations of consciousness that exist past a person's death (see blog entries like Auras, Ghosts, and Pareidolia, Do You Believe in Ghosts, Happy Birthday Paul and Going to the Light), I think this quantum suicide concept can be easily misconstrued: the universes where you die and don't get to see the rest of your life are just as real as the ones where you beat the odds and get to continue on. If you die you die, and what happens to your consciousness after that is very different from what happens while you're in your physical body.


There's a blog entry I put up not long ago called Suffering in the Multiverse, it gets into this discussion in a very deep way. Some of my other blog entries about death, statistically unlikely events, and the multiverse include:
The Statistical Universe
Roger Ebert on Quantum Reincarnation
Unlikely Events and Timelessness
We're Already Dead (But That's Okay)
Randomness and the Missing 96 per cent
Elvis and the Electrons
Have Each of Us Already Died?
Gevin Giorbran: Everything is Forever

What it all comes down to is this - we are all lucky to be here, and whatever processes you care to imagine to have contributed to this "now" are worthy of your sense of wonder, and deserving of your praise. That's what song 26 of my 26 songs attached to this project is about: it's called "Thankful".



A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIfN1RM9X6I

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: A Hug From Another Dimension

Here we are on the eighth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks. I remember waking up that morning, seeing that the first tower had been hit, and immediately running to wake up my two (then) teenaged sons. "This is one of those cusp moments that you're going to remember for the rest of your lives", I told them. "Our world has taken an unlikely new tangent and this is a major shift in our reality."

Yes, even though this was five years before I launched Imagining the Tenth Dimension, this was the way I've always thought about how our reality is constructed, and as I've mentioned many times before, I spent over two decades prior to the 2006 launch of my website trying to get anybody else who would listen to see that this was a useful way of visualizing that multi-dimensional and parallel universe fabric that our reality springs from. I've talked about this concept in older entries like The Spacetime Tree, Anime, Gaming and Cusps, Everyone Has a Story, and John August and The Nines.

When we're thinking about a multiverse of possible parallel universes for our particular universe, in how many of those do you think it's 2009 and the World Trade Center towers are still standing? If we're talking about how we are each navigating through a fifth dimensional probability space, it doesn't really matter whether you believe those towers coming down was an inevitable outcome as a result of a long chain of previous actions and reactions in the years or decades prior to 2001, or if you believe that the terrorists got extremely lucky to have their plans come to fruition that day: in the Many Worlds Interpretation, both outcomes were possible, and we happen to be in one of the parallel universes where the towers no longer stand, while in other versions of our universe it's 2009 and they are still one of New York's major landmarks.

Last blog, in The Statistical Universe, we talked about the unlikely chain of events and alignment of forces that had to be put in place for there to be life in our universe, and how our very existence was like winning a cosmic jackpot. In The Flexi-Laws of Physics, we talked about the work of cosmologist Paul Davies, but we didn't mention his famous book which is in fact called "The Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe is Just Right for Life". In that book he explores the Anthropic Principle, a concept which has received a lot of negative critiques over the past decade, but as I discussed recently in Does the Multiverse Really Exist?, is now being embraced by many more mainstream physicists such as Brian Greene. My song The Anthropic Viewpoint, which I wrote back in 2002, is about the same concept.

As a bit of synchronicity, this past weekend I watched the DVD of Watchmen: you know, the movie with the big blue naked guy in it? That guy's name is Dr. Manhattan, and in typical superhero comic logic, a lab accident which should have been fatal has instead given him superpowers, including the ability to simultaneously see his own past, present and future (in Dr. Mel's 4D Glasses, we talked about the sci-fi creatures Kurt Vonnegut invented, the "Trafalmadorians", who had a similar capability of viewing reality from a timeless perspective).

In this movie, Dr. Manhattan gradually loses touch with his own humanity as he becomes more and more convinced that free will is an illusion - I've spoken many times in my book and this blog about how this "hard determinist" viewpoint is a common pitfall arising from not seeing that our reality comes from a fifth dimensional probability space rather than a single, narrow "line of time". Near the end of the movie Dr. Manhattan takes his former girlfriend Laurie up to Mars, where Laurie pleads with him to intervene in a nuclear disaster about to happen back on Earth:

Laurie - John, please, you have to stop this. Everyone will die.
Dr. Manhattan - And the universe will not even notice! In my opinion, the existence of life is a highly over-rated phenomenon. Just look around you. Mars gets along perfectly well without so much as a micro-organism. Here it's a constantly changing topographical map, flowing and shifting around the globe in ripples ten thousand years wide. So tell me how would all of this be greatly improved by an oil pipeline? By a shopping mall?
Laurie - So it's too much to ask? For a miracle?
Dr. Manhattan - Miracles by their definition are meaningless. Only what can happen does happen.

