"k is for Kaluza, who proved to Einstein that gravity and light can both be defined at the fifth dimension, a brilliant idea that shows us there's more than our 4D line the 5D Hologram from where we come, probabilities of Everett's branching Many Worlds non-locality all wrap up together in Kaluza's innovation our universe comes from the fifth dimension: what a realization!"
Ah, the fifth dimension. Almost a year ago, in its inaugural North American issue, Urban Garden Magazine published an article I wrote called Why The Fifth Dimension is a Dangerous Idea, which suggested there might be reasons why the powers-that-be prefer you not to know about the fifth dimension. By the time Kaluza, string theory, and the Holographic Universe principle all tell us our reality comes from the fifth dimension you'd think this would be a mainstream idea by now, but it continues to be ignored. Why?
Meanwhile, quantum theories about the many worlds interpretation, non-locality, reverse-time causality, entanglement and tunneling (etc.), are all portrayed to the general public as being unimaginably strange, something the unwashed masses have no hope of understanding. With this project, I've insisted that the fifth dimension answers those quandaries as well: understanding that our "now" is a point not in the fourth dimension but the fifth, being experienced one planck frame at a time, shows us how all those spooky quantum connections are easily made once you get "outside" of the limits of 4D spacetime and use the "additional degree of freedom" that an additional spatial dimension affords us. The fact that this also gives us a way to understand why from our perspective the fifth spatial dimension is "curled up at the planck length" is, for me, the icing on the cake.
"l is for life, a mysterious process that animates matter and makes it want to focus on whatever happens next, so it strives to continue that wonderful spark is found within you"
My most popular blog entry of all time is now Jumping Jesus, in which we talked about the intimate connection between the observer and the observed, and how the acceleration of consciousness, information, and the universe may be more inter-related than we could possibly imagine. In Beer and Miracles, we talked about how unlikely life is, and what a marvel it is because of that. In Creativity and the Quantum Universe we talked about the mysterious processes that allow life to happen, and in entries like Alien Mathematics, The Statistical Universe, and Randomness and the Missing 96%, we've talked about how unlikely our universe itself is when you back out to the big picture of all possibilities.
Which, of course, is the point of "O is for Omniverse": it's all about thinking about those big picture ideas. Want to know more about this innovative and mind-expanding book from myself and Marilyn E. Robertson? Go to omniverse.tv .
"g is for genes, another branching tree from a root in the past to a huge diversity seeing this from timelessness we learn the connection of all living things -- through time in each direction"
"h is for hypercube, a way for us to see a higher dimension than our usual three watch as it turns and try to imagine a shape in four dimensions, moving through time 3D sections, all in a line to make a 4D object, like a spime"
Bruce Sterling coined the word "spime" to refer to the data set representing an object's existence in space and time - Wal-mart, for instance, is famous for being able to keep such detailed information about everything in their inventory across all their stores, so the data representing a pair of pants on a shelf in a specific store would include the record of when and where those pants were created, how and when and through what path they were transported, and so on... and that entire data set would represent that pair of pants as a space-time object - a "spime". Visualizing the connection between hypercubes (a 4D cube), each of us as a "long undulating snake", and Bruce Sterling's concept of the "spime" is an important key to thinking about our reality. Which leads us to our next letter.
"information and reality equal each other, can this be?
if information (a word that starts with i) equals reality, try to visualize how patterns and shapes that flow within and behind and around create what we're in energy or mass, genes, memes or spimes waves and shapes, fractals and lines
i is also for indeterminacy the unobserved state that underlies reality where all possible states enfold together and find their balance -- in perfect symmetry"
By now I hope it's clear to everyone that these poems are the text equivalent of a fugue - themes keep restating themselves, recombining with other themes, creating an overall structure that is larger than the single elements used in its construction. When I first saw quantum physicists using the phrase "information equals reality" I immediately embraced it - it sums up the way of visualizing reality we're playing with in the project, and the field of Digital Physics definitely ties into this idea as well. My song "The Unseen Eye" expressed the same idea, although I wrote that song many years before I heard the phrase "information equals reality" which sums this large idea up so compactly. Here's a video for "The Unseen Eye":
and here's the first verse and chorus of this song, written back in 2002, and with many themes that connect strongly to what we've been talking about here as we work through our Omniverse Alphabet:
In the universe of all universes Anything is possible Everything has happened, and will happen again In the universe of all universes Grey and formless Till you choose a point, to become the first -- when You can think of it as data This dark and shapeless void Unrealized potential In the static and the noise Till in the universe of all universes The unseen eye Opened and collapsed the wave, and we entered on in
Now we know it’s the act of observation That gives the world its how and why So the big bang is just an illusion It’s just the opening of the unseen eye
"j is for John Wheeler, a famous physicist who drew a strange eyeball looking at its tail as a way to imagine how some branches or our line might be changed in the past as we look back from today so the branching tree that extends from now is even more surprising: it branches either way!"
