Hyperspace

Also The general nature of things

Maxwell Lamb University College 28/02/2003

Hyperspace

Maxwell Lamb

1/17/2013

Hyperspace
Also The general nature of things

Hyperspace has always been a word only ever uttered quietly in physics circles, as anyone heard discussing it is often viewed as a little cracked, or misguided, as hyperspace is not conventionally considered a subject of serious study. The concept of hyperspace, however, is becoming increasingly essential in modern theories of the nature of matter, time and space, and is used widely in many theories, although is generally dressed up to avoid its crackpot connotations.

What is hyperspace?
Hyperspace is merely any spatial dimension above the usual three which are visible to us, in which objects move in manners incomprehensible to our three dimensional minds. There has never been any evolutionary need for humans, or any other creature, to be able to visualize objects in higher dimensions, as not once has a tiger jumped out of the fourth dimension, so we have not evolved the sense organs necessary to probe any higher dimensions. Hyperspace was originally hypothesized by Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann, under Gauss guidance, in a lecture given on June 10th 1854 at the University of Gttingen. Gauss had long felt that Euclidean geometry was essentially flawed, and that there must be something more to the shape of space, but was far too conservative in his work to even consider publishing under his name, so urged his student, Riemann, to give a lecture on the subject. In this lecture, Riemann presented g11 g12 g13 g14 the astounding hypothesis that forces are merely a g21 g22 g23 g24 consequence of geometry, and that space was crumpled. He explained that if one lived upon a two dimensional g31 g32 g33 g34 universe, such as a sheet of paper, the paper could be g41 g42 g43 g44 crumpled into a ball, and anyone moving upon the surface of the paper would find himself pulled from side to side by invisible and mysterious forces as he passed over the crumples in the paper. He established that at any given Fig.1 The Riemann Metric Tensor point in four dimensions 10 numbers (as 6 numbers in the tensor are redundant) are needed to describe the curvature of each point, described by the Riemann metric tensor. The Riemann metric tensor g is an N x N matrix, which determines the infinitesimal distance between two points as ds2 = dxgvdxy. In the limit of flat space the tensor becomes diagonal, and gv=v, which reduces back to Pythagoras in N dimensions. The deviation of the metric tensor from v measures the deviation of the space being defined from flat space. From the metric tensor we can construct the curvature tensor, given by (Eqn.1) where R are the components of a 1/3 tensor. A perhaps easier way of understanding this is to take a circle of radius r, and measure its area. If the circle is on flat space, the area, as expected by Euclid, will be r2. If however, the circle is on a space with positive curvature, i.e. the surface of a sphere the are will be > r2, and correspondingly, if placed on a space with negative curvature, i.e. a saddle, the area will be < r2. This is the principle of the curvature tensor defined in only three dimensions. To extend to a four dimensional topology the analogy remains the same, however rather than plotting circles on spheres one would be plotting spheres on hyperspheres, and measuring the volume. Riemann inadvertently started a cultural revolution, and as the general public heard of this mysterious fourth dimension popular literature such as Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott, and explanations for Ghosts and the afterlife. This interest gradually faded, as all fads do, and Riemann was largely forgotten, except by mathematicians who specialized in topology.

Hyperspace

Maxwell Lamb

1/17/2013

The metric tensor essentially described gravity in terms of a field and was the first step towards the unification of fundamental forces.

