Physics Sequence

Structure for my physics sequence:
- Level I of Tegmark's Multiverse
 - Toroidal Universe
- Level II of Tegmark's Multiverse
 -
- Level III of Tegmark's Multiverse
 - Many-Worlds
 - Timeless Physics
- Level IV of Tegmark's Multiverse
 - Ultimate Ensemble
 - E8 Theory
 - Absolute Infinite


Barbour and Tegmark in Ten Dimensions


Barbour

Physicist Julian Barbour says, "In my view of the universe, it's just like a huge collection of snapshots which are immensely, richly structured. They're not in any communication with each other, they're worlds unto themselves. ...In some very deep sense, the universe, a quantum universe, is static. Nothing changes." What Dr. Barbour is conveying here is that our 3D universe is like a giant flipbook animation, and even though it feels to us like our observed reality is continuous, each of those "snapshots" he's referring to represents a frame of 3D space without time. Each of those frames is defined by the speed of light and Planck's constant, which is the smallest possible distance that can be observed, and the smallest possible duration that our reality can have before words like "distance" and "duration" lose their meaning. So, the only way for change to occur is to string those "snapshots" together and view them from the fourth dimension, one Planck frame after another.

There's a second problem with the way people tend to think about the third dimension: it's so easy to forget that it takes time for light to travel to our eyes. So even if we look at our own hands, there was already a tiny delay for the time it took for the light rays to bounce off our hands and arrive at our retinas. If we're trying to imagine the third dimension, then, as space without time, we're already imagining something that can't be seen! This is easier to think about when we move out to the vast distances of the nearby stars - if I'm looking in the night sky at a star that's ten light years away, I'm looking at what that star looked like ten years ago. I'm not looking into space, I'm looking into space-time. And right next to that star could be a different one that's twenty light years away. There those two stars are, seemingly side by side, and yet when I'm looking at one I'm looking ten years into the past, and when I'm looking at the other I'm looking twenty years into the past.

Isn't it amazing to think about how all the different distances of galaxies, stars, planets and satellites that we might see through a telescope blend together into a vision not of 3D space, but of 4D space-time? And even though it's on a much smaller scale, the same is true if we look at our hands, then look at some other object that's further away - even though our brains tell us we're looking at a 3D world, the time it takes for light to reach our eyes from any particular object will be defined by how far away that object is from our eye, and what we're seeing at any particular instant is really a blend of those tiny delays, a snapshot of 4D space-time.

The next time someone tells you that the first and second dimension don't exist because something with no depth is impossible, think about how the third dimension has the same problem- in our minds we can visualize objects that are constructed from length, width, and depth, but we can't actually see them with our eyes unless they have duration within 4D space-time. Does that mean the third dimension doesn't exist? Of course not! But those 3D "snapshots" of space without time are much stranger than our intuition might tell us - because within each of those snapshots lies the potential for quantum entanglement which can occur at any distance across the universe. Remember - those connections and superpositions are not just faster-than-light, they're instantaneous: as Julian Barbour says, a "frame" of the quantum universe exists in a place where time doesn't exist. And if that idea seems unimaginably strange to us, perhaps that's because it's so easy for us to forget that you and I are really part of something larger than the third dimension.


Tegmark

[b]Level I: Beyond our cosmological horizon[/b]

The cosmological horizon is what we can see from Earth, out to the cosmic microwave background. Max Tegmark estimates that, within a Level I multiverse, an identical volume to our should be about 10^10^115 meters away from us. Perhaps Tegmark's strictly flat space-time, without extra dimensions, restricts his viewpoint in this way. Another way of thinking of this is that our 5-dimensional hypersphere (or torus) has a circumference of 10^10^115 meters, meaning that, if we traveled that distance in a certain direction, we would arrive back on Earth.

[b]Level II: Universes with different physical constants[/b]

In this version, the multiverse as a whole is stretching and will continue doing so forever, but some regions of space stop stretching and form distinct bubbles, like gas pockets in a loaf of rising bread. Such bubbles are embryonic Level I multiverses. This is also called the multiverse landscape, and is in the seventh dimension and above, depending on the context of the discussion.

