Michio Kaku - Are there Extra Dimensions?

michio extra dimensions is front and center in the scientific world no longer just science fiction I want to understand how it works in string theory and fundamental physics and then potentially in cosmology in enlarged extra dimension so how significant is this in our understanding let me tell you a story when I was a child growing up in San Francisco area I used to visit a Japanese tea garden and visit the carp swimming just beneath the lily pads in a two dimensional pond I used to spend hours looking at them they would swim forward backward left and right their eyes were to the side and they couldn't see me I was in the third dimension I was in hyperspace they were totally unaware that there was a universe beyond their pond and then I thought well what happens if I reach down and grab one of the fish lift the fish up maybe that fish was a scientist and the scientist was a bah humbug science fiction there's no world of up up does not exist well I would grab this scientists lift them up in the world of up hyperspace the third dimension what would he see he would see beings breathing without water a new law of biology beings moving with our fins a new law of physics and then I would put the fish back into the pond what kind of stories would he tell well today we physicists believe we cannot prove it yet but we are the fish we spend all our life in three dimensions we go forward backward left right up down thinking that anything beyond our pond anything beyond our little puny universe is science fiction we say bah humbug we can't say that any more because the concept of higher dimensions now is the biggest game in town you see in three dimensions there's not enough room to put all the laws of physics but when you go to this larger pond this pond of hyperspace then all the laws of physics just fit together like a jigsaw puzzle in our three dimension the laws of physics are there we can explain things but there are lots of of pieces that seem to be random that you have to enter constants by hand and so you might have two dozen 30 or so constants of physics and more in cosmology and they they look like they all have nothing to do with one another that's right I like to think of a crystal let's say a crystal a beautiful crystal shatters and lands on a tabletop and their little insect like Flatlanders living on this tabletop and they say let us reassemble the crystal well they bring it together and then they have one crystal it's called the quantum theory they assemble other pieces of the crystal is called relativity theory of space-time but then they try to bring these two chunks together and they cannot no matter how they bring these chunks together they cannot and then one day someone says let us go to the world of up let us move one crystal up and then fit it into the third dimension and it will create a beautiful unified crystal that's where we are today we think we live in a three-dimensional world we see pieces we see the electromagnetic force we see gravity we see nuclear force little pieces of this unified field theory we bring them together now we have the theory of the quantum theory the theory of the small the theory of atoms we have the theory of Einstein the theory of space-time relativity but they don't fit together until you go into hyperspace and then they fit together beautifully so when they fit together what does that mean we now learn that we need ten or eleven dimensions only three of which or four if you include time that we we have and so there there's many as six smaller dimensions and and what's happening in those dimensions why do you need six in string theory well today we see the world as is very broken and we see pieces of it but at the beginning of time when the universe was first created that's when the crystal existed in His perfect form we call it the super force a single super force held is crystal together but then we had the Big Bang which shattered this crystal giving us the shattered universe of today when you look around you and you see the different forces mountains clouds planets is broken we live in a horribly broken world but at the instant of creation there was perfection there was perfection in a higher dimension this perfection cannot exist in three dimensions now some people say well why 10 why 11 well it turns out that there are certain magic numbers in mathematics and numbers which have spectacular properties it turns out that if you go to a 13 dimensional universe a 15 dimensional universe it's unstable particles would prefer to collapse down to 10 or 11 dimensions because the mathematic shows that self consistency is important they're unstable universes in in 29 dimensions are simply unstable and so the mathematics has shown that that we need 10 or 11 dimensions including the 3-week we see to make stability and so the simplest of forces or strings can then emerge in our three-dimensional world in the particles and forces that we normally say that's right so in this crystal the crystal exists in a higher dimension but it eventually cracked apart for reasons that we are still trying to understand and the three-dimensional world we see today is quite broken now where are these higher dimensions look at smoke smoke permeates throughout a room smoke permeates in all three dimensions but smoke never disappears smoke never floats into the fourth dimension therefore a fourth fifth sixth dimension has to be smaller than smoke but atoms also don't suddenly drift away into hyperspace therefore these higher dimensions have to be smaller than an atom or else our universe would float away okay so we think that at the beginning of time there was this perfection of ten or eleven dimensional hyperspace but these other dimensions curled up so small that atoms cannot lean into these higher