Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What Is A Dimension And How Many Are There?

Episode Date: December 11, 2018

What's the real meaning of a dimension? Are there more than 3? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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What if you could slip in and out of the world you're currently in? Are you talking about opening a door to another dimension? Because you know, that's just science fiction, right? Is it really? Are you sure? There could be more to the world than the world we see around us. You know, like there's this 3D world we live in. But maybe this world that we're in actually kind of extends somewhere else.

It's certainly true that we know very little about how the universe works. So there's the possibility to sort of blow things open and discover that the universe is rich in ways we hadn't imagined. And one of the highest candidates in my mind is this concept that there might be other dimensions to space and time. Wow. Well, I'm excited about this podcast. I feel like it's going to add a whole new dimension to our conversation. I feel like you worked way too hard for that little joke. But I laughed at anyway.

She the theme song. Key the theme song. Hi, I'm Jorge. And I'm Daniel. And we're the authors of the book. we have no idea. And this is our podcast. Daniel and Jorge explain the universe.

Today on the podcast, extra dimensions. Dimensions, dimensions. And also non-extra dimensions, the ones you know and love and shake your booty to on Friday nights. What is a dimension? There's essential dimensions

and then there's extra dimensions. I feel like there's some sort of judgment you're making there, like extra like second-class dimensions or not-necessary dimensions. or not necessary dimensions or if you had to cut them away, you know, you could just prune them out of your life

without peeking twice. You don't need them to make a podcast, apparently. Actually, I think as you'll discover, when we break this down and explain what dimensions are, all the dimensions that exist are absolutely essential for physics to work. And, you know, physics is fundamental. If physics doesn't work, nothing works.

Yeah, and these days I feel like we kind of need an emergency dimension too, just in case, you know? You mean you want a trap door where you can slip into some emergency dimension where nobody can hear you screen. Yeah, or, you know, just throw some extra heat from global warming or... Yeah, that would be awesome, just like a venting dimension, just like... The garbage shoot dimension.

You want to just have like a black circle on the floor of your office where you can press a button and suck anything you want into another dimension? But this is a really mind-blowing topic and really kind of challenges what you know about the world around you. We were curious about what people out there. thought about extra dimensions and how many of them are there? Yeah, so I went around and I asked people, I said, what is a dimension and how many do you think

there are? Here's what they had to say. I'm not sure if I was watching Interstellar. I heard there was five dimensions, so I was like, but realistic, I don't know. I heard of a four dimension, fifth dimension. I don't know if anything beyond that.

I don't know. I heard of the fifth dimension, the sixth dimension, the movies we have seen. Right. Yeah. Right. So, I mean, using time as a conundrum, there can be many dimensions, and you can go from one dimension to.

No, I don't know scientifically. I just know, like, fictionally, like, when they say there's, like, different dimensions, and I think of, like, kind of, like, time traveling, but, and I don't know how many dimensions there are. Okay. Cool. All right. Not a lot of deep knowledge about dimensions.

Yes. Definitely some deep misunderstandings about what dimensions are. Some people out there seem to have some concept, you know, that dimensions are not universes, that they're not parallel places you can go to, but that they're like a direction in space. So we have some knowledge, but also a lot of misconception. So that totally motivates this podcast. We should really break this down and explain from the beginning what is a dimension. Yeah, because in science fiction, you always see them talk about dimensions that if it's like another parallel universe, you know, like it's just like ours, but it's in another dimension. Yeah, creature from the other dimension.

But that's kind of how to use normally, right? Like in doorway to another dimension and the version of you in another dimension. That's right. It's really used to mean parallel universe. Yeah. Why do you think science fiction writers started using that word dimension for this concept of a parallel universe? I don't know. And I have a lot of things to say about that, but I don't want to because I love science fiction.

And I don't want to get on the bad side of science fiction writers. Okay. I think a lot of times they don't have as deep a grasp of the science as they think they do and they imagine they understand it. And so they end up misusing a word. Like, I read a lot of science fiction with the Higgs boson in it. And the Higgs boson in those fictional universes has nothing in common with the Higgs boson in our universe, except for, like, how it's spelled on the page.