[b]Level III: Many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics[/b]

Hugh Everett III's Theory of the Universal Wave Function, commonly known as the Many Worlds Interpretation, tell us that observation causes one universe out of many to be selected, but the others continue on, just as real as the one we're in. All the different "worlds" created by "splits" in a level III multiverse with the same physical constants can be found in some Hubble volume in a level I multiverse. Tegmark writes that "The only difference between Level I and Level III is where your doppelgängers reside. In Level I they live elsewhere in good old three-dimensional space. In Level III they live on another quantum branch in infinite-dimensional Hilbert space." Similarly, all Level II bubble universes with different physical constants can in effect be found as "worlds" created by "splits" at the moment of spontaneous symmetry breaking in a level III multiverse.

These "other" universes resulting from different physical constants are at different positions within the multiverse landscape of the seventh and eighth dimension, and that having arrived at any particular location within that landscape there is a potential for there to be a wave function of possible states (in other words, a set of parallel universes for the resulting universe) within the first through sixth dimensions.

[b]Level IV: Ultimate Ensemble[/b]

This level considers equally real all universes that can be described by different mathematical structures. This does not include different low-energy physical laws not of our observable universe. Tegmark writes that "abstract mathematics is so general that any Theory Of Everything that is definable in purely formal terms (independent of vague human terminology) is also a mathematical structure. For instance, a TOE involving a set of different types of entities (denoted by words, say) and relations between them (denoted by additional words) is nothing but what mathematicians call a set-theoretical model, and one can generally find a formal system that it is a model of." He argues this "implies that any conceivable parallel universe theory can be described at Level IV" and "subsumes all other ensembles, therefore brings closure to the hierarchy of multiverses, and there cannot be say a Level V."

"Ultimate Ensemble" certainly works as a description of the tenth dimension, and I've been saying that to avoid confusion it's better not to call this over-arching concept a multiverse, but rather The Omniverse. This helps to keep it separate in our minds from the parallel universe versions of our own universe (Tegmark's Level I, which I have also referred to as our universe's "phase space"), and the multiverse landscape of possible universes (Tegmark's Level II and/or III). On top of that I have added the ninth dimension, which encompasses the dimensions below but moves beyond any physical expressions and into patterns of information only, and by then we are arriving at what Tegmark calls Level IV. The omniverse, then, becomes either the ninth dimension in its entirety, or the tenth dimension in its unobserved state: a single "point" representing the ultimate ensemble of all possible patterns and shapes, ready to be created through symmetry breaking to spill us back into the realities of the dimensions below.

Subatomic particles, fractals, life, consciousness, and our observed universe are all structures that result from these underlying patterns that reside in that place where the distinction between past present, and future is meaningless. Our own observed reality is being created at the fifth dimension, so anything beyond that becomes part of a "you can't get there from here" list, unless we can some day navigate within those extra dimensions beyond the fifth. And as we get closer to ten, we are now starting to move away from the reality side of the equation and more towards the information side.


Barbour and Tegmark

If the universe had the least amount of entropy at its beginning, and Schrödinger described life as a unique process which creates "negative entropy", does that mean that in a sense he thought the universe was the most "alive" back at its beginning? Gevin Giorbran's remarkable insight, in his book Everything Forever, was that we're not moving from low entropy to high entropy with our arrow of time: instead we're moving from a high grouping order to a high symmetry order. I like this because it allows for a way to imagine a universal creative force which expresses itself throughout the world line of the universe, and which makes sense when we view our universe as a single data set from a timeless perspective. From our own vantage point, then, both time and anti-time represent the same thing: a naturally occurring return to balance. Ultimately our universe or any other arises from a breaking of symmetry, and "outside" of this system is a return to the underlying fabric of reality: the unobserved tenth dimension, the Ultimate Ensemble, the Teilhardian Omega Point, the Godelian "outside the system", the computational underpinnings behind digital physics or Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, ultimate enlightenment, or the Omniverse. And that's what we're visualizing with every single dimension in this project - how can we perceive any dimension from "outside" of itself, from the truest perspective, which is timelessness?

The video for Imagining the Ninth Dimension provides one way of thinking about this – it shows how each dimension, perceived in its entirety as a single timeless point, becomes a point on the surface of a finite but unbounded hypersphere in the next dimension. Physicist and author Frank Wilczek recently put forth two papers which add a very interesting spin on this idea of extra-dimensional patterns that reside within a timeless whole as well. Wilczek proposes that just as there are naturally emerging crystal structures in the third dimension, this same effect could be happening within what he calls “Time Crystals” as well. Does a phrase like Time Crystals sound like science fiction? You bet it does, but Frank Wilczek is a Nobel prize-winning physicist so we should take a serious look at this creative new idea.