Imagining the Tenth Dimension : A New Way of Think

by Rob Bryanton

"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.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Physics, Philosophy, Popular Science, Spirituality

Mass Market Paperback

First published September 15, 2006

Reviews

[Heini · Rating 2 out of 5]

A bunch of nonsense. Don't get me wrong, it was a quite enjoyable and easily read bunch of nonsense and the author is completely honest about it just being his speculetions. However, it is nonsense nonetheless.

[Voss Foster · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maybe I only like this bok because I like quantum physics and quantum mechanics. But I doubt it. This is for everyone. All of the science is presented in a user-friendly fashion, unpretentious and humorous. Yet, you're learning. You're expanding your mind. Even if his theory turns out to be proven wrong, you've entered into a mental exercise of sorts, and you'll come away thinking.

While I do try to avoid putting textbooks and their ilk on here, 'Imaginging the Tenth Dimension' is much more than a text book. It's a form of entertainment where you happen to learn a little something about theoretical physics.

And who would mind that?

[Robin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Food for thought, on a purely philosophical level, as most of it lacks basis in science. I haven't studied physics since elementary school, but even I thought it felt as if he veered way off sometimes (although the author does admit at the beginning that he's not a physicist and that the books is indeed speculative and philosophical in nature). If you take the book for what it is, and not as a scientific explanation of dimensions, it's interesting, but not amazing.

[Hellread · Rating 1 out of 5]

Was hooked by the first (promo) chapter. The rest of the book is author's pseudo-science speculations and imaginations. If I judge it as a serious book, it's not. If I judge it as sci-fi, then it has no plot, no world, no characters, no events.

[Mark Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bryanton’s book is a way to think about order, perception.
I came upon his book when I was figuring out how to explain why committees don’t work. I was on a committee formed to figure out how to implement a new law at state level. We were all bright and competent people, but we didn’t get much done. I began to think of each of us as shifting, independent spheres of information and involvement. Each person’s sphere bounced off others; or they might cling together in tiny groups for a while, then go off in other directions. There was no big sphere, no universal guiding concept, philosophy and expected result, to contain us; to move us in the same direction.
I began to see that no one, at any one point saw anything the same way as another. I imagined each perception as a line of slight, taken from different points, through this mass of spheres, which would allow a person to see many different things in many ways, without adding to, or taking away from the mass of information. The individuals didn’t need more information, or have too much, they simply worked with what they could perceive in a moment.
When I read Bryanton’s book, I began to think how I could deconstruct this sphere world along a multi-dimensional set of imagined event spaces; things happening in same place, simultaneously. Each person’s understanding and involvement, in essence, were separate realities. I could perform this deconstruction as, per his concept, everything could be contained within ten dimensions of measure. It was to me, an indexing or filing system. I could place the individuals, and their perceptions, along with the groupings of individuals, at various dimensional levels.
To expect that the filing system will animate a bad idea, or a good ideas take equal footing in this system, is not accurate. That one cannot see his/her discipline validated or invalidate another, relative to their position in the filing system, is a not the fault of the filing system. The filing/indexing system allows for an explanation of the perceptions, which supports a person’s understanding of order. To expect it is a theory of everything is wrong. One’s specific point of view e.g. particle physics, is not going to be explained in the structure, no more than the Dewey decimal system can hold the whole of the information contained in the library. The information can be arranged, understood relative to the structure, but the structure is not the information. Expecting the structure is the information, is seeing the medium as the message. Inflexible data management systems force the information into the medium. Bryanton’s system allows for the opposite.
My background is in data analytics. I can see how Bryanton’s concepts could be applied to explain data relationships beyond a simple tree structure, moving them under a square pyramid structure; a place where many lines of perception could be taken through the volume of the structure.

[Garrett · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got this book because the story I am writing has some inter-dimensional elements in it and I wanted to get a little more science behind what I was writing. I was hoping for science that I could understand, but this is more a new-age, popular take on the science related to M theory (string theory). Still, it was interesting to get this take on it and there are things that were very useful for me and for what I want to do. The explanations were pretty clear and the idea seems to hold together fairly well.