So I think they appropriate, you know, terms they hear in science and use them for whatever plot device they need. Well, let's break it down. So in science fiction, another dimension means like a parallel universe, but in physics, it means something else. It doesn't mean a whole other universe. It means just another direction of space, right? That's right.

You can think of the question, what is a dimension? As another way of saying, like, how many numbers do you need to specify where you are, right? Imagine that you're some being that lives on a string. It's a one-dimensional world. What that means is that there's only one direction you can move. you can specify exactly where you are in that world with just one number, which is how far long you are on that string, right?

Imagine like a ruler, a single ruler. And if you say, hey, meet me at 6.5, there's no other place at 6.5, right? You just need one number to tell you where you are on that string. It's kind of like your coordinate in a GPS map. Yeah, exactly. Like on a flat map, you only need two numbers, right? Up and down to know where you are on a flat map. Yeah, exactly.

So in one dimension, you need one number. in two dimensions, which is like a surface, like a flat piece of paper or the surface of the earth, you need two numbers, right, for two dimensions. So that's why you need like longitude and latitude. If you're on a two-dimensional surface, like the surface of the earth, and you just tell somebody your latitude, like, meet me at this latitude, there's an infinite number of places that have that latitude. It's not enough to specify your location. So in two dimensions, you need two numbers.

That's what dimension means, right? Being in two-dimensional world means you need two numbers to specify it. And so 3D means three dimensions means you need three numbers to specify where you are, like not just where in the map, but also how high up you are. Yeah, exactly. So if you're flying an airplane, right, you need to know exactly where you are, longitude and latitude, but also your altitude, right? You need to know.

That would be important, yeah, to know. That would be important. So you don't crash two planes together. Yeah, or into a mountain or something, right? Because you can be at the same longitudinal latitude but different altitudes and so be quite safe, right? So three-dimensional world needs three dimensions to specify where you are. So it's mostly just about directions. So like instead of commonate dimensions, you could just call it directions, right?

Kind of, right? Like you could say in our 3D world, we have up and down, left right, forward, backwards. Those are the three main directions. Yeah. And there's an important concept there, which is not just main directions, but orthogonal directions, directions that don't overlap, right? so that moving in one of them doesn't change your position in another.

You mean they're like in a corner of a cube. You know, there's 90 degrees between each direction. That's right. So imagine yourself on a chessboard or something, right? And you can hop left or right just along one row. It doesn't change which column you're on. That's because those two directions are orthogonal.

They don't affect each other. You can move independently in those two, right? Now, you could put a third dimension on a piece of paper. You could put a third direction, like a diagonal direction, but then moving along it would change your direction in the other two. So that's how you know on a piece of paper that there are only two dimensions because there's no place to add a third one. Oh, I see. They need to be like totally independent directions.

Exactly, exactly. Okay, got it. So that's three dimensions. And so dimensions is kind of like directions. So then if we add more dimensions, that means that what does that even mean? Yeah. So in order for there to be more dimensions and there have to be more ways that you can move, right? It means that specifying your position just with three numbers isn't enough, right?

There's like another way that you can be at those three places, but not be on top of each other, right? That space has this other way you can move. And this is really hard to think about, right? Because we are used to being in a three-dimensional world. We understand depth and height and width and these sort of ways to move. It's hard to imagine like where things could go or where this dimension could be, right? Yeah. But I think it's interesting to think about how long people have been thinking that way.

You know, I think thousands of years ago, people weren't thinking in terms of three dimensions. The whole concept of dimensions is actually fairly new and scientific. What do you mean? You know, it's only a few hundred years old. You know, Descartes came up with Cartesian coordinates. He was the first person to really lay this idea out, that there was a space around us and that you could define it mathematically in terms of a few independent directions. Yeah, but like ancient civilizations, they could build pyramids and buildings and columns and blocks, right?

