[i_have_no_idea (OP)]

How many dimensions are there?  How do these work?  I made a bet with a friend who thinks there are olny three because he is and idiod and can only perceive 3.  Now i have to proove there are more and i herd there were 11 somewhere.

[Ultima]

Your friend doesn’t perceive the passing of time?

I don't know a great deal about this Phil but I can give you a layman's idea of what it's all about:

The idea is that the 4 dimensions we perceive are just a small visible part of a much larger order of dimensions; most 4D concepts don't interact in any tangible way in these other dimensions.

String and or (not sure) M-Brane theory, uses 11 or more dimensional maths: 1 time + 3 space + 7 extra odd spatial dimensions. This is not to say there are that many dimensions in the universe. The model they have come up with uses this many and works well for solving certain problems. So it might be the universe has exactly that many dimensions, or more, or less, who knows it's all just maths!

The main thing that string theory promotes is that in these higher order dimensions everything can be explained with one construct: The oscillation of higher dimension strings or membranes. The “vibrating” properties of the string (similar to the idea of a "note" in music, hence the name "string") cause everything in the visible universe. One downside is that string theory predicts loads of extra gumph we don't know about or will never be able to observe without a lot of energy etc.

Looking at the predicted properties of these higher dimension objects string theorists have come up with equations explaining a lot of known physics and predict lots of new things yet to be seen or proven. This is one of the main problems with string theory since lots of the new particles and interactions might not happen under normal conditions in the universe as it is now. So it's hard to validate.

Hopefully the Large Hadron Collider at Cern in a few years time will find some predicted new particles and some we didn’t predict. Then Physics might have a better idea of what’s really going on.

[Solvay_1927]

A couple of links that might be of interest (which give a good introduction to string theories):

http://www.superstringtheory.com/basics/index.html

http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/mbg15/superstrings/superstrings.html


"Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines."