We perceive world in 4 dimensions. Three dimensions in space and one in time. So, do more dimensions exist in space?
There is an amazing book by this name. Here are some thoughts from it.
Suppose you and I live on a flat table. We are flat organisms that can only perceive 2-D. Front, back, left and right were the only directions we knew. Now, if I am in front of you I will just see a line. If I have to get past you, I will slip and slide past you. Imagine if some one said we had a third dimension of height, how blind would be to that concept! Say someone picked me up and placed on you other side, it would be nothing less than a miracle for you. I disappeared in front of your eyes and appeared at another place out of no where as I can see you leave the surface of our flat table and move above me and land on the other side. Well, in mythology we hear about people having such powers. In real science?
Suppose we extended the flatland to one more dimension. Now imagine we were 3-D organisms. We would be pinned to a 3-D membrane. And someone picked me and moved me through the 4th dimension and place on you other side? A miracle!?
In a dijet event two quarks scattering off each other inside detector of an accelerator. Now if we are able to detect just one of them, it is refereed to as a monojet. If detected in a detector of any accelerator, a monojet would seem to violate the conservation of momentum. But, a dijet could look like a monojet if one of the pair escapes detection. A very simple reason.
But there are doubts it could be this reason.
Here’s a case in point: the monojet – a single quark or gluon spotted in a particle detector, appearing to recoil against nothing. Could it be recoiling against another quark, which is in another dimension?
At an experiment in Fermilab called DZero, a recent result from detector tells us we haven’t yet reached that last place to look- but we have trimmed the list. Although experiments have not seen extra dimensions, they were able to set rather strict limits on their size.
They are also looking for the effects of extra dimensions in collisions that produce different types of particles, such as quarks. They are also looking for events where gravitons are produced in the collisions and then leave our three-dimensional world, traveling off into one of the other dimensions. This would cause an apparent non-conservation of energy from the point of view of our three dimensional world.
Photo courtesy Alan Chai