And it's not like they thought in 2D. Well, it's not clear how they thought. I mean, they lived in 3D, right? Certainly they lived in the world and they could understand it. But look at their art. You know, their art was really flat. The whole concept of like perspective and geometry and art is only a few hundred years old. And some people even think that art might have led the way, you know, that people, artists, trying to figure out how to make an image look accurate.

develop this concept of perspective in order to describe it. And it's out of that idea of perspective and geometry, change the way people thought about the space in front of them. Mathematically speaking, you mean? Mathematically speaking, yeah, that they gave us a more mathematical view of the very world we live in. And this is one of the core problems, is that it's hard to pull apart the way you think

and think about the ways you could be thinking, right? Other ways that you could imagine the world because it's so ingrained in you. It's just the way you are. It's really difficult. to imagine what would we like to live in another country or to use another kind of toilet or whatever, right? Because these are just the way we live

and we think it's basic and inherent to everything, but it might not be. So at some point somebody said, hey, hey, guys, wait a minute, if we're going to do science, we got to think about these directions of space. Yeah, and the whole concept of space is even kind of new. I mean, Aristotle didn't believe in space.

What? He thought everything was filled, right? He's like, there's no void. Everything is filled. There's no gap between me and the air surrounding me. You know, he didn't believe in atoms, right? He thought air was continuous fluid and everything was continuous. And the whole concept of like a huge universe out there, mostly empty, was an anathema to Aristotle.

And, you know, Aristotle was an influential dude. So people thought that way for a long, long time. And it wasn't until much later that people embraced this concept of space. And, you know, Descartes invented this coordinate system, which now seems like totally trivial, right? I love these inventions in history where you're like, dude just wrote down. X, Y, Z, and he's like a genius and like a staggering genius in the history of intellectual thought. Like, it's so obvious. But that's a clue that the concept was so deep and fundamental and insightful that changed

the way everybody thinks so much that you can't even imagine another way, right? It's like when you see a joke in a movie. Do you wish you had been born a few hundred years ago so you could, you know, become more famous a little bit more easily? I don't think I would have been a man of leisure and had the opportunity to do any science. Plus, a few hundred years ago, like, the food wasn't nearly as good, so I'm pretty happy to be alive now. Yeah, I think the bathrooms were also less comfortable. And, man, the broadband was terrible.

Yeah. But, you know, it's like when you see a trope in a movie, and you're like, oh, my God, what a cliche. And then you discover, oh, this is the movie that invented that cliche. And actually, it's totally forward-thinking. And at the time, it was a crazy idea, right? That's how crazy the idea of dimensions was at the time. And then Newton extended it to space, right? He said, well, if the laws of physics are the same on the earth as they are out in the cosmos,

that these three dimensions should extend all the way out, and they could go on forever. So this whole concept of thinking of the world around us is having three dimensions and that we move through it in this space is actually kind of new. Okay, so we think that there are only three dimensions in our world. I mean, that's what we're used to. We're used to only being able to move forward, backwards, left and right, up and down. And so now this idea is that maybe in the same universe that we're in, in, you can also move in other directions that are sort of invisible or not apparent to us right now.

Yeah, and so let's think that through. Like, what would that be like? And we talked at the top of the program about, you know, could you disappear into another dimension? Yeah, let's get into it. But first, let's take a quick break. Imagine that you're on an airplane and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers, the pilot is having an emergency. and we need someone, anyone, to land this plane.

Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane with the help of air traffic control. And they're saying like, okay, pull this, until this. Do this, pull that, turn this. It's just, I can do it in my eyes close. I'm Manny. I'm Noah. This is Devon.

And on our new show, no such thing. We get to the bottom of questions like these. Join us as we talk to the leading expert on overconfidence. Those who lack expertise lack the expertise they need to recognize that they lack expertise. And then, as we try the whole thing out for real, wait, what?

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to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so how can there be more than three dimensions around me right now? How is that even possible? Well, almost anything is possible. I mean, we should take everything we know about physics with a huge grain of salt, right? Because everything we've learned is something we've learned by studying a tiny little slice of the kinds of stuff in the universe only around us here on Earth for the last few decades, basically.

So a lot of things that we think could be wrong. We should be prepared for almost anything you think is fundamentally obviously true to be overthrown by physics in the next few decades. Okay, so you're saying physicists are salty, A, and B, not even the things we take for granted, like three dimensions we're starting about. Is that what you're saying? That's right. In fact, we're pretty sure there are more than three dimensions.