In my book and this blog, I've talked about how there could be other completely different ways of expressing matter and energy that would still rightly be called "life", but perhaps those other formulations exist only within other parts of the multiverse landscape. Perhaps when we do finally find life elsewhere in the universe, the "fine-tuning" of our universe's conditions will have created forms that only seem as alien as the strange assortment of creatures we can find on our own planet.
Watching the above BBC documentary about these strange and beautiful creatures found off the coast of south Australia reminded me strongly of what I was talking about in that blog. In fact, we've become so accustomed to seeing photographically realistic alien life forms in movies now, I'm sure there are a good many of us who first looked at the above movie clip and assumed we were looking at computer-generated imagery!
In my book "O is for Omniverse", W is for water. Why? Because no matter where you go, that's the one thing all life on our planet shares in common. No water, no life. There have been scientific studies suggesting other building blocks could possibly have been used to create life on other planets, but that remains to be seen. Wouldn't it be interesting if it turns out that our universe's uniquely fine-tuned basic physical laws resulted in water being the one thing that all life in the universe shares?
My song Change and Renewal starts and ends with a prayer to the healing and rejuvenating powers of water.
Let's start this time by looking at page 13 from O is for Omniverse: I have to admit that I haven't discussed all of Marilyn's illustrations with her in detail, her work is evocative in ways that any good art should be, with multiple resonances, and the resonances were strong enough for me that I saw no point in stating what to me was obvious. For me, the above illustration ties nicely to concepts we've talked about in blogs like The Flipbook Universe, Slices of Reality, and The Quantum Solution to Time's Arrow: there are a number of scientific schools of thought which tell us that our reality is not continuous, but rather divided into planck-length-sized frames, or "atoms of spacetime" as loop quantum gravity theory calls them. Marilyn's illustration shows us a series of 3D states, one after another, all somewhat different from each other, and that is what our 4D spacetime experience is - a series of 3D "frames", one after another, connected together to create the apparently seamless reality we find ourselves to be in as we travel along our "line of time". Persons familiar with Gevin Giorbran's wonderful book Everything Forever may remember this illustration, which uses another visual approach to describe the same idea that I see in Marilyn's illustration: By the way, if you go to omniverse.tv the videos I've been creating for this book all play one after another, it's another way to enjoy these concepts. The image below is from page 14, where Marilyn adds these fanciful extrapolations:
If you have trouble picturing more dimensions, or dimensions enfolding around one another, think about the petals of a flower that grow and curl around. They are separate, yet they are part of the whole. They surround and enclose space that is not part of the flower yet interacts with it.
Looking at the rose petals, each petal has a life going on within the outer layers that we see, but there is space between each one filled with air. Could dark energy be something like this -- filling the spaces between universes and keeping them apart? Does our universe trade the "stuff of life" through black holes or other hidden connections, like the pores on the petals and leaves 'breathe' air and moisture?
Then on page 15, another poem:
"e is for entropy, the opposite of order thermodynamics, the arrow of time starts with the big bang, ends beyond tomorrow moves us along our line the opposite direction is certainly as real time and anti-time, both together head towards the very same place where everything is forever"
We've talked a lot about physicist Sean Carroll whose ideas about how the underlying symmetry state that our universe springs from is the same thing both "before" and "after" the existence of the universe. "Before" and "after" are in quotes because you're not really imagining this properly until you've visualized the place where all of these possible states exist simultaneously: the place where, as Einstein liked to say, the separation between past, present and future is an illusion, albeit a persistent one. Blogs talking about Sean Carroll and the timeless perspective that this way of visualizing the dimensions is based upon include Time in Either Direction, The Spacetime Tree, Scrambled Eggs, Unlikely Events and Timelessness, and What's Before and After?.
The idea that "time" and "anti-time" are each just directions, in the same way that east and west or up and down are directions, and that you need to consider both opposing directions as a package in order to be talking about a spatial dimension is discussed in entries like Time is a Direction, Elvis and the Electrons, and Are Pictures More Important in Science?.
