The fourth dimension explained and where it can be found, according to a leading physicist
If you’re struggling to wrap your head around the idea of further dimensions, this scientist’s garden-hose analogy may help.
Humans experience reality in three spatial dimensions - length, width and depth - but scientists have long theorized about the existence of additional physical dimensions.
The idea of such a world is difficult for the brain to wrap itself around - which is precisely why further dimensions could exist beyond the scope of our senses, says a leading professor of physics and mathematics.
In a video for the science website Big Think, Dr. Brian Greene seeks to help us understand this potential perception gap. The Columbia University academic offers up an analogy involving a garden hose that has been stretched out horizontally in front of its viewer.
“Where could they be?”
“In addition to left-right, back-forth and up-down, there may be other spacial dimensions,” Dr. Greene says. “It’s hard to picture - like, where could they be? There doesn’t seem to be any room left. And that’s really the point.
“They are new places that our experience doesn’t allow us to access directly, but according to [scientists’] theoretical ideas, might be there.”
Greene continues: “Think about a garden hose that’s nice and long. From far away, the garden hose is going to look one-dimensional, because that’s the only part that you have the visual acuity to see. Because the circular part is just too small for your feeble eyes to detect.
“But then, if you take a pair of binoculars from a far away vantage point, now you see that there is a circular dimension, a circular part that wraps around the garden hose that you missed, when you just used your feeble senses.
“So dimensions can be big, obvious and easy to see, or they can be curled up, and tiny. Much more difficult to detect.”
“Maybe space itself has curled-up dimensions”
Dr. Greene concludes: “This idea might apply to space itself. It could be that left-right, back-forth and up-down are the big, easy to see dimensions, like the horizontal extent of the garden hose.
“But just as the hose has a curled-up dimension, maybe space itself has curled-up dimensions, all around us, just curled up to such a fantastically small size that we can’t see them with our eyes, we can’t see them even with today’s most powerful microscopes.”
Watch the video in full:
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