A Higher Dimensional Universe?
Does our universe have higher but unusual spatial dimensions ? This idea has been gaining popularity to help explain why vastly separated parts of our universe appear so similar , and why the geometry of our universe does not seem to result naturally from the amounts of matter it seems to contain . In a new incarnation of an old extra-dimensional idea , some astrophysicists hypothesize that we live in a universe dubbed Ekpyrotic , where our four dimensions (three spatial plus one time) resulted from the fiery collision of two four-dimensional spaces ( branes ) in a five-dimensional universe . This big-bang hypothesis is meant to compete with another big-bang hypothesis that our universe underwent a superluminal inflation event in the distant past, and does make distinct testable predictions. Above , a dynamic three-dimensional drawing (two spatial plus one time) of a four-dimensional depiction of a five-dimensional cube (a hypercube with four spatial dimensions is also known as a tesseract ) is shown. Donning red-blue glasses will give the best multi-dimensional perspective .