Likewise, this project insists that the "arrow of time" is an illusion created by the fact that we are constructed from chemical processes that obey the thermodynamic laws of entropy, and that time's reverse direction is just as valid within the laws of physics. The closing line of the above poem is, of course, a reference to Gevin Giorbran's book of the same name, and Gevin understood very well what it means to think about these structures as all ultimately existing simultaneously. We've discussed a number of approaches to timelessness in blog entries like You are Me and We are All Together, "t" Equals Zero, The Big Bang and the Big Pie, and The Invariant Set.
Page 16 is above, another of Marilyn's fascinating line drawings, useful for thinking about the endlessly recursive structures which must underlie our reality. On page 17, tenth dimension fans will recognize a tiny image from the original animation, this drawing was created by Jason Orban for OH!Media. Here's the text from the page below:
f is for flatlander, f is for free will f is for a future not decided and the line that we travel from the past until the end like the branching of a tree becomes divided the flatlander thinks that his line is straight and so do we, with time's arrow when, in fact, there are branches and twists: our line of time is not so straight and narrow!
Understanding how time is really just a direction in the "next dimension up" is also key to all this: for our fictional flatlander, "time" would be a direction in the third spatial dimension, just as we 3D creatures experience "time" as a direction in the fourth spatial dimension. There has been much opportunity for confusion here, because physicists often count "time" as being a separate concept from the ten spatial dimensions: in Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?, I argue that if physics says the first three dimensions are spatial, and also says that the fifth dimension and above are spatial (or "space-like" as some physicists prefer to say), then we need to understand our relationship to the fourth spatial dimension for this all to make sense. For more about all that, check out Hypercubes and Plato's Cave, What Would a Flatlander Really See?, What Would a Linelander Really See?, and What's Around the Corner?.
Next in the book is another one of Marilyn's thought-provoking illustrations, we don't really get the impact in this tiny little representations in this blog, but in the book these images are great to meditate upon as we ponder all the different ways of organizing the information that becomes reality... the selection patterns that become our universe or any other.
Here's Marilyn's text for the above illustration, which adds some useful commentary to the ideas we're exploring. She writes:
Think about one single human cell. It doesn't look like much, but within that cell is all the information needed to produce a human being. All possible characteristics are held there, waiting. Fertilization provides the right conditions to begin moving towards what it is to become.
And within the seeds of plants and trees is held all the information needed to grow into their future selves. When conditions are right, they too begin to move towards "what happens next".
The idea that there is something mysterious and marvelous about life and the building blocks that create life, is a recurring theme within this project. In Beer and Miracles, I talked about scientist Raul Cano, who made the astonishing discovery of yeast cells that had been trapped dormant in amber for 45 million years. When Dr. Cano extracted the yeast and provided the proper growing conditions, the yeast immediately sprang back to life. If that isn't a powerful demonstration of how life is a process that is engaged with our reality through connections that extend beyond the "now" we are currently in, and into the possibilities of "what happens next" then I don't know what is. Other blog entries where we've talked about life, spacetime, and connections that exist outside of spacetime include Creativity and the Quantum Universe, Our Non-Local Universe, The Quantum Solution to Time's Arrow and The Biocentric Universe Part 2. "c is for cosmology, the study of the cosmos the study of the universe we find ourselves in from chaos, and fractals, to space and time to energy and mass, and quantum spin-- look up at the stars at night and that's a tiny slice of the cosmos we're within. And when you look into the sky what does the looking? what is this I I'm calling me, that travels on a line, and observes the quantum waves? consciousness, another useful c"
The idea that we only see a "tiny slice" of the underlying structures that create our reality is referred to more than once in this book, because it's so important to our understanding of not just the incredible universe we find ourselves to be within, but also our understanding of all of the other possible universes which are part of the multiverse landscape, and ultimately the omniverse where all of that potential information is enfolded together. Is the universe really infinitely old and infinitely big? Believe it or not, the jury's still out on that one. Even though evidence points to our universe being 13.7 billion years old, and what we can see appears to be of only a certain size, there's still almost certainly much much more beyond what we are able to observe, as astronomer Brent Tully explains in this nicely written NOVA Online article called "How Big is the Universe": http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/universe/howbig.html
Part of the difficulty in determining how big and how old the universe really is relates to the fact that we can't see beyond the cosmic microwave background, or the "surface of last scattering" as it's sometimes called (we talked about this recently in Seeing Time, Feeling Colors, Tasting Light). This scattering occurred about a half million years after the beginning of the universe, and it creates a relatively smooth sphere which we find ourselves to be right at the very center of. In entries like The Statistical Universe, An Expanding 4D Sphere, and Alien Mathematics, we've talked about the cosmological horizon, and how that horizon can be compared to being in the center of the ocean: even though we see an ocean horizon that is an equal distance away in each direction, we know that there is much more beyond that horizon. In The Holographic Universe we showed an animation conveying how just as it's the slight curvature of our earth's 3D sphere that creates our observed ocean horizon, it's the slight curvature of our universe's 4D spacetime that creates the illusion that we're right at the center of our spherical universe, and prevents us from seeing any further back in time than 13.7 billion years.