Einstein and Maxwell

A field is defined by Faraday as a collection of numbers defined at every point in space that completely described a force at that point. Faraday was given the idea of a field by observing furrows in a ploughed field, and the realization that forces could be described by these fields. 1 The next set of great field equations to emerge after E= Riemann were James Clerk Maxwells field equations of B - E/t = j electricity and magnetism. In the 1860s, Maxwell wrote down B=0 the eight field equations that govern the electromagnetic force. E + B/t = 0 In his process of finding the field equations, he carried out a kind of unification as well. Throughout history, people had been Equations 2 and 4 are vector aware of magnetism and of electricity, but Maxwell showed they equations, representing three equations each. were two manifestations of the same thing, and was thus able If we introduce the Maxwell tensor to create the electromagnet. His eight equations also describe light, which is a form of electromagnetic radiation. F= A - A These equations rather nicely reduce Maxwells equations, when expressed in 3 dimensions, to are ugly and cumbersome, as time and space are treated as F = j two separate entities, however, once expressed in four dimensions become one, beautiful, simplistic equation. 2 In 1915, Einstein discovered the field equations for gravity, by simply introducing time as a 4th dimension. He used the Riemannian view of forces, that is, forces as a consequence of geometry, without realizing that the very same idea had been used over half a century previously. His field equation for gravity is essentially Matter-energy determines the curvature of space-time After two years of searching for a mathematical apparatus to express his theory, Einstein stumbled across the work of Riemann. The true relevance of Riemanns discovery was not understood until this point, when it became apparent that Einsteins theory of gravity was in fact Riemanns theory of Gravity, with the difference that Einstein had been searching for a theory of gravity, whilst Riemann had been playing with a mathematical hypothesis, with no real end in mind. Einsteins tensor reads as:

(Eqn.2) Through the addition of time as the fourth dimension, Einstein was able to produce his theory of general relativity, thus beginning one of the greatest scientific revolutions since the wheel.

Kaluza-Klein Theory
Four short years after Einsteins field equations for gravity, in 1919, Theodr Kaluza, a German mathematician, came up with the idea of writing Einsteins gravity field tensor in 5 dimensions. Incredibly, the part that was not Einsteins original equation in 4 dimensions was Maxwells field equations. Without having ever been purposely inserted into the tensor, Maxwells equations emerged. Through the addition of the 5th dimension Einsteins theory of gravity unified
1

Kaku, Michio. Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey through Parallel Universes, Time Warps and the 10th Dimension. Oxford University Press: New York, 1994. (p. 25) 2 Kaku, Michio. Hyperspace. (Oxford University Press: New York, 1994. p. 86)

Hyperspace

Maxwell Lamb

1/17/2013

with Maxwells theory of Electromagnetism. Kaluza also proposed that light was simply a resonance of this 5th dimension.3 As always, the question of if there is a 4th spatial dimension, why cant we see it? cropped up yet again. This time, however, the answer was slightly different. Oskar Klein, another German mathematician, offered an explanation; the 4th spatial dimension could not be seen because it had compactified into a ball the size of the Planck length (10 -35m or 1027eV). A simple analogy for this is to see a pipe from a great distance. From this distance, the pipe appears to be a single line, but seen closely it is in fact a three dimensional pipe. Kaluza-Klein theory was considered interesting, but was not widely accepted, and by the 1930s was dead. In the words of Wolfgang Pauli It isnt even wrong.

Quantum Theory and Yang-Mills fields

Quantum theory began to appear in 1925 as a result of Heisenbergs Uncertainty principle (we cannot know the simultaneous velocity and position of a particle), and Einsteins universe of smooth geometry began to fracture into a universe of particles held together by impossible glue as a veritable stampede of physicists chased after this new exiting field of research. The key idea behind quantum mechanics is that forces are the result of the exchange of quanta of energy. For each force there are different carriers, known as bosons. Bosons, named after Satyendra Bose, have spin n, n+1, n+2, and fermions, the other quanta of matter, named after Enrico Fermi, have a spin of n/2, (n/2)+1, (n/2)+2. By the 1960s quantum theory was beginning to run out of the momentum that it initially had, as so many new elementary particles were being produced by particle accelerator across the globe that a vast array of incorrect new theories sprang forth to describe the results. In 1954 C. N. Yang and R. L. Mills discovered the Yang-Mills field, which is the quantum of energy used in transfers for the weak and strong forces. The Yang-Mills field is a generalization of the Maxwell field to describe light, except that the Yang-Mills field has many more components and can have an electrical charge. Feynman diagrams are the most commonly used shorthand for exhibiting particle interactions, and each diagram represents a term in a complicated mathematical expression (The expression is an infinite summation of these terms). This is known as Perturbation Theory. The reason for this summation is that in order to make the calculation rigorous small quantum corrections must be added to the original term, represented by all other forms that the interaction may take. When applied to the Electromagnetic and Gravitational forces, these series were convergent, and the answer was almost always a finite answer. When, however, calculations were to be made for the strong and weak forces, a problem arose. The series were strongly divergent, and always summed to infinity, regardless of what tinkering was done.4 The reason for this because the strong force, carried by the meson, acts on mesons as well. This causes the diagrams to loop back onto themselves, and instead of getting smaller, the termsFig.3 An interaction with an infinite loop get larger. A similar case exists with the weak force. The theory was "non-renormalizable", that is, it generated non-sensical answers. This rendered the Yang-Mills field and quantum theory useless in describing the weak and strong interactions. In 1971 a key development was made that propelled a unified description of three of the quantum forces (excluding gravity). This discovery was made by a Dutch graduate student, Gerard t Hooft. The Yang-Mills field had a reputation of being formidably difficult to calculate with, in comparison with Maxwells field, but, being a relatively fresh graduate student, he was still undaunted by the prospect of the Yang-Mills field. t Hooft showed that whenever symmetry breaking occurs, the Yang-Mills field acquires a mass but remains finite. He showed that the infinities caused by the loops can be cancelled or shuffled around until harmless.
3 4

Kaku. Hyperspace. (pp. 100-102) Davies, P.C.W and Brown, Julian (editors). Superstrings: A Theory of Everything? Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1988.

Hyperspace

Maxwell Lamb

1/17/2013

As a result of this, by the mid 1970s the Yang-Mills field was being applied to strong and weak interactions, and progress was once more being made, although this time it seemed that matter was held together by Yang-Mills fields, rather than the beautiful geometry of Einstein. Thus was born the standard model.

The Standard Model

The standard model is a comprehensive theory that can explain every piece of experimental data concerning subatomic particles, up to 1012eV. It is, as yet, the most successful theory in the history of science. The standard model states that each fundamental force is generated through the exchange of a variety of quanta, as follows. The Strong Force The standard model states that Protons, Neutrons, and all other Hadrons consist of quarks, which come in three colours, red, green and blue, and six flavours, up, down, strange, charm, top and bottom. There are also antiquarks (blue antiup, red antistrange etc.), which are simply the antimatter counterparts of quarks (incidentally, the term quark was coined by James Joyce in Ulysses). This gives us a total of 36 quarks. The quarks are held together by gluons, which are described by the Yang-Mills field, which condenses into a sticky substance and glues the quarks together, in the roughest terms. This gluon field is incredibly powerful, and the quarks can never be removed from one another. This is known as quark confinement, and explains why free quarks have never been observed. A system of quarks held together by a gluon field has many different resonances, and each resonance is representative of a different hadron. This part of the Standard Model describing the strong force in known as quantum chromodynamics (QCD). The Weak Force The weak force governs leptons (i.e. mesons and neutrinos). It is far weaker than the strong force, but still stronger than gravity. 5The quanta exchanged for the weak force are W and Z bosons, and these are also described by the Yang-Mills field. Unlike gluons fields, the field generated by W and Z bosons is too weak to set leptons into a resonant state, so there remain only 12 leptons, inclusive of antimatter. The Electromagnetic Force The standard model includes Maxwells theory, and how it interacts with other particles. Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) governs the interaction of electrons and light, and is accurate to 1 part in 107 , making it technically the most accurate theory in history. In summation, all quanta are described by the Yang-Mills and Maxwell fields, and all matter consists of quarks and leptons. From theory we can show all of the properties of matter. But how does this relate to hyperspace? Symmetry in the standard model The standard model is based on symmetry. Quarks have SU(3) symmetry, due to the three colours available, the weak force has SU(2) symmetry, due to the existence of only two particles governed by it, the electron and the neutrino, and the electromagnetic force has U(1) symmetry, which rotates the components of the Maxwell field into itself. The most fundamental (and controversial) aspect of the standard model is that it unifies the three fundamental forces by creating one greater symmetry, SU(3) X SU(2) x U(1).
5

Davies and Brown. Superstrings: A Theory of Everything? (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1988.)