I mean, no concrete proof, but if the world would make more sense if there were more than three dimensions. Well, I guess something we had in. our book that I always like was this idea that why only three dimensions. Yeah, like what is special about the number three, right? Yeah. Three is a weird number. Like there's no argument in physics that says there must be only three dimensions. So that's a weird thing. It's weird. And mathematicians don't like the number three either. You know, they like simple numbers. Zero, pie, E. Nobody but the Catholic Church thinks that three is a deep fundamental number in the universe, right? Why don't we think about what it would be like if we saw something that was four dimensional. Okay. So I can move forward,

backwards, left, right, up and down, and I can also move in this other fourth dimension. Yeah, let's invent a name for this fourth dimension. Okay. You're the creative one. Go ahead. Yeah, sure. Red blue. Okay. Marshmallow unicorn. No, I like red and blue. That's cool. So before we think about the fourth dimension, let's practice by thinking about three dimensions as if we were two dimensional beings, right? Say we lived on the surface of a piece of paper. Okay. So we're flat Daniel, flat Jorge, talking on a flat podcast somehow delivered to you.

Meaning like we're stuck in a comic book. Yes, exactly. Right, or a TV screen. Yeah, we are comic characters on a comic page. Now, of course, we live in a three-dimensional world, but as comic book characters, we're not aware of that. We can only see our two dimensions. Right.

We're moving around inside the page. We're walking around each other. We're bumping into each other, but we're still stuck on the page. Yeah. Now, imagine what happens if a three-dimensional object passes through the page, right? What do we sense? What does that like for us to experience a higher dimensional object? It would suddenly appear, right? Or if it was, I guess if it was like a sphere, like a ball, going into our page, we would see first the dot and then it would get bigger and bigger and bigger, and then it would get smaller and smaller. Like, it would just suddenly appear. Yes, exactly, because it's moving in this dimension. We can't understand or approach.

appreciate or measure, right? And so we just see a slice of it. We see the two-dimensional slice of this three-dimensional object. And that slice is changing as it moves through this dimension that we can't observe or notice, right? So that's the useful strategy, right? That's how you think about going up one dimension. So now we're in a three-dimensional world, right? Me, you're a 3D people, flesh and blood, et cetera. And now imagine somebody, a four-dimensional being passes a four-dimensional sphere through our universe. The analogy tells us that it would start out looking like an object appearing and then growing and then shrinking, right?

And so that's how you see a higher-dimensional object. You only observe your dimensional slice of it. So we see a three-dimensional slice of a four-dimensional sphere. It would do things that 3D spheres just can't do. You only see part of it. That's right, yeah. Because a 3-D slice has three dimensions, right? It looks like a physical object.

But because it can move in this fourth dimension, it can do things that make no sense to us, right? It can seem to disappear or change or grow or whatever. It's like you call it a slice, but it's almost also like the shadow or the projection of that thing in our world. Ooh, I like that projection, yeah. Okay, so that's what would it feel like for me to move in this other dimension? Like if I'm sitting here talking to you

and then suddenly I decided to move in the other direction, what would that be like? Well, if you are a three-dimensional being and you can only observe three dimensions, right? So you can't tell where you are in this fourth dimension. Then you're going to be seeing different 3D projections of that 4D world. And so the whole world around you would change. It would change. Yeah, the same way a 4D object passing through your 3D world would shift and change in ways that don't make sense to you. If you as a 3D object pass through a 4D world, then the whole world around you could change.

like, what does your house look like in this fourth dimension? Is it the same? Does it change? Does it disappear? Does it have a finite extent in this fourth dimension? So that if you move through that fourth dimension, your house disappears, right? You're not observing the whole thing. Okay, I'm getting a 3D headache.

You're getting a 3D headache. Imagine a cartoon character walking through our world, right? Only perceiving in two dimensions. Things would suddenly appear to them and disappear, and the whole world around them would be changing constantly. It would be very hard to understand. Oh, I see. So you're saying like if I can move in four dimensions, but maybe my house didn't have a four dimensional aspect to it, then it would just disappear once I move into this other dimension. Yeah, like that common, that 2D comic book character jumping off the page, right? If they can still only experience 2D, then the world around them, the comic world they've known and loved disappears instantly, right?