So the idea that we're at the very center of the observable universe makes perfect sense from a cosmological viewpoint. Yet when we say the same thing from a philosophical viewpoint, critics dismiss it as new age "woo-woo" thinking. We've explored the relationship between consciousness and the universe each of us is observing in a number of blogs, including Where Are You?, The Shaman, You Have a Shape and a Trajectory, and Placebos and Nocebos. Where the ideas of consciousness and cosmology really start to blend together is when we add in quantum indeterminacy and the mysterious role observation plays in locking in one outcome or another. We've talked about some of the amazing scientific theories that stem from this in entries like Creativity and the Quantum Universe, The Biocentric Universe, The Biocentric Universe Part 2, and The Flexi-Laws of Physics. Are each of us creating our own version of the universe through our observation and the choices we make? You bet we are.
Okay, for those of you keeping score the above graphic was on page 10 in the book, and on page 11 is another of Marilyn's fascinating and evocative illustrations. You really have to hold the book in your hand to appreciate the fine detail here, but even the high resolution pdf does a much better job of capturing the brilliance of her work than what we're able to show here in this blog.Then on page 12: "as we ride along our line we see a tiny slice four per cent of all that there should be! The rest is in dark matter, and dark energy so dark is a very useful d d's also for dimension and each new dimension is at "right angles" to the one before that's easier to imagine with our first four dimensions but harder to picture as we add on more"
The mysteries of dark matter and dark energy may be the biggest hole in modern science's understanding of how reality really works. In The Statistical Universe, I quoted theoretical physicist Raphael Bousso on why he believes it is important to consider the multiverse of other universes and the extra dimensions of string theory as we try to understand dark energy. Dr. Bousso offered this succinct explanation:
This may seem laughable, but without the multiverse our finest theories predict that empty space should contain about 10123 times more energy than it actually does. This is known as the “cosmological constant” or “dark energy” problem. It has been called the “worst prediction in the history of science” and the “mother of all physics problems.” And it was the main reason why Polchinski and I, building on work of Steven Weinberg and others, began studying the multiverse of string theory.
In Dark Gravity Across the Dimensions, I discussed a new scientific theory that appears to echo what I proposed four years ago in my first book: that science tells us gravity is the only force that exerts itself across the extra dimensions, the "pulling together" of dark matter and the "pulling apart" of dark energy are examples of gravitational attraction being exerted from additional dimensions in different ways.
"a is for alpha, the very beginning a letter that stands for whatever comes first a is for alpha, the fine structure constant that locks in our universe"
In entries like The Statistical Universe, The Map and the Territory, The Long Undulating Snake, and Alien Mathematics, we've talked about the cosmologists who tell us that there are a great many other universes out there beyond our own, and each of those universes would have their own unique structures that make them completely different from our own, with basic physical laws that would make it impossible for life as we know it to function. The wikipedia article on alpha, the fine structure constant, explains this idea further.
"b is for the big bang, the highly ordered big bang from the omniverse of timelessness and unobserved states with the big bang our universe is chosen is the big bang an illusion? some say maybe so perhaps it’s better calling it the first yes and no rising from the chaos of the background noise we can look back from now and see the very first choice the big bang shows how our universe came to be selected from the background—of indeterminacy"
The idea that the incredible expansion of the big bang may have more to do with the selection processes that chose our universe rather than being an event that really happened was one of the radical ideas proposed in my first book, where I said this:
The currently accepted version of the big bang is known as “inflationary cosmology”, in which it is proposed that the size of the universe increased by a factor greater than a million trillion trillion in less than a millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. Does this mind-boggling amount of sudden inflation not sound more like the flipping of a gigantic yes/no toggle switch?