Hyperspace

Maxwell Lamb

1/17/2013

It would be nice if this theory of everything held all particles within one multiplet, and one symmetry, however it does not, there are three multiplets, and they cannot be rotated among one another. The standard model does not include gravity, and it is particularly ugly and unconservative. Nature is economical and beautiful, so therefore something is missing.

A return to beauty
The first step By the 1980s the standard model was being killed by its own success. Over and over again experimental data proved it to be correct, and physicists were feeling increasingly like taxonomists, stamp collectors. In the words of Ernest Rutherford All science is either Physics or stamp collecting. Let us attempt to explain gravity in terms of quantum mechanics. Gravity is the weakest of all forces, it takes the mass of the earth to keep a piece of paper from flying into outer space. If we construct a quantum theory of gravity we find that the quantum corrections necessary are of the order of the Planck energy, a fantastic amount of power at 10 28 electron volts. We can postulate that gravity is caused by the exchange of an arbitrary quanta of gravity, called gravitons, and that all gravitational forces are the result of the exchange of a myriad of these particles. However, we find that if we apply the quantum corrections necessary for this theory to Einsteins or Newtons laws of gravity we get infinities cropping up, as with the Yang-Mills field, which rends the theory useless. This was a huge stumbling block for physicists until suddenly, quite surprisingly, KaluzaKlein theory reappeared. Hyperspace was back on the scene. Even though Kaluza-Klein theory was still nonrenormalizable, it gave hope of a beautiful, smooth, symmetrical theory. In the 1930s, when Kaluza-Klein theory came about, very little was known of the structure of matter, but, by the time it reappeared in the 1980s the Standard Model had given a new understanding of the underlying nature of the universe, and the world was ready for Kaluza-Klein theory. It was already known that if you applied five dimensions to Einsteins tensor that Maxwells equations appeared, but even more excitingly, if N dimensions were added, the YangMills field was derived! A new symmetry was being applied to hyperspace, giving the potential of an overall symmetry. To understand how these symmetries can appear from hyperspace, consider the possibility of a vibrating sphere of gelatine. The sphere will resonate at certain frequencies, in a number of different modes. The symmetry of an ordinary sphere is O(3), and the symmetry of a hypersphere is O(N). Now imagine a hypersphere, vibrating in any number of dimensions. If the wave function of a particle vibrates along the surface of this hypersphere, we find that the particle inherits the symmetry of the sphere. The SU(N) symmetries arising in the standard model can be viewed as a result of oscillating hyperspace! The standard model and Yang-Mills fields were put together piece by piece from hints of experimental data, and trial and error, but can be extracted almost automatically more dimensions are added to the overall picture. Bryce DeWitt was responsible for a rather astonishing discovery, when he realised that if you could separate Maxwells fields from Riemanns metric tensor, if you expressed it in (4+N) dimensional space, you could split off the portion that describes both Yang-Mills and Einstein. This was only the first step to beauty; the next would be to actually show that matter itself could be derived through this method. The next step was supergravity. Second Step Let us again consider the spin of Fermions (half-integral spins) and Bosons (integral spins and force carriers). Quantum theory always dictated that fermions and bosons are completely different classes of particle, and that there was no window for symmetry between the two. Supersymmetry changed all of this. One multiple of supersymmetry consists of equal

