And if those dimensions are wrapped up on themselves, then every time you move around in four-dimensional space, you're really circumnavigating those extra dimensions billions upon billions of times.Īnd those are the dimensions where the strings of string theory live. It's so small that we couldn't possibly hope to directly probe it with our high-energy experiments. If an extra dimension (or dimensions) is really that small, we wouldn't have noticed by now. He found that if this fifth dimension existed and was responsible in some way for electromagnetism, that dimension had to be scrunched down, wrapping back around itself (just like in Kaluza’s original idea), but way smaller, down to a bare 10^-35 meters. Still, a couple of decades later another physicist, Oskar Klein, tried to give Kaluza's idea an interpretation in terms of quantum mechanics. In retrospect, this was a bit of a red herring. It looked like adding dimensions could potentially unify physics.
#Dim notion definition plus#
The equations of relativity don't really care about the number of dimensions it's something you have to add in to make the theory applicable to our universe.īut then Kaluza added a special twist to that fifth dimension, making it wrap around itself in what he called the "cylinder condition." This requirement made something new pop out: Kaluza recovered the usual equations of general relativity in the usual four dimensions, plus a new equation that replicated the expressions of electromagnetism. And he found something especially interesting when he added a fifth dimension to the equations - nothing happened. Thankfully, string theorists were able to point to a historical antecedent for this seemingly radical notion.īack in 1919, shortly after Albert Einstein published his theory of general relativity, the mathematician and physicist Theodor Kaluza was playing around with the equations, just for fun. How can the string theory's requirement for extra dimensions possibly be reconciled with our everyday experiences in the universe? Curled up and compact We're pretty sure that if the universe had more than four dimensions, we would've noticed by now. But when we look around the universe, we only ever see the usual three spatial dimensions plus the dimension of time. In other words, the strings don't just wiggle, they wiggle hyperdimensionally.Ĭurrent versions of string theory require 10 dimensions total, while an even more hypothetical über-string theory known as M-theory requires 11. This is because our usual space-time doesn't give the strings enough "room" to vibrate in all the ways they need to in order to fully express themselves as all the varieties of particles in the world. But for the math to work, there have to be more than four dimensions in our universe.
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