Physicists are now hotly debating the possible existence of any underlying mathematical beauty associated with a host of new dimensions that may or may not exist in nature. Further, it has now been proposed that the extra dimensions of string theory may not even be microscopically small. Instead, they could be large enough to house entire other universes with potentially different laws of physics, and perhaps even objects that, like the eight dimensional beings in a Buckaroo Banzai story, might leak into our own dimensions. Whenever scientists speculate about such hidden realities as extra dimensions we have to ask ourselves whether their speculations are more likely to reflect the world as it is, or as our minds are programmed to want it to be. Does the longstanding human love affair with extra dimensions reflect something fundamental about the way we think, rather than about the world in which we live?
Lawrence Krauss is a Canadian-American theoretical physicist who is a professor of physics, Foundation Professor of the School of Earth and Space Exploration, and director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University.
Parallel Universes
String Theory
No comments:
Post a Comment