dimensions so these are the kinds of that that look from a distance as if they're one-dimensional but when you get very very very small on scales that are much much smaller than an atom they actually would curl around each other and be like a straw that's right so that the universe we see around us really is hyperdimensional but we can't see it because these other dimensions have curled up they're too small to be observed compactification is the word that I think string theorists use that's right if I have a tabletop a tabletop exists in two dimensions but I can roll it up like in a cigarette roll it up and then I see this one dimensional thing which is actually two-dimensional if I get very close with a microscope so we think that these higher dimensions are all around you all around you in your body in your living room the the pond touches the third dimension at every point and so if I have a pond and we are the fish swimming in the pond and you ask the fish where is the third dimension the answer is everywhere all right now we have that's on the microscopic scale what about large extra dimensions that that seem to be talked about now in some theories of cosmology well strings can only vibrate in ten dimensions but in the 90s there was a revolution that that it turns out that if you add an 11th dimension one more dimension then membranes can exist not just little strings but beach balls and golf balls can vibrate and perhaps our universe is a membrane in which case perhaps some of these dimensions could be large perhaps even infinite so once you go from the ten dimensional world of strings where these dimensions are very tiny and go to an 11 dimensions then you're talking about a whole new picture a picture whereby some of these dimensions could be huge and that may even explain why gravity is so weak gravity is a very weak force perhaps gravity loses loses escapes into these higher dimensions and that's why gravity is so weak this so-called hierarchy problem which gravity may be 10 to the 39th or 10 to the 40th times smaller than the electromagnetic grab that the electromagnetic force it seems it seems of these two are fundamental forces to have such a vast difference in scale doesn't seem to make sense that's right I could put sheets of paper on the table comb my hair and you do this in elementary school pick up the sheets of paper well I just defied gravity the earth weighs 6 trillion trillion kilograms i defied six trillion trillion kilograms with a comb by picking up pieces of paper with electric force that's how weak gravity is and perhaps these higher dimensions is due to the fact that space loses a gravity losses into these higher dimensions now these if we look at the possibility of these large extra dimensions which you said might be infinite in size are we limited to these extra six or seven dimensions other than the three we see or might there be a vast number of infinite number of dimensions as well as each one being infinite in size how many infinities are we dealing with well we think that eleven is the upper limit some people actually have looked at twelve dimensions in twelve dimensions we have two times but in thirteen dimensions the universe becomes really unstable I've looked at 13 it's a horrible dimension to work with mathematically 12 seems to be the limit and even in twelve dimensions you have double times I don't know what to make of that but one thing is maybe we can experimentally see some of these objects because if such a universe is hovering just above you it is invisible to you light goes underneath and that may explain dark matter dark matter is invisible it has gravity we the Hubble Space Telescope has given us maps of this invisible matter maybe it's nothing but an ordinary galaxy hovering just above us in another dimension if you read HG Wells famous novel The Invisible Man he becomes invisible because he's blown into the fourth dimension he's hovering just above us light goes underneath the Invisible Man but he can look down on us so perhaps dark matter which makes up most of the matter of the universe is nothing but ordinary matter of a galaxy hovering in a parallel universe just above us under the thinking gravity then being the only kind of force that can that can transmitted between in some way between different dimensions it's the it's the one thing that that different dimensions are permeable to would be gravity everything else can't penetrate it but gravity can that's right we are like flies on flypaper the flypaper represents our universe we're stuck we can't get off but gravity losses between fly papers and therefore we can actually perhaps detect experimentally the presence of alternate universes this is not just science fiction perhaps with our instruments we can detect dark matter like objects from other universes hovering just above our universe because gravity losses between dimensions

Channel: Closer To Truth

Views: 509,426

Rating: 4.8908372 out of 5

Keywords: Michio Kaku, Close To Truth, Physics, Cosmology, Universe, Space, Time, Multiverse

Id: RUlVFzl_BJs

Length: 11min 33sec (693 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 29 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/Matsu09]

Amazing because I’ve recently been thinking quite a bit about the 4th dimension. Whoever or whatever created the simulation is probably from that dimension or another higher dimension. They are clearly not a part of this universe and can most likely observe what’s going on without us ever being able to detect them. They could do this quite easily in the 4th dimension-permanently hidden, just like objects in the 2nd dimension could never detect us in the 3rd dimension. Regardless, higher dimensions have to be a big piece of the simulation theory I would think. At least from a creationist point of view.