Is There a Fifth Dimension? | Physics - Gizmodo

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Imagine a world where you can only move forwards and backwards along a line, explains Ryan F. Mandelbaum, Science writer at Gizmodo.

Photo: Benjamin Currie - Gizmodo

You’d see nothing but single points in front of you, and nothing but single points behind you—a one-dimensional world. Now expand this to a second dimension—you can move forwards and backwards, and also left and right, experiencing the world as flat lines moving around one another. But you couldn’t drill a hole into something in this universe—you’d split it in half. Add a third dimension, and you’ve got depth—things take on visible forms and can move around none another, becoming the rich world we live in today. Then there’s a fourth dimension, time, through which we can only experience forward motion.

What if there was a fifth dimension through which things could move? What would it be like? Does it exist somewhere else, obscured by our four-dimensional brains? Or what if the universe secretly has eleven dimensions, some of which are curled up and only experienced by the smallest units of mass?

Like anyone else who’s taken a physics class (or smoked weed) we wondered whether a fifth dimension could exist somewhere in the universe, and if so, what it would be like. We’ve reached out to physicists and mathematicians to help us figure it out and it turns out there’s a lot of disagreement surrounding the question.
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Source: Gizmodo