Imagining the Tenth Dimension: A New Way of Thinking About Time and Space [Hardcover]

Rob Bryanton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 6, 2007

"A fascinating excursion into the multiverse - clear, elegant, personal, provocative." - (Hugo and Nebula award-winning author Greg Bear.)
Read the book whose companion website (tenthdimension.com) has already achieved worldwide popularity.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A fascinating excursion into the multiverse - clear, elegant, personal, provocative." - --Hugo and Nebula award-winning author Greg Bear. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

Rob Bryanton made his first record at twelve, and was host of a regional CBC-TV music series at twenty. He is the President of Talking Dog Studios (www.talkingdogstudios.com) in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, which specializes in music and sound for film and television. He has been nominated eight times in the last eight years for Canada's prestigious Gemini Awards, four times in the category "Best Original Music Score for a Dramatic Series", and four times for "Best Sound for a Dramatic Program". Recent projects to which Rob has contributed his talents as a composer and sound mixer include the hugely popular CTV series "Corner Gas", plus the historical mini-series "Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story" (CBC-TV). Rob is also responsible for the theme and underscoring on CBC's Canadian Antiques Roadshow. While Rob has had poems and song lyrics published in several anthologies over the past decade, "Imagining the Tenth Dimension" is his first book. It represents the culmination of a lifelong fascination with science, philosophy, and the nature of reality which, as he tells in the book, began at the age of seven. Rob is also the current President of the Saskatchewan Motion Picture Association, and is an active volunteer in his community. A typical stubborn prairie boy, he is proud to have built a career for himself as a composer and sound mixer in his home town, and to have been a part of Saskatchewan's burgeoning film and television industry for the past 30 years. Rob lives in Regina with his wife Gail and their dog Buddy. Gail and Rob have two sons, Todd and Mark. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 228 pages
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing (February 6, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1425167047
• ISBN-13: 978-1425167042
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #767,522 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

207 of 231 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Wannabe Scientist's View, March 1, 2007

By 

Cybertronian (Finland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Imagining the Tenth Dimension: A New Way of Thinking About Time and Space (Paperback)

I bought the book, because I am a graduate student in string theory and was curious about "new" ways of thinking in ten dimensions. I knew the author of the book was actually a musician (some research with google was required for that), but so is Brian May of Queen, and his book "BANG - THE COMPLETE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE" is very well-written. Well, I couldn't be more wrong. Whereas Brian May studied physics (and is currently doing his long-lost PhD), 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.

Although the book is not intended to be a discription of "real physics", as he points out in the introduction, his ideas on ten dimensions and the alledged connection to string theory and the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics couldn't be stated more explicitely and couldn't be more wrong. The many world interpretation 'assumes' multiple universes in which all possible quantum processes do happen. Bryanton thinks these multiverses are in the dimensions 5 to 10. Moreover, our third spatial dimension is merely the thing "we fold through" to go from one place on a surface to another, which are not directly linked. If he is referring to the holographic principle, he's wrong there as well. Physically and mathematically, what he claims about space and time is absolute bullocks, if I may use the expression. 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 or whatsoever, except that the number 10 and the word dimensions are in the same sentence. The eleven dimensions of M-theory are in his view superfluous.

The book is perhaps intended to be scientifically and philosophically provocative, but in fact it is scientifically incorrect and at most philosophically boring. If you really want to know something about string theory and modern developments on a non-technical level, buy The Elegant Universe or The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene, Hyperspace or Parallel Universes by Michio Kaku, or Warped Passages by Lisa Randall, and your money will be well-spent. Other ideas on quantum gravity can be found in Lee Smolin's "Three Roads to Quantum Gravity". For the mathematical inclined reader (as Greene would call it in the notes), Penrose's "The Road to Reality" could be interesting, which is a brilliant mathematical exposé of theoretical physics.

Moreover, because the author does not fully understand quantum physics, his explanations are even for scientists hard to follow, because they don't seem logical. For non-scientists, I cannot recommend this book either, since I don't think it will help you in any way: you probably won't understand the science and if you do understand what the author says, you understand the wrong thing.

35 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Might be worth an afternoon of your time, June 5, 2007

By 

J. Thomas (United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Imagining the Tenth Dimension: A New Way of Thinking About Time and Space (Paperback)

When this book arrived, I could tell by the quality that it was vanity-published. The writing within confirms this -- as other reviewers have put forth, the author hasn't been anywhere near a physics text. That being said, it's still a fairly interesting read. There are a few places in the book where the author's -- how shall I say -- "hippieness" comes out to play. The author's political views somehow insinuate themselves into the book's pages, but the distilled essence is still an interesting thought experiment and likely worth an afternoon to wade through.

Of course, you could also go to the website and watch the video -- the book doesn't really offer too much more over that. If you do purchase it, I suggest purchasing it used from one of these other reviewers that is likely selling it here on Amazon. It's certainly not worth the $14.95.

57 of 73 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars This is not about dimensions at all, June 1, 2007

By 

Alexei Lebedev (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Imagining the Tenth Dimension: A New Way of Thinking About Time and Space (Hardcover)

This book is not about dimensions at all (based on the definition of the word). If it were a collections of poems, I would have no gripe, but it pretends to be a popular science book. It makes assertions about the way things are, and is bundled with Brian Greene's "The Fabric of Cosmos", so I'm going to treat, and criticize it as such.

I'm going to briefly explain what dimensions are, and then show why statements such as "all possible histories of all possible universes are a point in ten-dimensional space" make no sense.

The a geographical location on earth can be described by two coordinates -- longitude and latitude. So the surface of a sphere is a two-dimensional entity. Most non-mathematical people agree with the first statement, and disagree with the second. They say "why, isn't the earth three-dimensional". That's true, but the *meaning* of the first two statements is exactly the same. When something can be described using two independent coordinates, that something has two dimensions. Our everyday experience simply makes us associate the word "two-dimensional" with the idea "flat", thus the intuition; but in mathematics, such associations don't apply. The word "two-dimensional" has a very explicit meaning, referring to the number of independent directions.

Consider a plumbing pipe. Its surface also has two dimensions, because from any given point you can either go along the pipe, or across. The direction across is very short -- if you crawl along it, you'll quickly come back to where you started. It wraps like the pacman screen. All the additional dimensions that physicists introduced are of this type and have a "pipe circumference" of about 1.6×10^-33 centimeters (that's thirty three zeros after decimal point). When you go along those dimensions, you come back quickly indeed! The result is much closer to zero than to infinity.

Each pixel on your screen is described with five independent variables: x,y,r,g and b (the last three being the color). So your screen shows you a 2D slice of a five-dimensional space. If each pixel could also taste differently, for example, bitter, salty, sour, sweet, and umami, the underlying space would now be ten-dimensional. So much for "all possible histories of all possible universes".

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.

The author not only has no qualifications to write on the subject, he grossly misunderstands the very term he used in the title.