How could 4 or more dimensions exist?

Question

It seems to me that the human mind can only think in 3 dimensions. But are there any suggestions out there as to how something can exist in 4 or more.

Answer 1

(ignoring time as the 4th dimension for the sake of this point) higher dimensions are hard for us to visualise. However, imagine you lived in a 2 dimenional world and existed as a stick man on a peice of paper with no thickness. If you were asked to visualise a ball, you couldn't. and if i passed a ball through you 2 dimensional world you would only see a short straight line that gets longer then shorter and then dissappears. If you were able to steo into the third dimension you would see the ball, but no amout of explaining would help you see it while you were stuck in your 2D world.
Therefore we cannot see past our own 3D world.
It has been theorised that there are in fact up to 13D!!
Hope this helps

Answer 2

look up Calabi-yau manifolds.

The human mind often finds it difficult to think about more than three extended dimensions and rightly so as that IS physically impossible. These extra dimensions are theorized to curl up on themselves which is plausible.

Kaluza, on studying general relativity, was surprised to note that when he applied 5 dimensions to the field equations of general relativity he was able to unify electromagnetism with gravity. At the time this was thought to be a 'theory of everything' but when the nuclear forces were discovered it was neglected as these were not incoprated.
More recently research using 11 dimensions shows much promise for uniting all 4 fundamental forces. Indeed complete unification may REQUIRE extra dimensions. Some people argue that the way forward is through what we can see and not upon what we think we need to see, but that is a differn't issue.

Like most people, I know very little about this, but I hope this helps

Answer 3

Why not? Mathematically, a point in a space is an ordered list of coordinates:

For R the number line (x1)
for R^2 the plane (x1,x2)
for R^2 3-d space (x1,x2,x3)

Now let's say that you want to record the temperature at every point in the room

(x1,x2,x3,x4) where x4 is the temperature at the point. If you fix x4 you can find surfaces of constant temperature.

Another example,
A dating service asks 20 questions, put them on a numerical scale. Now everyone is a point in 20 dimensional space. A potential match are those points close to you. Distance is given by a natural generalization of the Pythagorean, or use dot products of vectors

d(p1,p2) = sqrt( p1*p2), where p1 and p2 are 20 dimensional vectors, and * means vector dot product.

Answer 4

well Time is the 4th dimension.
On very tiny scales like the Plank scale somewhere around 10^-35 m there is the posibliity of more dimensions. I wouldn't really worry about it too much unless your a high energy physicist.

Answer 5

i know other people said this before but time is the fourth
apparently for the string theory to be real we need to be able to work with about 20 + dimensions, im of the understanding that as it stands physicists know of 10 but chances are im wrong. beats me how they could imagine these, it took me ages to get my head around time being one

Answer 6

well X Y and Z

and TIME is the 4th

Answer 7

im not sure you made it to three.

Answer 8

God.