[Erica · Rating 2 out of 5]

To be fair, the author warns the audience several times that he’s basically making all of this stuff up. The book basically reads like a long form of the strange stuff your weird friend in college said that time he was really high.

[Xan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The reason I picked this book up was not only my ongoing personal fascination with quantum physics, but also because I am directing A Wrinkle in Time with 5th graders at the moment. Well worth reading in my recommendation. Madeleine L'Engle, recently deceased author of Wrinkle, used a string in her story in 1962 to explain what a "tesseract" was - it being the word she created for Einstein's theory of time travel, a word borrowed from geometry - anyway, she would hold the string in the air and then bend the ends together to demonstrate how time could be bent to create shortcuts in time - hence, time travel. What is curious is that today, quantum physics uses the term "string theory" as one of the end theories in quantum physics. I love connecting the dots between fiction and emerging scientific theory. Enjoy the read.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rob Bryanton's vision of how the omniverse works, as presented by this text, can get the brain stimulated in such a brief amount of pages. With his limited understanding of how the various theories rampant in theoretical physics, it still comes across as a fascinating way of trying to imagine higher dimensions and seems like a great point to start off from for those who don't know either. There are some philosophical elements also tied in, such as the discussion on free will, but those are kept even shorter than the explanation of his tenth dimension imagination. Since the author wanted this to be more of an on going project, the website/blog that's paired with the book (tenthdimension.com) is far more substantial in its reading material, but again the book is a great to get a nice way to get started on the subject.

[Mil]

Rob Bryanton (the author) was actually a musician, and 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"), popular science books (Greene, Kaku and Randall) and Scientific American.

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\nAlthough the book is not intended to be a description of "real physics", his ideas on ten dimensions and the alleged connection to string theory and the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics...

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\nNonetheless, a musician philosophying Quantum Mechanics through Science Fiction could be interesting: I would be selecting this strictly as an entertainer (happy to revise my review after reading it).

[KRatliff Ratliff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imagining the Tenth Dimension has taken many very difficult concepts and explained them in such a way that it is very understandable. Things like infinity which are usually a very difficult concept for people to understand and actually interpret and use as a base to build even more complex and difficult ideas off of, is explained in such a way that you don’t get lost in the text. This book is not one you can pick up and read through, its one you want to read slowly, and re-read things, understand and analyze the text. This book to me was one that I used to challenge my mind and the extents of my understanding of the universe vs. the views of the universe from another perspective.

[van gone. · Rating 3 out of 5]

knew this book since i binge-watched rob's videos in his yt channel in 2017 and i must say, there's too much chunk of information included in it that i thought i would find interesting (but i didn't). this might be because 1) already familiar to majority of rob's ideas from his videos and 2) some additional information are already available from books i've read or yt vids i've watched, like there's nothing new school of thought or new 'meme' (see the reference there lmao) to think about, i guess

[Alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

Didn't like this book nearly as much as I thought I would. I saw his Youtube video a while back and it fascinated me so I tried the book. Took me a while to find it and I wasn't even able to read the whole thing. Ended up skimming the majority of it cuz it was so dull and poorly written. I enjoyed the opening, which was basically the video in text form, but other than that it wasn't very good. I'd recommend a Michio Kaku book over this one any day if you're interested in higher dimensions.

[Matthew Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like pictures, especially when they explain things like the ten dimensions, this book in conjuction with the website is really an eye opener and at the end of the day makes you feel, just a wee bit smarter about the universe.

[Leah Beatty · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was absolutely amazing. The author is a total nerd but is still able to express very complex ideas in a way that just about anybody can understand.

[Abdullah Konash · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite interesting book.

Although my head really hurts right now!

[Pablo Astorga · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard to follow at times due to the complexity of the thought process, but definitely worth reading. It provides a very interesting perspective on our world.

[Mazen Alloujami · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting viewpoint of the structure of our universe. Lot of physical conceptions that need concentration to clarify. Nothing proven, but interesting.

[Ray · Rating 5 out of 5]

On chapter 2. I may need to reread chapter 1 a few more times before I am done.