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

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

Am I referring to this blog entry as "spooky" because it's now October and Hallowe'en is coming up? No. This blog entry is about what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance".

Last blog, in Seeing Time, Feeling Colors, Tasting Light, we touched upon the idea that Albert Einstein had problems with some of the implications of quantum mechanics, and specifically the idea that observing a particle "here" might be able to instantaneously affect the observation of another entangled particle far away, even on the other side of the universe. To show that he thought this sounded more like superstition than science, he called such implications "spooky".

On the same subject, in my book I talked about the entanglement experiments of physicist Nicolas Gisin and his team at the University of Geneva:

Entanglement is easily explained within the dimensional concepts we are now exploring. We can imagine that these atoms are still directly connected or somehow directly adjacent to each other in a higher spatial dimension, even though they may be, for example, 11 kilometres away from each other in the third dimension (as they were in the entanglement experiment conducted by Nicolas Gisin and his team at the University of Geneva in 1997). With entanglement, it seems possible that we are seeing direct evidence of actions in higher-dimensional geometry that show how time is just another spatial dimension rather than a separate concept. And from our new perspective, we have another way to show that Einstein’s concepts regarding “no faster-than-light motion” are not being violated.

In 46 - Is the Big Bang an Illusion?, and 47 - Are Pictures More Important in Science?, we returned to an idea from Stephen Hawking that there is an important part of our reality which is at "right angles" to our spacetime. While he used the term "imaginary time" to refer to this, I've tried to show that what he is really talking about is the fifth spatial dimension, and this fits into so many other ways that science is talking about where our reality comes from that I am continually amazed that I appear to be the only one talking about how this concept makes these ideas fit together. With entanglement, two particles can be widely separated, and observing one of those particles causes the other entangled particle to instantly be affected by the first observation. If those particles were ten light years away from each other, we are not talking about how that second particle would be affected ten years from now once the information from the first particle traveled to the second one - we are talking about that information transfer happening right "now" at both positions. What made people like Einstein skeptical about this implication is that it implied that a faster-than-light connection of some kind was occurring. What I want people to understand is that "faster than light" has no meaning once you are in the fifth dimension, because any fourth dimensional point can be connected to any other using the additional degree of freedom that the fifth dimension affords, with no violation of the limits of spacetime.

Nicholas Gisin and has team have continued to refine their experiments since I published my book. Here's a few paragraphs from a recent article in Science Now written by Phil Berardelli which talks about Nicholas Gisin's more recent work. The name of the article is "Quantum Physics Gets 'Spooky' ":

This might be a rare case about which Einstein was wrong. More than 60 years ago, the great physicist scoffed at the idea that anything could travel faster than light, even though quantum mechanics had suggested such a condition. Now four Swiss researchers have brought the possibility closer to reality. Testing a concept called "spooky action at a distance"--a phrase used by Einstein in criticizing the phenomenon--they have shown that two subatomic particles can communicate nearly instantaneously, even if they are separated by cosmic distances.

Physicist Nicolas Gisin and colleagues at the University of Geneva in Switzerland split off pairs of quantum-entangled photons and sent them from the university's campus through two fiber-optic cables to two Swiss villages located 18 kilometers apart. Thinking of the photons like traffic lights, each passed through specially designed detectors that determined what "color" they were when entering the cable and what color they appeared to be when they reached the terminus. The experiments revealed two things: First, the physical properties of the photons changed identically during their journey, just as predicted by quantum theory--when one turned "red," so did the other. Second, there was no detectable time difference between when those changes occurred in the photons, as though an imaginary traffic controller had signaled them both.

The result, the team reports in tomorrow's issue of Nature, is that whatever was affecting the photons seems to have happened nearly instantaneously and that according to their calculations, the phenomenon influencing the particles had to be traveling at least 10,000 times faster than light. Given Einstein's standard speed limit on light traveling within conventional spacetime, the experiments show that entanglement might be controlled by something existing beyond it. Gisin says that once the scientific community "accepts that nature has this ability, we should try to create models that explain it."

Okay, that's heady stuff. But there are some additional sentences in this article that I'd like to take one at a time because they're very important.

Although the research doesn't demonstrate spooky action at a distance directly, it does provide "a lower boundary for the speed" necessary for the phenomenon, says theoretical physicist Martin Bojowald of Pennsylvania State University in State College.

In other words, even though the Nicholas Gisin team's experiment only showed that the connection was at least 10,000 times the speed of light, the limitations of their experiment could not prove that the connection was instantaneous. I feel certain that no matter how this experiment is improved in the future, we are always going to see indications that these connections really are instantaneous, and in fact that it's harder for us to imagine how such effects could be occurring at all if they're not the result of a higher dimensional "folding" of spacetime as per the kinds of concepts we're always talking about with Imagining the Tenth Dimension.

