two time dimensions

since i dont' have a physics or math degree - and i've thought about this for... oh about fifteen or twenty minutes - i think we can agree i'm qualified to blather on about the implications for string theory if if a Really Simple Theory Of Everything (which i blogged about previously) turns out to be useful / correct (e.g. by predicting yet undiscovered particles).

if the RSTOE / E8-mapping is correct... does that mean string theorists are barking up the wrong tree?

one possibility (to my uniformed thinking), is that the E8 mapping turns out to be a transform of what string theorists are doing. in other words - they are both right from but different perspectives - with different approaches requiring different levels of complexity to work with - but also with differing utility.

i'm also not clear that a RSTOE really provides a true TOE - in the way we've been thinking about it for so long. so what if there is an E8 symmetry to everything... that doesn't feel like a fundamental explanation of everything to me - it's more like a curiousity. Like, why E8? What is there written into the fabric of reality that necessitates E8 as truth? Conversely a string that resonates in the four dimensions that we know + the six dimensions from a Calabi-Yau space + an extra dimension = a fundamental understanding of why. at least to me.

ok maybe as a musician, i'm still stuck on the idea that music (the resonance of a string) is what underlies it all... or maybe i'm not ready to give up string theory because... well, because just recently someone suggested that extra (11th) dimension the string theory requires, does a much better job at making things pretty, if it is in fact a time dimension instead of another space dimension - and i just think that idea is too cool.

if so, that means, we are currently living in two time dimensions, right now.

i used to think to myself - heaven must have time, because heaven has music - and you need time for music to work. but i always used to wonder if maybe heaven has multiple time dimensions... because, you know, of all the infinities of God and heaven 'n all... and i used to wonder what music would sound like in two sound dimensions.

so... we've all experienced moments when time nearly stood still. when something calamitous strikes and time slows down for us. i've started wondering if this is our consciousness accessing another (perpendicular) time dimension? normal time continues for everyone else - but our experience says something quite different. we exist for longer in that moment that everyone else does.

so maybe we do indeed feel the deep pocket of a drummers groove because we (can) experience it in more than one time dimension. maybe this is why a human playing has some intractable magic and a "drum machine has no soul".

oh the greatness and mystery of reality and consciousness.

Your Mind Makes it Real

while I am hardly a specialist in much of anything - and thus completely unqualified to make or reinforce any significantly meaningful statements - one statement I've held comes from a line in the Matrix - "Your Mind makes it Real".

I see this as a fundamental reality of the universe -

... from the quantum universe (my perhaps gross approximation notwithstanding) - to the "reality" of the virtual world - to the "real" world... what seems to matter is human... errr... consciousness. we also don't know what consciousness is... which only adds to the enigma of it all.

in seemingly unrelated news - we still don't know what time is. but this article - suggests we also don't know what space is any more than we know what time is. . why didn't i think of that? we experience time - but have a hard time explaining what it is when asked... yet for some reason we feel we have a pretty good handle on space... except... aren't space-time interrelated? so what makes us think we understand space any better than time?? Does a ruler actually tell us more about reality than a clock??

this article is brilliant to my way of thinking - and is exactly the kind of mind job we are going to need to undergo to finally produce a cohesive and holistic view of this universe (TOE).

this article succeeds in unifying consciousness with space-time by turning your mind inside out: i.e. instead of looking in at consciousness, it looks out from consciousness. in this way - it is also very zen... and begins to explain e.g. this.

not saying this is the way to go - but it is the kind of shift that awaits.

too fricken' cool.

i love a good humbling -

wired magazine - which is kind of like my farmers almanac if it were written by a smarter version of my subconscious brain - had a cover story last physical issue (just hit the virtual shelves) - that is through da roof... stuff i love - a much more comprehensive list of things we don't know than i have ever been guilty of trying to assemble.

my favorites?
- time, kind of a gimme, almost a cliche, if you know me
- consciousness, like my all time fav
- gravity, good clean fun stuff
- turbulence, yeah baby! delightfully lovely chaos
- entanglement - my idea of romance. no really

i also thought the "is the Universe actually made of information" bit was pretty cool - and pretty postmodern too -

I'm feeling slightly vindicated because I asked a medical doctor friend this quandary once - and got a very unsatisfactory response... seriously, look at the math predators like cheetahs are doing on the fly to intercept their accelerating dodging prey - and it would suck to solve those problems by hand. how do their lightweight "inferior" brains do that stuff so stinkin quick.

also - if i haven't mentioned this before, i really want to live for a thousand years (and live on Mars to maybe help terraform it to learn more about complexity and chaos) so i'd like us to make some progress on understanding this one.

i was a little surprised they didn't mention the astounding gap of knowledge in how many species are on the planet. dudes...

although, they did add the catchall - which does raise the killer question - how deep does the rabit hole go?

i'm thinkin - pretty deep

sweet dreams -