{"id":25309,"date":"2016-05-03T14:47:52","date_gmt":"2016-05-03T21:47:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/why-is-space-three-dimensional"},"modified":"2017-04-24T21:02:39","modified_gmt":"2017-04-25T04:02:39","slug":"why-is-space-three-dimensional","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/why-is-space-three-dimensional","title":{"rendered":"Why is space three-dimensional?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/why-is-space-three-dimensional.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>(<i>Phys.org<\/i>)\u2014The question of why space is three-dimensional (3D) and not some other number of dimensions has puzzled philosophers and scientists since ancient Greece. Space-time overall is four-dimensional, or (3 + 1)-dimensional, where time is the fourth dimension. It\u2019s well-known that the time dimension is related to the second law of thermodynamics: time has one direction (forward) because entropy (a measure of disorder) never decreases in a closed system such as the universe.<\/p>\n<p>In a new paper published in <i>EPL<\/i>, researchers have proposed that the second law of thermodynamics may also explain why <a href=\"http:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/space\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">space<\/a> is 3D.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cA number of researchers in the fields of science and philosophy have addressed the problem of the (3+1)-dimensional nature of space-time by justifying the suitable choice of its dimensionality in order to maintain life, stability and complexity,\u201d coauthor Julian Gonzalez-Ayala, at the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico and the University of Salamanca in Spain, told <i>Phys.org<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"http:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2016-05-space-three-dimensional.html\">http:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2016&#45;05-space-three-dimensional.html<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(Phys.org)\u2014The question of why space is three-dimensional (3D) and not some other number of dimensions has puzzled philosophers and scientists since ancient Greece. Space-time overall is four-dimensional, or (3 + 1)-dimensional, where time is the fourth dimension. It\u2019s well-known that the time dimension is related to the second law of thermodynamics: time has one direction [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":387,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[219,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25309","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\/387"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25309"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50626,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25309\/revisions\/50626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}