Number of dimensions

what is the current "prevailing" scientific view, about the number of Dimensions in our universe? eight, nine, other number?


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Posted 2 years ago ( permalink )
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I'd be much happier thinking outside the box if I was convinced that there was some thinking going on inside it...

Physical space can be described using 3 dimensions. However many physical phenomena such as gravitational forces and electromagnetic forces cannot be described so simply, and physicists use the string theory model to describe them. String theory models postulate the existance of multidimensional objects, some of them having 10, 11 or even more dimensions.


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Cogito ergo sum. René Descartes

I think you cannot say "Our universe has x dimensions". It belongs to you viewpoint.

For example I can take time and space as dimensions. But I can also add Magnetism or something else as a dimension. 


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In the following link you can see a short clip (in Flash) describing string theory's 10 dimensions.

 

http://www.tenthdimension.com/


Posted 2 years ago ( permalink )
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We reliably know that the number of space-like dimensions is at least three. Physicists count time as a dimension (it is in the mathematical sense), that makes four. String theory in the easiest version needs 26, but this is not a realistic theory. In the more sophisticated (supersymmetric) version that is a canditate for a theory of everything, one has 10 or 11. What the current 'prevailing' scientific view is I can't tell, but people are searching for signatures of extra dimensions, see e.g. http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2006/07/extra-dimensions.html


Posted 2 years ago ( permalink )
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The lowest servant in Heaven is still in Heaven.  Whoever rules in hell is still in hell, but they won't rule for long.

There is some debate.  Thirty years ago, we decided that there were at 11 dimensions (26 with supersymmetry).  Now, research at Lawrence Livermore and CERN near Geneva disclose that we may have infinite dimensions in what we call the Multiverse.  Our universe supports baryonic mass, dark energy/mass, and compact mass, but we see only 4-dimensions at work: X,Y,Z,T. 

The math is a bit involved, but it works and now, we note that it makes sense. 

If you deal in antiques, look at an archaic arcade game: Q-Bert.  You will see a pyramid of cubes.  Note also that you can move only the character, Q-Bert.  Other "critters" move at 60 degrees from Q-Bert, as though responding to gravity moving contrary to the gravity everyone else knows.

We found that out long before Q-Bert.  That is what makes it so difficult to discern how gravity functions on us, and differently on other universes -- that exist in exactly the same space that we occupy.  Newton had gravity down to a science, Einstein showed a bit more of the function of gravity, and now, we know that gravity pulls on infinite "wavelengths" against bodies that "resonate" our gravity at the quantum level. 

We know that it is, but not how it works. 

The next Nobel Prize in physics will go to the genius who unravels that maddening riddle, makes quantiafiable predictions, and those predictions occur.  We'll let the rest of traditional scientific rigor go just to get a useful clue on gravity, that will in turn show us how many dimensions actually exist. 


Posted 3 months ago ( permalink )
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