Planet 10 by way of the 8th dimension

In the course of human events, I got mail last week from EnlightenNext -- "The Magazine for Evolutionaries" -- encouraging me to "Think About This..." That's the name of a series of teaser emails this outfit has been sending out. What they wanted me to think about this week was... well here, you can read it yourself. It involves a book called Imagining the Tenth Dimension: A New Way of Thinking about Time and Space by one Rob Bryanton. Naturally, there's also a website -- and a YouTube video. Here's how the book is introduced in the hardcopy April-June 2007 issue of "What Is Enlightenment?" magazine, which has recently been renamed (and none too soon) EnlightenNext. Now I also want to show you this detail, because -- and maybe it's just me, but -- at first I thought those were like maybe fairy wings. No? Well OK, maybe not. But the image is suggestive of something woo-woo, or as I like to think of it: para-abnormal. Our intrepid Mind Traveller leaves behind the mundane, indeed passé, realm of the Big City, passes through the Sublunary Sphere of Nature -- represented here by the World Tree -- and enters the Higher Spiritual Realms of Quantum Theory. Sans, of course, all that icky and over-conceptual mathematics. "To those of us not up to speed on the finer points of theoretical physics," wonders the author of the EnlightenNext article, Your 3-D Universe Is So Passé (Tom Huston, that's him at the left), "what could it mean for there to be ten or more dimensions?" After a tip of the hat to Buckaroo Banzai, Huston offers a brief overview of Bryanton's truly Buckaroonian theorizing, and wraps it up by saying... by the time we arrive at the tenth dimension, which comes across as a kind of Teilhardian Omega Point encompassing absolutely every possible timeline of every possible universe, "there’s no place left to go." In other words (let me see if I've got this right), wherever you go, there you are! But, forgive me, I cannot pass over that reference to Blowhard de Chardin without (re-)quoting Nobelist Peter Medawar's 1961 review of his book -- which I anyway feel is powerfully germane here. [The Phenomenon of Man] is a book widely held to be of the utmost profundity and significance; it created something like a sensation upon its publication in France, and some reviewers hereabouts called it the Book of the Year -- one, the Book of the Century. Yet the greater part of it, I shall show, is nonsense, tricked out with a variety of metaphysical conceits, and its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself. Hold that thought. Meanwhile, on the Imagining the Tenth Demotion site, we find this... These ideas are proving to have interesting resonances and connections for a great many people from around the world, and I believe this innovative blending of ideas from quantum physics and Everett's multiverse with ideas from philosophy and ancient wisdom will some day be confirmed to be part of the essential truths of how our universe is defined: from the timelessness of the underlying quantum fabric where all universes and all timelines for those universes exist simultaneously. In addition to that, there are any number of references to "quantum" this-and-that on the site and its associated discussion boards. Now, I will be the first to admit that I don't know the first thing about multidimensional multiverses, quantum entanglement, dead-or-alive boxed cats, Bell's Theorem, string theory, or any of that stuff. Except, of course, for the plethora of references I find in New Age hogwash such as... Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine by Tupak Okra Quantum Wellness: A Practical and Spiritual Guide to Health and Happiness by Kathy Freston Quantum Success: The Astounding Science of Wealth and Happiness by Sandra Anne Taylor Dr. Quantum's Little Book Of Big Ideas: Where Science Meets Spirit by Fred Alan Wolf The Quantum Doctor: A Physicist's Guide to Health and Healing by Goatshit Asswami ...ad nauseam. Not so coincidentally, those last two were in the execrable POS movie... ...or, as it's currently being marketed, What the "Bleep" Do We Know?!: Down the Rabbit Hole Quantum Edition. But I digress. Back to Imagining the 10th Dementia. btw, that's an actual unretouched callout from the printed article there on the left -- just to give you a further clue of where all this is coming from. Or headed to. If you think you are confused at this juncture, imagine how I felt as I waded through all this pseudoscientific bogosity. So I decided to turn to that nonpareil font of collective wisdom: the 1-star Amazon review! Here's a short stack of what I found for Imagining the Tenth Dimension: A New Way of Thinking About Time and Space... Wannabe Scientist's View ...Bryanton has never touched a scientific article, let alone stood near the mathematics required to grasp them. All his "knowledge" comes from science fiction (which he uses as genuine "references" for his wild ideas), popular science books (Greene, Kaku and Randall) and Scientific American.... his ideas on ten dimensions and the alleged connection to string theory and the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics couldn't be stated more explicitly and couldn't be more wrong.... The first chapter is exactly what is shown on his website and the rest is just a filler in which he tries to explain the ideas of quantum observation and its relation to philosophy, poorly. There is absolutely no (scientific) connection to string theory whatsoever, except that the number 10 and the word dimensions are in the same sentence. This is not about dimensions at all ...One conclusion is that the success of this book is due to the fact that some people simply cannot tell the difference between, say Hawking's popularization of black holes and Bryanton's statements like this one: "for us, a point in the seven-dimensional space is Infinity". Both sound vaguely poetical, but underneath, one is sense, while the other is nonsense. Tenth Dimension Hoax This is not a serious treatment of string theory, but a fabricated theory with little to no scientific background. The author's approach is entertaining, but totally off-base and a disservice to the true string theory field of study. This book is a borderline hoax and I feel dumber for having actually read it. Don't be fooled This book is totally bogus pseudo-science. The author (not a scientist, but a music producer) attempts to explain higher dimensions, as if they were analogous to the lower ones, as "points" and "lines," which is completely incorrect. If you have an interest in quantum mechanics and string theory, stick with books written by physicists, such as Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe." At the end of Medawar's above-quoted review, he makes reference to "the gullibility which makes it possible for people to be taken in by such a bag of tricks as this. If it were an innocent, passive gullibility it would be excusable; but all too clearly, alas, it is an active willingness to be deceived." Nuff said. Except for: EnlightenNext nee "What Is Enlightenment?" is the brainchild of Andrew Cohen, who describes himself as "a spiritual teacher and acclaimed author widely recognized as a defining voice in the emerging field of evolutionary spirituality." Even his own mother thinks he's a narcissistic little shit. On the site's front page, Ken Wilber -- "world's leading integral philosopher" -- is quoted as saying, by way of an endorsement, "So, the Big Question is: How do we transform ourselves to change the world?" Yeah, I guess that's the Big Question, Kenny.

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