Cosmologist Sean Carroll of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena says that it's "yet another experiment that tells us quantum mechanics is right" and that there "really is an intrinsic connection between entangled particles, not that some signal passes quickly between them when an observation is performed."

I've quoted Dr. Carroll a number of times in blogs like Time in Either Direction, Scrambled Eggs, The Spacetime Tree, Unlikely Events and Timelessness, and What's Before and After?. It seems that the more I read about his viewpoints, the more I would love to sit down and have a coffee with him some time, as there seem to be so many connections between the intuitive leaps I have made with my project and the science that Dr. Carroll is pursuing.

And physicist Lorenza Viola of Dartmouth College says there's much more to be determined. "I am sure we are not finished unveiling what the quantum [effects] due to entanglement really are and how powerful they can be."

(EDIT: as a lovely coincidence, Sean Carroll posted a new blog entry a couple of weeks after I posted this entry, his entry is called Spooky Signals From the Future Telling Us to Cancel the LHC.)

For me, this concept relates to the powerful idea of how right "now" we are each navigating through a fifth-dimensional probability space, one planck length at a time, and that Einstein's "spooky" entanglement shows us that each succeeding "now" is actually a point in the fifth dimension rather than the fourth. This makes sense whether you're thinking about the wave function of possible universes as per Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation, or how the fifth dimension and above from our perspective appear to be "curled up at the planck length" even though they're really not, or the idea that our universe is created holographically at the fifth dimension by interference patterns created by this planck length granularity of spacetime. Understanding how much everything within our "now" is connected to things that are outside of our spacetime is the key, and the fact that ancient spirituality and modern science are pointing at the same concept doesn't mean one is right and the other is wrong.

Everything fits together in probability space. Think about that one for a moment, and enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

PS, Here's some other blogs where we've talked about Einstein's "spooky" feelings about quantum mechanics:
The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic
Wormholes as Dimensional Foldings?
The Long Undulating Snake
Norway's Reverse Deja Vu

Next: Tenth Dimension Audio Book

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=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

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lMsPnYKFjc

Poll 41: "Life uses quantum physics effects such as tunneling and entanglement to engage with reality 'outside' of spacetime, and this is true of all creative processes". Poll Ended June 10 '09, 83.2% agreed while 16.8% disagreed.

I suggested the wording for this poll in my blog entry accompanying "Poll 36 - Do Plants Use Quantum Effects?". Both this current poll question and that previous poll 36 are connected to my blog entry Creativity and the Quantum Universe. I will post the videos for both of those down below. In those entries I talked about the scientific experiments that have shown ways in which life is engaged with more than the "now" of our 4D spacetime. This time around, I'm going to talk mainly about creativity.

Here's a video from the TED Talks series featuring author Amy Tan (best-selling author of The Joy Luck Club). Amy takes us on a similar exploration to the areas my project regularly delves into, blending ideas from quantum mechanics and cosmology with her own thoughts on free will, chance, and creativity. This presentation is light and fun, but underneath Amy is dealing with some heady concepts.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8D0pwe4vaQo

There continues to be mounting evidence that we operate "outside" of the limited little window we call "now". Here's some articles about recent research that shows there are processes which let us decide what we're about to do before we are consciously aware of the decision:
http://www.twine.com/item/126p14182-jk/unconscious-thought-precedes-conscious-incognito-the-economist
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124535297048828601.html

Here is another author speaking at Ted Talks about creativity: this is Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love. Elizabeth has some very wise things to say about the negative connotations sometimes attached to the role of being a creative person: the myth that creative people have to suffer for their art is dangerously destructive. Last entry, in "When's a Knot Not a Knot?", I ended by asking that we think about loops and knots, and that we ponder the loops and knots that keep us from our goals. My song Addictive Personality is about those same patterns that we can let ourselves be trapped into, and Elizabeth adds some very important points to this conversation.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86x-u-tz0MA

Here's videos for those previous blog entries I mentioned above. "Poll 36 - Do Plants Use Quantum Effects?":

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

"Creativity and the Quantum Universe":

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBNv8LMbEPA

Addictive Personality:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFvsd6IUoH4

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Tenth Dimension on boingboing

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pddxV_3RZbw


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGAmV4V4By4

A youtube user from Norway calling themselves BlueSkyFish sent me some interesting information about a phenomenon that is part of that country's folklore: the "Vardauger", which is also spelled "Vardøger". Here's an excerpt from the vardauger article in wikipedia:

Stories typically include instances that are nearly déjà vu in substance, but in reverse, where a spirit with the subject's footsteps, voice, scent, or appearance and overall demeanor precedes them in a location or activity, resulting in witnesses believing they've seen or heard the actual person, before the person physically arrives.

How's your Norwegian? There's a much more extensive entry about this subject in Norway's version of wikipedia.