Thinking of the big bang not as a real event but rather as an observed side effect of the selection process that chose our universe from out of the multiverse landscape of all possible universes is an idea that is beginning to be supported by some mainstream scientists, and in particular the field of digital physics. I've discussed this in blog entries like God 2.0, The Big Bang is an Illusion, The Flexi-Laws of Physics, and What's South of the South Pole?.
With O is for Omniverse, my aim is to distill the ideas we've been talking about with my project into something that appeals more to intuitive/right brain people. The above commentary is for the left brain/analytical thinkers who might be thinking that O is for Omniverse is a simple children's book, when it's much more than that. There is a lot of deep information encapsulated into the images and text of this book, something that even you left brain thinkers will enjoy once you start to delve into what's being discussed more deeply.
Over the next few weeks I'm going to be showing you some pages from my new book, O is for Omniverse. Here's what I say, and then what Marilyn E. Robertson says, by way of a foreword to the book.
First me:
In July 2006, I published my first book, “Imagining the Tenth Dimension”, and was surprised to see an immediate and enthusiastic response from around the world. As I write this in September 2009, the book’s website www.tenthdimension.com has now seen five million unique visitors, and the 11 minute animation showing the ideas from chapter one of my book has been seen by millions of people at streaming video sites like youtube and revver, and translated into ten languages (so far).
This is the followup to that project. “O is for Omniverse” distills the big picture ideas I’ve been playing with still further, into a book that I hope you will enjoy pondering again and again. When I came across the work of graphic artist Marilyn E. Robertson, I was immediately taken with the depth and inventiveness of her imagery, and asked her to think about providing some illustrations for the poems I had created. She surprised me by adding some additional explanatory text to her illustrations, and in the process of refining that text this book has become very much an equal collaboration of give and take between the two of us.
This is a book to stir the imagination, to expand the mind, to fire up the sense of wonder. It hints at a great many modern scientific discoveries, and like my first book it explores the meeting ground between physics and philosophy. In the last three years I have created a huge volume of supporting information at www.tenthdimension.com/blog www.tenthdimension.com/forum and www.youtube.com/10thdim , which I do hope you will find useful if you want to explore the ideas from O is for Omniverse further.
And from Marilyn:
When Rob asked whether I would be interested in doing some illustrations for a book he wanted to write, I said I was, and looked forward with anticipation to receiving the draft of the verse he was working on. I was familiar with his “Imagining the Tenth Dimension” website and videos, so had a general idea what the subject would be, but when the text arrived, my first thought was “Wow – how does one illustrate these ideas!” So I dove into massive amounts of research on the thoughts, theories and people Rob referred to, making short notes along the way to keep the ideas cemented securely in my brain whilst working up illustrations.
Those short personal notes were expanded on by Rob, and the complimentary text you see throughout the book is the result of those musings. In the spirit of the book, I began to see my art work in a different way, seeing that everything had an underlying connection of color and rhythm – of information and patterns – and the borders between drawing, painting and photography began to dissolve.
It has been an enjoyable, enlightening and challenging journey for me, and I invite you, the reader, to allow the book to assist you in your own personal journey.
And here's the first of Marilyn's beautiful illustrations inside the book: Go to omniverse.tv if you want to know more. And enjoy the journey!
P.S. - Thank you to eyebeam.org for their recent "reblog" of my last entry "Jumping Jesus" - and welcome to all the eyebeam readers who have now been introduced to this blog for the first time!
The followup to my first book is finally out, it's called O is for Omniverse. It's a collaboration between myself and visual artist Marilyn E. Robertson, and although it looks like it might be a children's book, it's really more of a coffee table piece - interesting design, gorgeous pictures, and thoughtful poems and writing about the huge cloud of ideas surrounding leading edge science and ancient spirituality that my first book also dealt with. This is a book to sit and ponder, with a more meditative approach to these ideas, and despite its use of the A-to-Z format there is a nice logical progression, a unique journey, to this unique book.
Here's a little promo video talking about O is for Omniverse:
Go to omniverse.tv for more info about this new project. You'll see some great quotes there from a couple of well-known deep thinkers, author and psychobiologist David Jay Brown, and Tom Huston, senior associate editor for EnlightenNext magazine. Thank you David and Tom for your enthusiastic support!
And thank you, Imagining the Tenth Dimension fans, I believe you're going to love this new book.
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