Wow. Okay, so then it could, it could be sort of like in science fiction where it's a whole other world, right? Not really a whole other world. It's like it's a larger, it's an expansion of our world. Or we are a slice of a larger world. Okay. I could change my red-blue coordinate. And what if there's a whole other world in another red-blue coordinate? Then I would sort of be moving to another world.

Yeah, absolutely. That could totally scientifically actually happen. But there wouldn't be a door and there would probably be no marshmallows and no unicorns. But, you know, I can't guarantee. like I said, we should be prepared for everything. I think all physics theories should have that caveat, you know, ergo-sum, this is true. May not include marshmallows. Pack your own marshmallows.

Double-foot note. Forget about the unicorns and the marshmallows. Right. B-Y-O marshmallows. Okay, so it's all about kind of like slices of reality and projections of reality. That's what it would be like to move between dimensions. Yeah, and so if you're moving through these dimensions, and things are changing, then you have to build in your mind the sort of four-dimensional map

of this space. You're like, okay, when I'm on the red end of this dimension, the world looks like this, when I'm on the blue end, the world looks like that, and then you can sort of interpolate between and get an idea of how things change as you move through this fourth red-blue dimension, right? But you have a little bit of practice with that already, because in some sense, you already know how to move through a fourth dimension, and that's time, right? Oh, right, time.

People, sometimes call it the fourth dimension. Yeah, exactly. If you think about time as another dimension, like a direction you can move, it's good practice because moving through time is different from moving in like X, Y, or Z, right? There's no replacing one with the other. You can do it while standing still. Yes, exactly. It's independent, right?

And really, to specify where you are, you need to say when. Also, you can't say, hey, meet me at Lexington and Fourth Avenue. You have to say, well, tomorrow, next year, yesterday, like, when are we meeting, right? So you really do need to specify time. And also, in this time direction, you're used to the world changing. Like, the world is different now than it was 100 years ago, and it will be different in 100 years. The whole 3D world does evolve through time. And you're used to sort of making a understanding of the world through time.

So it's not that much of a brain meld to think that the world is changing through this fourth dimension. Because you're used to doing that a little bit with time. It's kind of like a videotape If you scrub it back and forth If you hit rewind and forwards backwards It's like the world changes But it doesn't move That's right, exactly

And listen to our podcast about time travel To know how time is different From the other dimensions, right? It's like another dimension But it's not actually like another dimension Right, it has all sorts of special rules And we don't understand it at all And one of these days we're going to have time

To sit down and do a whole podcast About how time is weird But that's not the time for today we'll run out of time time after time cool well I guess the question is why are we even entertaining these crazy ideas about dimensions

like what makes us think that there could be more dimensions than the three we're in yeah that's a great question but before we get into it let's take a quick break imagine that you're on an airplane and all of a sudden you hear this

attention passengers Because the pilot is having an emergency, and we need someone, anyone, to land this plane. Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane with the help of air traffic control. And they're saying like, okay, pull this, until this. Turn this. It's just... I can do my eyes close.

I'm Mani. I'm Noah. This is Devon. And on our new show, no such thing. We get to the bottom of questions like these. Join us as we talk to the leading expert on overconfidence. Those who lack expertise lack the expertise they need to recognize that they lack expertise.

And then as we try the whole thing out for real. Wait, what? Oh, that's the run right. I'm looking at this thing. Listen to no such thing on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes. missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness, the way it is echoed

and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro, and these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories I'll be mining on our 12th season of Family Secrets. With over 37 million downloads, we continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths, and the way in which family secrets almost always need to be told. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests

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Tickets are on sale now at AXS.com. Get your tickets today. AXS.com. What makes physicists think that there's more than three dimensions in our universe? Well, number one, physicists hope there's more dimensions because that would be like a crazy discovery and awesome and like mind-blowing. There could be more funding in that other dimension, like a pot of cats. That's right. That's right. Or you just have more lab space or something. So it's just like on the list of crazy ideas you would love to discover because it reveals that the universe is different from the way you

always thought it was. Nobody said there can't be more dimensions, and so therefore it's tantalizing to be the one who discovers it. That's right, but it's more than that. We have some concrete hints that there might be more dimensions. And hint number one is this the unification of space and time into a concept called space time, right? And this is Albert Einstein more than 100 years ago.