Over the next few minutes, Dr. Manhattan reveals some devastating information to Laurie which causes her to lose hope, just as Dr. Manhattan begins to have a change of heart:

Laurie - My life is just... one big joke.
Dr. Manhattan - I don't think your life is a joke.
Laurie - Yeah, well, I'm sorry if I don't trust your sense of humor.
Dr. Manhattan - Will you smile if I admit I was wrong?
Laurie - About what?
Dr. Manhattan - Miracles. Events with astronomical odds of occurring like ... oxygen turning into gold? I've longed to witness such an event. And yet I neglect that in human coupling. Millions upon millions of cells compete to create life, for generation after generation until --finally-- your mother loves a man... a man she has every reason to hate. And out of that contradiction, against unfathomable odds, it's you. Only... you... that emerged... to this still so specific a form from all that chaos. It's like turning air into gold. A miracle.
And so... I was wrong.

Since I had already started writing this blog entry about "Beer and Miracles", the above dialogue had a lot of extra resonances for me. Let's talk about miracles for a moment.

Sir Arthur Clarke had a famous and often-quoted phrase: "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". How do you like this for my variation on the same theme? "Any dramatically unlikely occurrence is indistinguishable from a miracle". When we talk about how unlikely our universe is, and how unlikely life is, is the word "miracle" out of place?

Last month, New Scientist magazine published an essay by Hugh McLachlan, a professor of applied philosophy at the School of Law & Social Sciences, Glasgow Caledonian University, UK. The name of the essay is "Do You Believe in Miracles?". Here's a few paragraphs from that essay:

Consider the Azande, an African tribe whose members believe all deaths and misfortunes are caused by either witchcraft or sorcery. Suppose a falling branch kills someone. On one level, the tribe accepts a scientific account of the incident in terms of, say, the effect of termites on wood. But on another level, they ask why did it come about that the particular person happened to be standing under the tree when the branch happened to fall?

We are unlikely to ask that particular question, and unlikely to accept their particular explanation, but it is not at all clear why we should say that questions of that sort are inappropriate. There is no apparent clash with science or hostility to it, as the British anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard, who studied the Azande, was keen to stress.

People might accept a scientific account of why a particular event occurred, yet ask similar sorts of questions about why there are particular juxtapositions of occurrences. Much of this speculation and theorizing will be baseless, but there seems no justification for saying all such thinking is nonsensical. By analogy: most conspiracy theories are groundless, but not all of them are.

Okay, we've talked about statistically unlikely events and miracles, now let's add in some beer.

Wired Magazine published a fascinating article last month about a scientist who was able to recover dormant yeast cells that had been trapped in amber for 45 million years. As soon as he placed those cells into a growing medium they again flourished. Does that sound like a statistically unlikely occurrence to you? Would you be willing to call it a miracle if a living thing were somehow able to sleep for 45 million years, then wake up again as if nothing had happened? This yeast was discovered by Raul Cano, a 63-year-old microbiologist at California Polytechnic State University back in 1995. After years of trying to figure out what he could do with this miracle, he ended up in a business relationship with a micro-brewery who are now marketing a beer made with this ancient yeast to the world. The whole story is definitely worth a read, it's called "Amber Ale: Brewing Beer from 45-Million-Year-Old Yeast".

Why beer? The yeast strain that was recovered is Saccharomyces cerevisiae, commonly known as brewer's yeast, so it really didn't require that much of a stretch of the imagination. But there's some other interesting bits of synchronicity here. That same strain of yeast was big news back in 1996 when it became one of the first living organisms to have its genome completely sequenced. And at the time, there was a lot of press about how remarkably similar that yeast's genome was to that of human beings: here's a link to an article from back then that claimed about 50% of the yeast cell's genome is the same as a human being's.

How similar do you think you are to a yeast cell? We're not single-celled organisms so there's still clearly quite a leap from yeast to human, but at its core I think this news of 45-million-year-old yeast still having that mysterious "spark" of life within it reinforces a point I've made a number of times: life is a force which is somehow engaged with reality "outside" of our limited spacetime window. Other recent blogs where we've explored this idea include Creativity and the Quantum Universe, The Biocentric Universe Theory, Alien Mathematics, God? Or the Multiverse?, and Could I Meet My Incarnation?.

So next time you're enjoying a beer, or enjoying your favorite raw fruit or vegetable, stop and think for a moment about what a miracle it is that life exists, and that we are each here to enjoy the journey.

Rob Bryanton

PS: Back in Placebos and Nocebos, we talked about how the power of the mind could cause amazing changes to occur in our personal health (or lack thereof), but we also quoted a New Scientist magazine article which said this doesn't mean we have the power to make miracles occur. What do you think about life and miracles? Coincidentally, I've just posted the video blog version of "Placebos and Nocebos" on YouTube, take a look:


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg2Fxp7DgX0


Next: Polls Archive 45 - Conscious Computers?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFQrO76rXLw

There's a great feature on different approaches to visualizing the extra dimensions over at New Scientist: "Beyond Space and Time: Fractals, Hyperspace, and More". Most of what's in there is a repeat of ideas explored in my book and this blog: I think this is great, as it seems to be part of a general shift within mainstream science this year where the ideas I've been promoting are gradually becoming more accepted.

