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Comment by paulrouget | Hacker News Reader

Extra dimensions are just scifi stuff. Physics would break appart if there were any "big enough" dimensions. Gravity & electromagnetism would not behave the way they behave (inverse square laws).

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It is also possible that everything humans understand is simply a vignette into a much larger reality, and all of those things would fall apart because they aren't true, they're merely the laws we've discovered with the limited information we have available to us.

Maybe. Is that a good explanation for some grainy footage? Is it a better explanation than, "the drone technology most of us are familiar with is a vignette of a much larger space of technological possibility; without the need to accommodate human frailty, strange and wonderful configurations of aircraft are possible, so much so that they may baffle even experienced airman? And like any strange and wonderful technology in this world, it's first used to spy, and in a decade will be used to serve ads."

Please cote the spot where I suggested anything that even remotely looks like I took a position.

All I mean to say is that circular logic based on upholding one's views of reality do not bring any clarity to the situation.

The same situation seems to happen countless times in the history of empirical science and mathematics. There are incontrovertible facts, until some new information controverts them.

That's fine, but you asked a question and I responded to it. Whether you hold a position, that's not really my business, I believe you when you say you don't.

I'm seeing now that it was a proposition not a question (I read it as "Is it" rather than "It is"), my mistake there. But I would've responded in the same way regardless, so substitute this with, "you proposed something and I responded to it."

Then a "dimension" would not be a dimension as defined by math and physics.

Throw-away comment: that's essentially the point.

Is there any way to falsify this idea?

I don't think that there is.

An obvious comparison is religious thought. Unlike most religious thought, you do actually learn when the consensus has been utterly wrong. What you don't know is when that will happen.

or maybe it might takes as few hundred more years to understand them? Our understanding of things evolve very slowly compared to age of universe.

Dimensions have a strict definition. Under those strict definitions we can draw conclusions that are 100% true. Math tell us things that can't be invalidated in the future.

If it turns out there is "something else", it would not be a dimension as defined by math and physics.

Speaking as a former theoretical high energy physicist who has studied string theory and other BSM theories (including “extra dimensions”) quite extensively and black hole information theory to a reasonable extent, the higher dimensions talked about in any close-to-mainstream physics really has nothing to do with sci-fi “inter-dimensional travel”.

It’s quite amusing to read the sentence “Seems easier to live in a higher dimension than to break the speed of light”. The latter is well established, very precise physics, the former is a very vague, so far fictional concept with little to do with our current understanding of physics (and actually very much goes against it), yet somehow one is “easier” than another.

Of course we can’t rule anything out, including “extra dimensions” in some scifi-esque sense that’s not currently understood, but these two don’t belong in the same sentence.

(Btw, I enjoy sci-fi about traveling between alternate universes.)

The way I understand the extra "dimension" here is like me viewing a bacteria on a cover slide. To the bacteria, that 2D flat plane is all that matters. Sure, technically it is 3D, but the 3rd dimension is compressed so much it is basically nonexistent and the bacteria can't really be bothered anyway. They can't even comprehend the concept of dimensions.

But to me, I am fully in 3D. I am literally an extradimensional being to the bacteria. And I am so far above it (no pun intended) I am incomprehensible to anything that lives on that 2D slide.

Even if I assume the bacteria has some really good teachers and can build stuff (they actually do, they make biofilms that are pretty complex "superstructures"), the kind of thing they can do in their limited plane of existence is nothing compared to what a human can.

So while I don't believe anything that was released so far points conclusively to real aliens, I don't find the concept of extradimensional beings too far fetch.

I don't think your bacteria on a slide analogy makes much sense. A thin 3D space is still not 2D. A bacterium also doesn't have any comprehension or concept of anything, so of course it doesn't have a concept of 3D space.

Undetectable beings living in another part of reality we're unaware of are, of course, unfalsifiable.

From what I remembered, string theory proposed that the extra dimensions beyond the spatial and chronological ones we experience are also compactified and technically hidden from our perception. In another word, they exist just not on a scale we can appreciate. If you accept that then the 2D plane with the 3rd dimension minimized to the point of irrelevance is not so different.

And I don't really care about what the bacteria "think". The point being there exists an extradimensional relationship between me and the bacteria right here in front of me. So at least to me, it isn't so outlandish that there can be something above this 3D plane and I am simply too primitive to understand it.

Of course, there is no sufficient proof right now so I do not accept it as a real answer. It is simply analogical reasoning. Also, I would not say it is unfalsifiable. Like mentioned earlier, the extra dimensions are simply tucked away and not easy to detect. They still exist and with sufficient technology, they can be probed.

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