He noticed that if you think of space and time together as one four-dimensional world, right, that a lot of things mathematically make a lot of sense. things just sort of unify. But most importantly, it helps us understand what gravity is, right? So we're used to thinking of forces and space is totally different, right? Force of gravity is something that pulls you through space, pushes you away or whatever. It helps you move through space.

But Einstein, by bringing time and space together into space time, made this argument that actually gravity is not a force. It's just a bending of space. Right? You curve space in a certain way. And then it's very natural for the earth to go around the sun or the earth makes a bending of space. And so gravity is just you sort of falling into the well that the earth makes in space. So Einstein said, hey, actually there aren't three dimensions. There's actually four.

And so that's kind of kicked things off. That kicks things off. And then people thought, well, if you can explain gravity, this force we all know and love in terms of other dimensions, can we explain the other forces in terms of other dimensions, right? And so guys said, well, if you make five dimensions, then you can kind of explain electromagnetism, right? Maybe electromagnetism isn't a force either. It's just a way of bending in five dimensions. And then to explain the other forces, you add another dimension. Explain the other forces you add another dimension.

Meaning like the reason two magnets are attracted to each other is not some kind of magical force. It's just that in this fifth dimension, they want to be together. Yeah, or that magnets are the magnet's. manifestation of space, five-dimensional space getting bent in such a way that it's the most natural thing for these things to do to slide together or to be pushed apart. And exactly the way the gravity is a bending of four-dimensional space. Maybe the idea goes that space has more dimensions, eight, nine, ten, eleven, this is why you might hear sometimes the space might have 11 dimensions, ten spatial, ten physical dimensions of motion and one for time. Let's just go for

the Baker's doesn't, you know, why not? This is not like an auction, Jorge, where we say, let's figure out what the universe is. I hear 12 going once. Let's do anybody for 13. That's not how physics conferences go? No, no, you've been out of academia a little too long, I think, Jorge. That's not the way we figure out the way the world works. It's not like the price is right, you know.

You can get the closest without going over. Welcome to Physics, the Game Show. But it turns out, if you're not. If you want to explain the four fundamental forces we have, gravity, electromagnetism, the weak force, and the strong force, you need 10 physical dimensions, 10 dimensions of motion and one dimension of time. Really? Like, that's part of the current theory of physics, is that there are 11 dimensions?

That's one theory of physics, yeah. It's a theory that involves strings, right? So string theory maybe you've heard of. And it says that the universe has 10 dimensions, and that three of them are physical that we can move through, and that the other ones are ways that the universe can bend, that the space can bend, that explains what forces are. Oh, really? I never knew that about string theory, is that it uses these dimensions to explain the other forces.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And there's a lot of questions there, like, why are these three dimensions seem to be infinite and orthogonal and physical? And the other dimensions are like these curled up little wrinkles that you can't, like, notice or move through it. I mean, somebody out there might be saying, okay, maybe there are 10 dimensions.

How do I move through those? Why can't I notice them? You know, what's going on with those other dimensions? Even if they do explain the forces, where are they? Right. And the thing is that the dimensions that we know and love, X, Y, and Z, might be different from those dimensions. Because X, Y, and Z, we think, go on forever. I mean, we don't know how long the universe goes.

Meaning they don't have to be straight, right? Like another fifth dimension, sixth dimension, it could be. like a little curly loop where it could be who knows right that's right we don't even know about xyz if they eventually curl around themselves and come back to where you started we don't know if you go straight forever if you run out of space or come back to where you started but let's assume for now that x y and z go on forever the universe is infinite and you and there's an infinite number of locations in x y and z and you can go on forever and never come back to where you started that's probably not true for the other dimensions the other dimensions we're pretty sure

are rolled up little curls, tiny, tiny little curls, like 10 to the minus 30 centimeters or 10 to the minus 10 centimeters. Meaning like if my coffee cup suddenly took off and went off into one of these other dimensions, it would just make a little loop. Like it would disappear and then come back. Yeah, that there aren't many places to go in these other dimensions. And also, we don't even really know what it would be like to notice those dimensions. I mean, if those dimensions don't play a role in our lives, then, you know,

