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Why “other dimensions” do, and do not, exist

March 23, 2016 by  

serling_FotorA friend asked “Do you believe in other dimensions?”. I replied as follows:

Other dimensions of what? I’m not being obtuse here. It’s just that anything can be quantified as a dimension. For example: the sweetness of a fruit, the hardness of a snowball, the volume of precipitation etc. There are literally as many dimensions as there are things to quantify.

In popular culture, we are told that there are three spatial dimensions (height, width, and depth) plus “time”, which is typically referred to as “the fourth” dimension. There is no “the” fourth dimension. Take a given object, and make any four measures of it: its hardness, sweetness, smelliness, and loudness, for example. There’s four dimensions, right there. Which one is “the fourth”? Answer: any of them you care to refer to as “the fourth”.

When folks start talking about more dimensions, they almost never are talking about sweetness, hardness, etc.. Instead, they are referring to “another place”, variously characterized as Heaven, “another universe”, a realm in which intelligent but invisible entities hang out or in which one can visit Rod Serling, et cetera.

If, by “other dimensions”, you are referring to such things as sweetness and hardness, then of course I believe in them, and one would be foolish not to do so given that the evidence of them is available to the five senses. However, if by “other dimensions” you are referring to the Heaven/Rod Serling hang-out, my answer is “no”, and for the same reason: I don’t believe anything for which there is no physical evidence. It’s all just wishful thinking for those who can’t stand to believe that “this” is “all there is”.

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