Why 10 dimensions

Newsletter Sign up for our email newsletter for the latest science news. Sign Up. Already a subscriber? Want more? More From Discover. Recommendations From Our Store. Stay Curious. View our privacy policy. Website Accessibility. Parallel worlds, histories and such; quantum mechanics talk?? Dimension 5 added to account for electromagnetism, where do parallel worlds come from?? The source refers to PBS, which no info on this; but does talk about the compactified dimensions correctly, in contrast to this article.

So, its made up or their are additional sources not cited. Think I will call bull! Parellel worlds are simple. It has two points, means of travel. With motion another dimension is getting involved, the fourth dimension of time. Now, everything in our physical existance should be here with respects to time, nothing here would exist without it except for light.

Light is not bound by time, light has no boundaries and is beyond the precepts of time. Now back to the number line, In elementary school they teach you that negative numbers are part of our own numberline, right? Negative numbers do not exist for they are only a counterpart of an already existing positive number. Unfortunately for science communication, his ideas have nothing to do with the extra dimensions of string theory — he admits himself that they are speculation and fairly tame speculation for anybody familiar with higher-dimensional topology.

Evidently the author of this post Matt Williams, who has done good work on other subjects , was apparently taken in by the content of this video, and assumed it was an accurate description of aspects of string theory — and based this article on it.

If you want to get a better understanding of the higher dimensions from an actual physicist, check out these links:. Everything written here was based on the idea that extra dimensions need to exist in for String Theory to be consistent, which in turn is based on the work of Joseph Polchinski, Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, John Shwartz, and others.

If so, how do we define dimension? Improve this question. James Kujareevanich James Kujareevanich 2 2 gold badges 7 7 silver badges 14 14 bronze badges. So then there's no problem if the curled up ones are indistinguishable not saying they are, though. As the later articles in the series explain, the large extra dimensions could in principle have been detected by the discovery of Kaluza-Klein particles at the LHC for example.

From a theoretical point of view, the shape of the extra dimensions is discribed by moduli fields. Show 3 more comments. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Chris Gerig Chris Gerig 2, 16 16 silver badges 28 28 bronze badges. Even if you compactify euclidean time, thermal string theory is hard to make sense of too, because gravity doesn't allow thermal ensembles of infinite extent.

Regarding the central charge argument, it's fine, but it doesn't require 10 dimensions per-se, just an equivalent central charge, so you can have a non-geometric compactification. Add a comment. Community Bot 1. Abhimanyu Pallavi Sudhir Abhimanyu Pallavi Sudhir 5, 4 4 gold badges 32 32 silver badges 49 49 bronze badges.

Jiminion Jiminion 2, 2 2 gold badges 14 14 silver badges 27 27 bronze badges. Give me 4 and I can make it wiggle its trunk! JamalS Regarding spherical coordinates, these are orthogonal. All string theories include the idea of a hyperspace of more than three spatial dimensions. The "extra" spatial dimensions are theoretically "compact" or "collapsed" dimensions. This means that they are not as extended in space as the three familiar spatial dimensions.

The collapsed dimensions are too small to observe directly. It is not clear how many collapsed dimensions are required for a string theory that is in best agreement with observations of the physical universe, but mathematical constraints currently favor string theories with 10, 11, or 26 dimensions.

What explanatory power comes from including "extra" compact dimensions in a physical theory? Since the time of the first written speculations about the possible existence of an atom , a goal of physics has been to understand the fundamental physical components of the universe.

Unfortunately, many subatomic particles each subject to some combination of the four fundamental forces have been observed and so attention has turned to theoretical attempts to describe the diversity of subatomic particles in an elegant physical theory.

Why are there so many different particles? Why do they have the physical properties that they are observed to have? Have things always been this way or have the properties of subatomic particle changed since the formation of our universe?

Do they continue to change? Some theoretical physicists are exploring the idea that the diversity of subatomic particle can be accounted for in terms of symmetry breaking. Maybe under the high energy conditions of the early universe all particles were initially indistinguishable, a condition called supersymmetry. As the universe cooled, some spatial dimensions compactified and particles distributed themselves among the available stable energy states provided by four extended space-time dimensions and six or more compact dimensions.