And we have no senses in which to detect motion in those dimensions. And also, if motion in those dimensions is really limited because they're really super duper tiny, then you might not even notice, right? The takeaway is that those other dimensions, if they exist, are really small and looped up on themselves. So they're really different from the kind of dimensions we're familiar with. So while physicists suspect that there are dimensions of space, they're probably not the dimensions you can move through or extend your house into or go and gallop on unicorns while gobbling much. It wouldn't be like the ones that we have and know about.

They'll be really weird and different and pretty small. Yeah. And so mostly they would confirm like our understanding of the way forces work and maybe string theory. And you know, there's a bunch of variants of string theory. There's one variant of string theory called bosonic string theory that suggests 26 dimensions in order to get all the math to work out really, really nicely. How do they pick these numbers? Is it just from the math or they?

I don't think they're just like, you know, going. out for Froyo and being doing like, hey, man, how many dimensions you think there are? I feel in 26 today. Is that your model of how physics is happening? I guess what I mean? It's like 26 makes the math work, but 27 and 25 do not. That's kind of how they... Exactly. Exactly. I think the game is what's the minimum number of dimensions you need to make the math work, to make the theory come together, to have a universe that makes sense. So it kind of seems like all the dimensions we have, that's it. We can't escape to another universe or another world. or we're kind of stuck with this reality. Hey, is this reality so bad?

Jorge, man, you're depressing me. You mean like, hey, this is an awesome reality. I'm glad we're in it. We're stuck with this awesome and amazing reality. We have to spend it all day looking at depressing news articles. They will be good news one day in this dimension. I'm just kidding. And there's all sorts of other fascinating things I hope we get to in another episode of the podcast,

which can talk about why these dimensions can explain mysteries. Like, why is gravity so weak? It's so much weaker than the other forces. And can we make black holes of the large Hajon Collider? All these really fascinating things could be explained by having other dimensions of space and time and having them be rolled up and curled up.

It can even explain how farts move through the universe. Why what? It could explain how farts move through the universe. And you were like, what? You were like, stop paying attention then. He said, did he just say farts? I'm going to tune back in here.

You didn't know about farts. Fart Physics? Oh, fart physics is a whole new growing field. Yeah. To put it in perspective, right, remember that the universe that you think you understand is definitely not the universe that we live in, right? The universe we live in is more complicated and richer and fascinating than you can probably even imagine. And sometimes we get these crazy glimpses of other possible theories of how the universe could work, and they might actually work that way. And one day we hope physics will crack them open and reveal to us the universe

is strange and bizarre and beautiful in ways that we can, we really have a hard time even understanding. Yeah. And you'll discover it. There's more sides to it than you think. Yeah. And one day you will eat a 4D marshmallow. That's right. Riding a unicorn. Yeah. How many sides are there on a 4D marshmallow? I mean, 3D marshmallows is a 3D cube, right? So it's a 4D hyper marshmallow. Actually, a marshmallow only has two Ds, right? Like two flat ends and one cylinder. What? Are you saying marshmallows are cylinders? I think, I thought marshmallows. shells were cubes. Did I just blow your mind? You just taught me the universe is different from what I

always thought it was. Yeah, there's always some things more to the universe. Oh, no. Oh, no, that was terrible. Slash, wonderful. The 4D version of that joke really is hilarious. Thank you, everyone, for listening. This has been a mind-blowing experience in other dimensions. See you next time. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you.

You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge. That's one word. Or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorpe.com. The U.S. Open is here. And on my podcast, good. game with Sarah Spain. I'm breaking down the players, the predictions, the pressure, and of course, the honey deuses, the signature cocktail of the U.S. Open. The U.S. Open has gotten to be a very wonderfully experiential sporting event. To hear this and more, listen to Good Game with Sarah

Spain, an Iheart women's sports production in partnership with deep blue sports and entertainment on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports Network. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebeney, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebeney, and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Why are TSA rules so confusing?

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