Superstring Theory Confounds Astrophysicists

Journey To The 10th Dimension

Physics can't find the biggest thing in the known universe, so it's
looking beyond our paltry three dimensions. Michael Moyer enters the
zone of insanely hard mathematics, translates what he finds into plain
English, and makes it back alive

by Michael Moyer

March 2004

di · men · sion n 1 : a measure in one direction 2 : the number of
variables needed to locate a particle 3 : a property of space, or the
space-time continuum, related to extension in a direction.


If the following seems ridiculous, far-fetched or just outright
outlandish to you, rest assured: It is. It will probably hurt your
brain, as it has hurt mine, and as it most definitely hurts the brains
of those who come up with this stuff for a living. The following asks
you to accept ideas that are counter to the fundamental basis of our
experience, the framework through which we comprehend everything from
setting down a coffee cup to the arc of a home run as it sails into the
upper deck. The basic point of what follows -- and by the way, what
follows is not fanciful provocation but has been worked into
contemporary consciousness by the brainiest physicists alive today -- is
that everything that you have ever experienced has in some small but
significant way been an illusion. Why? Because everything you have ever
experienced you have understood as happening in three dimensions of
space -- up-down, left-right and front-back. Yet this is not how things
happen. Things happen in more than three dimensions of space; to see
them in only three is to succumb to a trick that the universe is
constantly playing on us.

Space as you know it is a lie. What follows is an approximation of the
truth, or at least of various conceptions of the truth. There is no one
model of the extra dimensions in the universe, no one statement of fact
that all physicists can agree on and create in their computers. Alas,
things are not that simple. There are at least two and possibly three
completely different theories of what these extra dimensions should look
like. And in each of these theories, the specific form of the extra
dimensions -- their shape, whether it be Gehry-esque or nail-straight --
is unknown. But let's not let that intimidate us. Let's get started.

Mo
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science...591747,00.html

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