Replies

I thought string theory reached a dead end on the white boards of math. I'm still waiting for proof of dark matter and dark energy.

I have no clue how theoretical physics work. However, most of it is speculated by doing math equations on a chalk board or now white board.

BTW, what are the "extra" dimensions? Can you tell me in layman terms? I still don't believe time is a dimension, but a human construct.

I also have a problem with there being more than 3 or 4 dimensions. My understanding was that the four dimensions of space and time were just a mathematical convenience to locate objects in space and time in order to make predictions.

After all, instead of saying that something is at position x,y,z we can use polar coordinates involving radii and angles when that makes the math easier.

The best way I can figure is something like this: they say for example that basic particles have certain properties such as mass and spin. They say that spin really shouldn't be thought of as a particle spinning, but it is just a property that can be measured and fits into the laws of quantum mechanics.

I'm thinking that these extra dimensions are similar. They are not like length, height and width. They are just other properties that can vary and at some far future time may be able to be measured with particle accelerators the size of our solar system.

I work with databases and every field in a database is like a different dimension that entries can have: last name, first name, SSN, salary, etc. I'm thinking these extra dimensions are similar.

But that's just a guess.

They know that the faster you get to the speed of light they know that the passing of time slows(as best as we can measure this). They have to make adjustments (based on this phenomena) with space probes velocities(especially going away or coming towards us) lest the adjustments made cause errors in the craft’s flight path.(Not just based on distance but on their current velocities since their onboard clocks will appear to slow down relative to Earth clocks) Another great experiment was when they took two identical timing devices, synchronized them and then sent one around the world on a nonstop flight(I think it was 2-3 times) at speeds of roughly 600 to 700 miles an hour. The onboard timer lost several seconds compared to the on ground timer(the time lost was proportional to time “0” experienced by an object at the speed of light or C or SOL 1). So time appears to be a dimensional reality or at least some type of force affected by acceleration and velocity. How gravity affects time I’m not sure, but we do know that speed and acceleration do.

I still don't believe . . .

Which is why no one will be able to explain anything to you. If your mind is already closed, there's no way in for more information.

Nonetheless, short form: There are theories expressed in mathematical terms which work to predict observed results. That's called "physics."

If they don't work - aside from Global Warming, of course, but that's not really about the real world; it's about controlling the masses - then they are not physics. Some theories work in all tested cases (so far, that includes Einstein's equations for motion - which characterizes time as a dimension similar to the three spatial dimensions). Some do not - and so are not considered 'proven.'

And some (Global Warming, again) never work but that doesn't get in the way of our statist overlords.

“BTW, what are the “extra” dimensions? Can you tell me in layman terms?”

An extra dimension is just a direction something has freedom of movement in, that is 90 degrees away from the next lowest direction it has freedom of movement in. You start with being able to move back and forth on a line, then if you can turn 90 degrees from that line and move side to side, you have a 2nd dimension, and can move around a plane. If you can turn 90 degrees from that plane and move up and down, you have a 3rd dimension. We can speculate mathematically on how things work to any number of dimensions, our brains just can’t visually conceive of more than 3. Our brains tell us there is no other direction we can turn to get to the 4th dimension, but math doesn’t care about that. If we plug in the numbers as if there was a 4th dimension, our equations still work.

For example, in computer programming, we have “arrays” which are just sets of numbers, with a dimension that determines the type of array it is, and a size telling us how many numbers fit in it. So you can have a 1 dimensional array of size 3, which would hold 3 numbers. You could think of this like a line of numbers: (1,2,3)

Then you could have a 2 dimensional array of size 3, which would hold 9 numbers. This is like a box of numbers:
(1,2,3,
4,5,6,
7,8,9)

It wouldn’t be easy to type out here, but I’m sure you could also imagine a 3 dimensional array of size 3, that would be like a cube of numbers, and hold 27 numbers. Now, we can’t visualize a 4 dimensional or 5 dimensional or 6 dimensional array, but we can program a computer to store them and do mathematical operations on them just like all the other kinds. The computer isn’t trying to visualize anything so it just applies the math. It has no idea that “4 dimensional” is not supposed to exist.

So that’s how you get to the point where we can speculate about how different theories work if we had higher dimensions. Even before computers we could work out the mathematics of higher dimensions to a degree, but with computers doing the grunt work it gets a lot easier.