Last entry, we looked at Roger Ebert's take on quantum mechanics, and what the ramifications are if all possible versions of our universe already exist simultaneously within a timeless underlying fabric. Just prior to that, in Just Six Things: The I Ching we looked at an ancient Chinese system as a possible way of tracking our trajectories, seeing where we are right now in the multiverse and what possible parallel universes from Everett's Many Worlds might be approaching... and this was an extension of the preceding blogs to that one, The Map and the Territory and What's South of the South Pole?.

The vardauger seems like an easy concept to tie into all this - if some people are more sensitive to the possibilities coming towards us from our fifth dimensional probability space, then a foreshadowing of an approaching person's form might be one of the ways this sensitivity could express itself. In entries like Are Animals and Kids More Fifth-Dimensional? and Magnets and Souls, we've talked about the work of biochemist Rupert Sheldrake and his book Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. Could these animals be sensing a vardauger of their owners, a reverse deja vu of their impending arrival? Interesting thought.

Here's a Google Tech Talks presentation featuring Rupert Sheldrake, as he makes an almost two hour long presentation on "The Extended Mind - New Experimental Evidence".

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnA8GUtXpXY

BlueSkyFish had some other interesting information for us as well: she tells us that interest in psychic phenomena has become much more mainstream within the last few years in Norway.
Click here to read a BBC new story about Norway's Princess Martha Louise, fourth in line to the throne, who says she has psychic powers and can teach people to communicate with angels. Or click here to read a story from earlier this year about Norway's health minister, Bjarne Håkon Hansen, who has gotten a lot of media attention for promoting a psychic healer who calls him Snåsakallen (the "snåsa man"), stating that the snåsa man healed the health minister's baby son from colic over the phone. According to this same article, many Norwegian politicans share minister Hansen's belief in alternative medicine, among them half of the members of the committee of Health and Care Services. And finally, here's an article from late last year about Saera Khan, one of Norway’s members of parliament, who ran up huge phone bills calling clairvoyants, not just for personal advice, but also for advice on political matters.

I find it very interesting that my book has sold well in the Scandinavian countries, which include Denmark, Sweden, and Norway: perhaps BlueSkyFish is pointing us to one of the reasons for why this could be? I 've wondered before what our world would be like if other industrial and political leaders of the world were to openly embrace a more metaphysical perspective: in my blog entry News From the Future (the video for which we saw at the start of this entry), I showed a possible future when major corporations will change their approach, when it becomes apparent that there are patterns which exist outside of our observed reality which connect what we each think of as our unique "soul" to a larger whole.

In entries like Creativity and the Quantum Universe, Our Non-Local Universe, and Where Are You? we've looked at other ways of thinking about how our reality is inter-connected in ways that are "outside" of our 4D spacetime, and with my project I continue to suggest that these "spooky" ideas (as Einstein referred to them) make much more sense when we realize that our "now" is not in the fourth dimension, but the fifth.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: An Expanding 4D Sphere

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4wvShQBi-I

First, go read Roger Ebert's blog entry published a couple of weeks ago, called "The Quantum Theory of Reincarnation":
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/07/everymans_guide_to_quantum_the.html

Mr. Ebert gets an awful lot of things right here, and in ways very similar to what I've been saying with my project since it launched over three years ago. I wonder how he would react to my original animation about how to imagine ten spatial dimensions? Or to the amusing College Humor satire published last month blending my way of visualizing the spatial dimensions with a movie trailer?

Over at YouTube, my most popular video blog entry is currently "Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?", which helps to solidify some of what Mr. Ebert is talking about: if, in the underlying structures of reality, time has no meaning and everything happens simultaneously, then the additional dimensions all have to be spatial rather than temporal for extra dimensions to make sense.

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfhOBevrN2U

As Mr. Ebert mentions, our reality is not continuous, despite what our senses tell us. Rather, it's sliced up into planck-unit-sized pieces of not just space, but spacetime. In The Holographic Universe, I expanded upon this idea further with an exploration of the growing mountain of scientific evidence that our particular reality comes from the fifth dimension rather than the fourth:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMLVjFrtq6Q

Coincidentally, a week or so before Mr. Ebert's blog entry went up I published a video blog at YouTube called "Could I Meet My Incarnation?", which explores very similar territory: what is it that makes each of us unique, and what is it that connects us all together?

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

My most popular blog entry of all time was published earlier this year, and it also relates to Mr. Ebert's exploration of how the quantum world relates to the reality we see around us: "Creativity and the Quantum Universe". Here's the video for that entry:


Roger Ebert is one of the most widely read columnists on the planet. With his blog entry we looked at here today, he shows us he is part of a growing surge of interest in these ideas, and as I approach five million unique visitors who have been to my tenth dimension website, I'm so very pleased to have played my own small part in helping to move people towards this new understanding. Bravo, Roger Ebert!

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Norway's "Reverse Deja Vu"