There is no proof that there are more dimensions than the four we know – three of space (height, width and volume) and one of time. But for most theoretical physicists, the fifth dimension does exist. We just can’t detect it. If one day we succeed, we will be close to understanding one of the great riddles of the Universe: the so-called dark matter, which, as it neither emits nor reflects light, is completely invisible. The only clue it leaves is its immense gravitational force – after all, if there is matter, there is gravity. It is estimated that there is at least five times more dark matter than “normal” matter, the stuff our bodies, stars and everything else is made of. But where does the fifth dimension come into this story? For some scientists, it is a millimeter-thick shortcut in folds in space through which the gravity of very distant galaxies escapes, so far away that they cannot be seen from Earth. They would actually be the mysterious dark matter.
“According to this idea, dark matter is just normal matter, located on the other side of space”, says physicist Gia Dvali, from New York University, in the United States, and one of the three creators of the theory of the fifth dimension. Still according to this thesis, the most incredible thing is that, although these dark matter galaxies are distant in terms of space, from the point of view of the fifth dimension, they are millimeters from us (check the infographic on the side). If we could see the fifth dimension, we would see trillions of galaxies just in the space between you and your Strangeworld! With the Universe, it is the same reasoning: an extra dimension would fit an infinity of three-dimensional bodies in a space of a few millimeters. That is, there would be more celestial bodies in your fingerprints than in a starry sky. When Shakespeare wrote that «there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our vain philosophy», he must not have imagined that it was all that…
Extra dimension would bring galaxies billions of light years away closer to Earth
1 – In the Universe, there are galaxies so far away that they cannot be seen from Earth. Traveling through all of space, their light takes tens of billions of years to reach us. But since the age of the Universe is “only” 13 billion years old, that light hasn’t reached us yet—so these galaxies would be called dark matter. We only know they exist because they have gravity.
2 – For those who defend the idea of the fifth dimension, the gravitational force of distant galaxies reaches Earth quickly because it crosses a “folded” space fabric, through a fifth dimension of millimetric thickness. That would solve the mystery of the extra gravity appearing in our region of space. But so far, no one has been able to detect this hypothetical fifth dimension.