{"id":153615,"date":"2022-12-26T07:23:07","date_gmt":"2022-12-26T13:23:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/12\/how-many-dimensions-are-there-and-what-do-they-do-to-reality"},"modified":"2022-12-26T07:23:07","modified_gmt":"2022-12-26T13:23:07","slug":"how-many-dimensions-are-there-and-what-do-they-do-to-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/12\/how-many-dimensions-are-there-and-what-do-they-do-to-reality","title":{"rendered":"How many dimensions are there, and what do they do to reality?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"display: block; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; aspect-ratio: 4\/3; object-fit: contain;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/a7uTKwbsFtg?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope;\n   picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Yet the notion that we inhabit a space with <em>any<\/em> mathematical structure is a radical innovation of Western culture, necessitating an overthrow of long-held beliefs about the nature of reality. Although the birth of modern science is often discussed as a transition to a mechanistic account of nature, arguably more important \u2013 and certainly more enduring \u2013 is the transformation it entrained in our conception of space as a geometrical construct.<\/p>\n<p>Over the past century, the quest to describe the geometry of space has become a major project in theoretical physics, with experts from Albert Einstein onwards attempting to explain all the fundamental forces of nature as byproducts of the shape of space itself. While on the local level we are trained to think of space as having three dimensions, general relativity paints a picture of a four-dimensional universe, and string theory says it has 10 dimensions \u2013 or 11 if you take an extended version known as M-Theory. There are variations of the theory in 26 dimensions, and recently pure mathematicians have been electrified by a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.quantamagazine.org\/moonshine-link-discovered-for-pariah-symmetries-20170922\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">version<\/a> describing spaces of 24 dimensions. But what are these \u2018dimensions\u2019? And what does it mean to talk about a 10-dimensional space of being?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yet the notion that we inhabit a space with any mathematical structure is a radical innovation of Western culture, necessitating an overthrow of long-held beliefs about the nature of reality. Although the birth of modern science is often discussed as a transition to a mechanistic account of nature, arguably more important \u2013 and certainly more [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2229,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-153615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mathematics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=153615"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153615\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}