Entry 351, on 2006-06-16 at 13:10:22 (Rating 1, Science)
After being referred to Stephen Hawking's web site, and taking a link for unsolved mysteries, I found myself reading an article on "Is there a Theory of Everything?" by Dr. Michio Kaku, Professor of Theoretical Physics at the City University of New York. This sort of theory has been the ultimate aim of advanced physics for about a century, but we still don't have one, even though there are a few interesting candidates.
Extra dimensions seem to feature prominently in these theories. As Dr. Kaku says "We spend our life in three spatial dimensions, confident that what we can see with our telescopes is all there is, ignorant of the possibility of 10-dimensional hyperspace. Although these higher dimensions are invisible, their 'ripples' can clearly be seen and felt. We call these ripples gravity and light." Extra dimensions have been a mainstay of physics for many years, so I think this statement applies to the 'average' person, and not to cosmologists and others who think about these things much, but he still makes a good point.
Many mysteries might become less mysterious if we accept that previously "science fiction" concepts, like hyperspace, might really be true. Theories of multiple Universes seem to be making a resurgence, a new oscillating Universe model is being considered, physicists working on advanced theories definitely want extra dimensions - the only question is how many (10 seems to be a popular number).
So I hope that in the near future everything might fall into place, perhaps as the result of a great leap of understanding like Einstein's about a century ago, or maybe after discoveries from new particle accelerators and other instruments.
I don't think we should ever assume that we will be genuinely be able to understand what's really happening though. After all, we have a very useful scientific theory, quantum theory, which no one seems to really understand. We use ideas like wave/particle duality to model what's happening, but does that really represent the truth? Probably not. Now that I think about it, what do we mean by "truth" in this context anyway. We have to be careful not to let physics morph into philosophy!
Its fascinating to contemplate that just over 100 years ago many scientists thought we essentially knew everything we would ever need to know and that we just had to fill in the details. How wrong they were. Quantum theory and relativity were just around the corner, and they changed everything. I think its time that a new theory (string theory?) did the same thing for this century by introducing new understanding but also showing us how little we really understand now.
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