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Asked by Joshua Arehart to Jonathan, Kellie, Kevin, Melissa, Stephanie on 28 Apr 2016.
Question: How many dimensions are there?What are the other dimensions like?Other than a 3rd dimension or a 4th dimension.
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Jonathan Jackson answered on 28 Apr 2016:
Hi Joshua,
I don’t know if I’m the best person to answer this question, but I’ll try anyway! Maybe some of the other scientists can set me straight if my answer is way off.
You’re familiar with the normal three dimensions of everyday life. Thanks to work of people like Albert Einstein (and many others), we know that time is just as real a dimension as the other three that we know. So that gives us four.
However, you’ve probably heard that in order to understand quantum mechanics, we have to imagine somewhere between 8 and 13 dimensions. So where are all the other dimensions, right? The best explanation that I heard was from a British science program called Horizon. They explained it this way. If you’re able, click on this image of a rope:
As you can see, it’s just a straight line, right? If you zoom out, you’d think of it as one dimension (just a flat line), or maybe two dimensions as you get closer. But if you were a tiny ant on this rope, you’d have to walk around and around in a corkscrew pattern to follow the rope’s twisted cords. That’s a whole extra dimension!
That’s a bit like how the extra dimensions work in our universe. Since we’re so big, we can’t even see those extra dimensions. We just glide right over them, like thinking of a rope as a one-dimensional line. But if we get down to extra-small levels, way smaller than an atom, then those extra dimensions pop into view and they affect how things travel, just like an ant on the twisted cords of a rope.
I hope that made at least a little bit of sense! It’s so hard to understand these things with words. That’s why scientists use mathematics to help them understand, as well as complex computer models (Melissa knows more about this!) to help us imagine what those extra dimensions look like.
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Stephanie Moon answered on 28 Apr 2016:
That’s a great question! I don’t think we know yet- it’s something that theoretical physicists have been working on for years and years, and there are many theories about extra dimensions (beyond the 4th dimension) that would make sense mathematically and logically… but I think there are systems that people are using now to actually test experiments to see if any of these theories can be supported with experimental evidence.
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Melissa Wilson Sayres answered on 30 Apr 2016:
In time/space, I don’t know how many dimensions there are. I do know that in the biological data I analyze there can be many, many dimensions that we have to account for statistically. For example, when we’re studying genetic diversity across human populations, we can look at location where the sample was collected, reported ethnicity of the person from whom the sample was collected, the reported sex, the reported age, what tissue was collected, and all sorts of things that might affect the genetic variants, as well as how genes are turned on or off. Statistics is super important for my work.
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Kevin Baker answered on 2 May 2016:
I have been sitting on this question for a while and I cannot come up with a good answer. I wish we had a physicist with us. I do like Jonathan’s answer, though. proving another dimension exists would be incredibly difficult.
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Kellie Jaremko answered on 4 May 2016:
I agree with Kevin. I kept trying to figure out how to answer this but I’ll admit again that physics wasn’t my strong suit. I think Jonathan gave a great answer also.
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