Physicists have carried out experiments that have made it possible to record in our three-dimensional world the effects of events taking place in four-dimensional space.
In addition to the usual three dimensions - length, width and depth - there really is at least one more spatial dimension. The experiments that led to such a sensational conclusion were carried out by American, British, Israeli, German and Swiss scientists from several institutes (The Pennsylvania State University, Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Pittsburgh, Holon Institute of Technology, Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Birmingham).
The researchers created special structures from atoms cooled to near absolute zero and photons. These structures behaved as if they were reacting to events that took place outside our three-dimensional world and influenced through the "additional" - the fourth dimension.
Specifically, in the experiments carried out now, it was possible to reproduce the four-dimensional quantum Hall effect. What the journal Nature reported in two publications at once - Exploring 4D quantum Hall physics with a 2D topological charge pump and Photonic topological boundary pumping as a probe of 4D quantum Hall physics.
“ Physically, we did not penetrate four-dimensional space, but we were able to feel it, having obtained a 4-D quantum Hall effect using a lower-dimensional system, because a higher-dimensional system is encoded in the elements of its structure, ” Michael Rechtsman told Gizmodo), professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
- Perhaps, - the scientist dreamed, - a new physics will appear, taking into account higher spatial dimensions. And devices will be created that, thanks to this, will be able to work much more efficiently in the three-dimensional world we are used to.
Who knows, suddenly it will be possible to penetrate the fourth dimension. And it turns out that "along it" passages pass through the fabric of space-time - the very "wormholes" connecting distant parts of the Universe.
By the way, scientists earlier doubted that the number of spatial dimensions is limited to three. As early as the nineteenth century, the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach wrote: "A satisfactory theory of electricity has not yet been created, perhaps because electrical phenomena were invariably wanted to be explained by molecular processes in space with three dimensions."
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The fourth dimension can take us to boundless distances.
Nowadays, there are very exotic theories of the structure of the Universe, in which space is stretched as much as 11 dimensions, and elementary particles at the same time are actually strings that look like point objects only in our world. That is, they represent some traces stretching from higher dimensions.
It has not yet been possible to prove the correctness of such views - at the expense of 11 dimensions. But to convince - albeit very devious, confused and difficult - that there is a fourth dimension, it seems to be working out already. At least in scientific journals.
VLADIMIR LAGOVSKY