# Experimental evidence of a fourth spatial dimension?

As human beings, we observe the world in which we live in three dimensions. However, it is certainly theoretically possible that more dimensions exist.

Is there any direct or indirect evidence supporting a fourth dimension?

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I personally live in a world with four large dimensions. It's enough to look at the clock. ;-) –  Luboš Motl Jan 28 '11 at 18:32
Is this wording "certainly theoretically possible" free or is there some copyright? I'd like to use this :=) –  Georg Jan 28 '11 at 18:34
No. Unless you consider time as the fourth dimension. Also current research suggests that spacetime become two dimensional at high energies and very small distances. So, yes, dimensionality of spacetime is a mutable concept in modern physics. But no experimental evidence, indirect or direct, has been found for a fourth spacelike or a second timelike direction. –  user346 Jan 28 '11 at 18:36
@space: You should put that as an answer. Then I can accept it. –  George Edison Jan 28 '11 at 18:54
Wait... We're in the 3rd dimension?! –  muntoo Jan 29 '11 at 5:38
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No. Unless you consider time as the fourth dimension. Also current research suggests that spacetime becomes two dimensional at high energies and very small distances. So, yes, dimensionality of spacetime is a mutable concept in modern physics. But no experimental evidence, indirect or direct, has been found for a fourth spacelike or a second timelike direction.

Someone is bound to question my statement that "spacetime becomes two dimensional at high energies and very small distances". My backup reference for this is Carlip's recent paper The Small Scale Structure of Spacetime, where he considers inputs from five or six different theoretical lines of research. Of course, there is bound to be a spectrum of opinion on this issue.

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Well, in this case, I was looking for something other than time, but you have certainly answered the question. –  George Edison Jan 28 '11 at 18:58
@GeorgeEdison, user346: This answer is very biased. "current research..." you should state that it is only in certain theories like Causual Dynamical Triangulation, Casual Sets, etc. . And is there a particular reason why you haven't talked about extra dimensions in KK theory, SuperGravity, String theory, etc. ? The answer is very biased towards LQG and its cousins, as it stands. The above is intended as an explanation for my downvote. r. –  DIMension10 Jul 21 at 14:10

If we consider the heat capacity of a mono-atomic gas, it will answer the question how many independent degrees of freedom exist in space. Experiment gives three space dimensions.

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Assuming you mean spatial dimensions, Nima Arkani-Hamed has some ideas and papers on the subject. Here is a popular article: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v433/n7021/full/433010a.html

The idea of a fourth dimension was popularized by Charles Hinton in the late 1800s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Howard_Hinton and, of course, by Edwin Abbott (Flatland). Then, there are the modern takes on it, like The Higher Dimensions Family Church :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlton_Pearson

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Hmmm... very interesting article. –  George Edison Jan 28 '11 at 18:56

Not data, but...

The string theorists and other TOE people would say that a single theory exhibiting all the required symmetries only has representations at higher dimensions.

Then they deal "So why can't we see the other ones?" by giving them periodic boundary conditions on length scales smaller than we have been able to probe.

This would be "extra" spacial dimensions, but would not have any interesting effects on day to day life.

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I know of this paper arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9803315 by Arkani-Hamed et al., according to which extra-dimensions should affect "sub-millimeter measurements of gravity" according to the abstract. That would appear to fall in the realm of day to day life. I'm not aware of the present status of this paper but it seems important regardless of whether such measurements have a positive or negative result. –  user346 Jan 28 '11 at 19:16
At CMS, LHC experiment last year they gave limits for the black holes that these extra dimensions predict in arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1012/1012.3375v1.pdf –  anna v Jan 28 '11 at 20:18

In Newtonian physics, there are 3 dimensions of space and there is time. Everything happens in these 3 dimensions of space and time is only a parameter which measures the evolution of things (for example the change in the positions of a particle).

In Special Relativity, it was postulated that the 3 dimension of space and time should be considered under equal footing and that time should also be seen as a dimension. The fact that that was the case was shown by proving the validity of relativistic transformations between various reference frames which mixed time with space. But because a reference frame in Special Relativity can be considered as a universal frame for that particular observer, it introduced time in an absolute sense and thus one could consider again time to be only a parameter for that particular observer.

General Relativity established the full equivalence of time and space as parts of spacetime, in the sense that it fully geometrised gravity and the place where everything happens is the 4-dimensional spacetime with 3 dimensions of space and 1 of time. The evidence supporting the geometric view of spacetime are those supporting the Einstein equivalence principle which states that every free falling frame doesn't experience any gravitational effects or that an accelerated observer can't distinguish with local experiments his accelerated frame from a gravitational field.

So, to quote some experiments that verify the Einstein equivalence principle, we have:

1. The redshift of photons climbing the gravitational potential,
2. The time delay of clocks in different gravitational fields,
3. The Eotvos-type experiments that show that all objects regardless their composition fall with the same acceleration,
4. The constancy of physical constants.
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...for what?     –  George Edison Jan 28 '11 at 18:55