I've mentioned before that the sound effects of my original Imagining the Tenth Dimension animation are an important part of what helps to convey the information being explored. One of the key ideas to this way of visualizing the extra dimensions is conveyed by the repetitive use of the sound of a thick deck of cards being riffled - and this sound ties to the idea that although our reality feels like a continuous whole, or a continuous "line of time", it's actually divided into tiny little planck-length-sized pieces. Previous blog entries like The Flipbook Universe and Slices of Reality have also discussed this concept.

In my popular blog entry Creativity and the Quantum Universe, we discussed some of the new lab experiments which appear to prove that life is somehow engaged with a larger chunk of reality than these quanta, these planck-length slices that the granular nature of spacetime tells us we exist within from instant to instant. In The Holographic Universe, I talked about the GEO600 experiment which appears to prove through observation that our reality is not continuous. And here's a link to a recent cover story from New Scientist magazine: "Late Light Reveals What Space is Made Of". As evidence mounts that these "atoms of spacetime" (as they were called last year in a Scientific American article on Loop Quantum Gravity which we looked at in "Why is the Speed of Light the Limit?") are what our reality is truly constructed from, the application of quantum theory to our macro world makes more and more sense.

There are other mind-boggling implications if the quantum and macro worlds really are all part of a single continuum from the very small to the very large, throwing away the dividing line between these two realms that has traditionally been proposed. Here's a link to a new article written by Lisa Zyga, "Physicist Proposes Solution to Arrow-of-Time Paradox", that was published last week at physorg.com . I'll quote a few paragraphs from the article here:

Entropy can decrease, according to a new proposal - but the process would destroy any evidence of its existence, and erase any memory an observer might have of it. It sounds like the plot to a weird sci-fi movie, but the idea has recently been suggested by theoretical physicist Lorenzo Maccone, currently a visiting scientist at MIT, in an attempt to solve a longstanding paradox in physics.

The laws of physics, which describe everything from electricity to moving objects to energy conservation, are time-invariant. That is, the laws still hold if time is reversed. However, this time reversal symmetry is in direct contrast with everyday phenomena, where it’s obvious that time moves forward and not backward. For example, when milk is spilt, it can’t flow back up into the glass, and when pots are broken, their pieces can’t shatter back together. This irreversibility is formalized through the second law of thermodynamics, which says that entropy always increases or stays the same, but never decreases.

This contrast has created a reversibility paradox, also called Loschmidt’s paradox, which scientists have been trying to understand since Johann Loschmidt began considering the problem in 1876. Scientists have proposed many solutions to the conundrum, from trying to embed irreversibility in physical laws to postulating low-entropy initial states.

Maccone’s idea, published in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters, is a completely new approach to the paradox, based on the assumption that quantum mechanics is valid at all scales. He theoretically shows that entropy can both increase and decrease, but that it must always increase for phenomena that leave a trail of information behind. Entropy can decrease for certain phenomena (when correlated with an observer), but these phenomena won’t leave any information of their having happened. For these situations, it’s like the phenomena never happened at all, since they leave no evidence. As Maccone explains, the second law of thermodynamics is then reduced to a mere tautology: physics cannot study processes where entropy has decreased, due to a complete absence of information. The solution allows for time-reversible phenomena to exist (in agreement with the laws of physics), but not be observable (in agreement with the second law of thermodynamics).

In his study, Maccone presents two thought experiments to illustrate this idea, followed by an analytical derivation. He describes two situations where entropy decreases and all records of it are permanently erased. In both scenarios, the entropy in the systems first increases and then decreases, but the decrease is accompanied by an erasure of any memory of its occurrence. The key to entropy decrease in the first place is a correlation between the observer and the phenomenon in question. As Maccone explains, when an interaction occurs between an observer and an observed phenomenon that decreases the entropy of the correlated observer-observed system, the interaction must also reduce their quantum mutual information. When this information is destroyed, the observer’s memory is destroyed along with it.

I want to make special note of this phrase: "Maccone’s idea... is a completely new approach... based on the assumption that quantum mechanics is valid at all scales". As people familiar with my project will know, there are critics who have said that by assuming there is a direct continuum from the quantum to the macro worlds, I am somehow mistaken. I've talked many times about the 2007 proof offered by a team of scientists at Oxford under the direction of physicist David Deutsch which also agrees with this idea of there being no actual separation between the quantum and the macro, and I will continue to underline this idea as I see it come up in other scientific theories.

Quantum mechanics is probabilistic, some outcomes are chosen over others, but Everett's "Many Worlds" Interpretations tells us all the choices ultimately exist within an underlying fabric which is intimately connected together. That's true at the quantum level, and it is just as true for our lives, and it's true for the entire universe we find ourselves within. More and more people are embracing this idea that I believe to be self-evident: once you back out to the biggest picture of all, everything fits together.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7aRH0imFe0

Coming up next: The Statistical Universe.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Other related blogs:
The Long Undulating Snake
Does the Multiverse Really Exist?
Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?
Have Each of Us Already Died?
Scrambled Eggs
Local Realism Bites the Dust
Time is a Direction
Information Equals Reality