Early on in the last century a man named Albert Einstein published a paper called "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" which contained within it some bold new postulates...
It is better known as "special relativity" which quite literally shook the world... not only for its ability to accurately explain most phenonmenon it was also notoriously famous for being quite
It is a world of reference frames and photons that always seem to be getting futher and futher away at the same rate no matter how fast you speed up... and how much propulsion energy you use to get there. To the uninitiated it is seemingly overwhelming and nonsensical... but it's really interesting and if you read it and think it through it does start to make some sense.
How does this relate to 4 dimensions?
Space and time are, as strange as it seems, intertwined. Imagine a 2D universe for a second... now if you extend out a 3D plane from your bit of 2D universe and let it represent space... you have this sort of unchanging "spacetime loaf" ... that conceivably could be cut up into slices. This model is needed for geometrically modelling things like causality and interacting reference frames etc etc...
Anyway basically that is why all the maths behind relativity is written in like vector or tensor format to be working within the rules of a 4-dimensional spacetime.
Okay that aside and explained. Let's for fun consider the idea of extra spatial dimensions. So far we have talked of 3 spatial dimensions and 1 temporal one. But string theory, a theory that was developed in the 80s and is continually being developed, necessitates the existance of extra dimensions.
M-theory, the currently most banked on version of string theory to come out the winner, points to 10 spatial dimensions while others can point as high as 20. These extra dimensions aren't extended like we experience... but are in fact like curled up on themselves at infinitely short distances on the order of the planck length (that's 0.(34 zeros)1m across). It's hard to visualise, but a good analogy is the ants on a piece of rope.
Imagine you're looking at a long piece of rope hanging across a canyon from a distance. Some ants are moving across the rope. The position of any ant could be given by just one figure, that is the distance x from one defined end of the rope... they can only be on the rope... therefore their position will always be just 1 dimentional...
But then maybe if you had a very very powerful telescope you could see that these ants aren't moving through 1 dimension after all. And in fact the ants can move around the rope itself... through 360 degrees of it... so now we see there was a hidden curled up dimension to their movement.
Now imagine a lot of those piled on top of each other in what's called a calabi-yau space. The idea being that the shape of these calabi-yau spaces effectively cause strings to vibrate... and the different vibrational qualities create different fundamental particles... force carrying particles and photons antimatter etc etc...
You can imagine though... that if scientists did something silly one day like cause an extra dimension to extend itself for whatever reason... we'd all be screwed our organs and blood would spill out into natural lower energy states closer to the ground through the new dimension rofl... the earth would inter-collapse and quite likely we'd fall into the sun... which itself would probably be experiencing less fusion reactions due to the spilling out and likely cooling that would happen with the new lower energy states it can fall into effectively through itself and well its impossible to really know unless you sit down with a computer and write yourself a program that will model this and go through a through thought experiment scenarios and see what happens... i'll tell ya now though it won't be good... damn scientists
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