We don’t tend to dwell on the fact that we exist in three dimensions. Front to back, left to right, up to down – these are the axes along which we move through the world. When we try to imagine something else, we usually conjure up the most outlandish science fiction images of portals in the fabric of space-time and parallel universes.
But serious physicists have long been fascinated by the possibility of extra dimensions. Despite their intangibility, extra dimensions hold the promise of solving some big questions about the deepest workings of the universe. And just because they’re hard to imagine and even harder to observe doesn’t mean we can rule them out. “There’s no reason they have to be three-dimensional,” says David Schneider, a physics professor at the University of California, San Diego. Georges Obie At Oxford University. “It could have been two, it could have been four, it could have been ten.”
Still, there comes a time when any self-respecting physicist wants hard evidence. That’s why it’s so exciting that over the past few years, researchers have developed several techniques that may finally provide evidence of extra dimensions. For example, we might be able to detect gravity leaking into extra dimensions. We might see subtle signatures of it in black holes, or we might find its signature in particle accelerators.
But now, in an unexpected twist, Ovid and his colleagues claim that there is an extra dimension that is fundamentally different from any previously conceived. This “dark dimension” hides ancient particles whose gravity could solve the mystery of dark matter, the force that is thought to have shaped the universe. Crucially, this dimension is relatively…