Hyperspace

Maxwell Lamb

1/17/2013

numbers of bosons and fermions, and by shuffling them within the same multiplet, the supersymmetric equation remains the same. Taking a lead from this, perhaps it would be possible to place all of the particles in the universe within one multiplet! Supersymmetry is based around a new number system, in which a x b = -b x a. In normal arithmetic, this is, of course, impossible, but in supersymmetric number space, this is the norm. An entire system of super calculus is based around this number system, but is well beyond the reach of this essay. In 1976 Freedman, Ferrara and Nieuwenhuizen penned the theory of supergravity at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In supersymmetry all particles have super partners, known as sparticles. The supergravity theory by the Stony Brook group has two fields; the spin two graviton field, and the spin 3/2 field, the gravitino. As there are not enough particles here to include the standard model, attempts were made to link the theory to more complex particles. The simplest means of including matter is to write the theory down in 11-dimensional space. The Riemann tensor bloats to become the Super Riemann tensor, as the 11D KaluzaKlein theory is produced. Suddenly, quarks, leptons, Yang-Mills, Maxwell and Einstein fields all appear in the same tensor! Einstein was having his revenge. Supergravity, however, as its predecessors, had its flaws. Sparticles were never detected, despite the claims of physicists in this area of research that only in the huge energies of the moment of creation did sparticles ever exist. The other, rather glaring problem was that Supergravity was nonrenormalizable. It proved impossible to quantize, and infinites cropped up at every turn. Also, this highest symmetry that Supergravity could accommodate was O(8), which was far too small to accommodate the symmetry of the Standard Model. Supergravity was dead, but rising like a phoenix from its ashes rose the most powerful theory ever proposed: the tendimensional superstring theory. The end of theoretical physics? A theory has developed, although not thoroughly, that could unite Einsteins theory of gravity with quantum theory for good. This theory is superstring theory, which depends on ten or 26 dimensional strings oscillating in hyperspace, forming a basis for all matter. In 1980 Schwarz and Green incorporated supersymmetry into string theory, thereby creating the superstring theory of everything. String theory first appeared as an explanation for the strong interaction which quantum mechanics was having so much difficulty in addressing, and the resonances that occurred in the strong interaction. Resonances were brief phenomena that were observed in scattering experiments, a ringing of energy that resembled a short-lived particle. 6 But there were too many distinct resonances for them to be fundamental. Besides, they had extremely large spin numbers (in other words, they had angular momentum), which suggested they were of finite size, rather than being point particles. Gabriel Veneziano, a young physicist, stumbled over the Euler Beta function quite by chance, and realized that it fit all the properties required to explain the strong interaction and its resonances.7 Sometimes called the Veneziano model or the dual resonance model, the idea behind it was to use one representation for different physical phenomena. Only two years later, did Yoichiro Nambu discover that the entity behind the model was a vibrating quantum string. Venezianos original model allowed negative problems, thereby violating the property if unitary, and would therefore give incorrect answers for particle interactions. Despite this, Kikkawa, Sakita and Virasoro used perturbation theory to restore unitary. String theory had been born! String theory proposed that the fundamental building blocks of matter were not point particles, but one-dimensional strings. In the case of the string theory, each mode of vibration or quantum note corresponds to a different particle. The modes can only occur in discreet levels, and the strings can also rotate in discreet levels. The strings were estimated to be about 10-15m in length, corresponding to the size of the smallest proton found in scattering experiments. The string had a tension set at fifteen tons. With
6 7

Weinberg, Steven. Dreams of a Final Theory. Pantheon Books: New York, 1992. (p. 214) Kaku. Hyperspace. (p. 161)

Hyperspace

Maxwell Lamb

1/17/2013

these two parameters set, the string vibrations produced particles that corresponded with the masses and spins of known hadrons. There were, however, problems with early string theory, in that it required the existence of a particle with 0 mass and 2 units of spin that could feel the effects of the strong force (strangely enough, the only particle with these properties is the graviton!), and that open-ended strings could close into loops that would lose all identifying numbers. Also, it allowed particles (tachyons) to exceed light speed, which would violate causality in a most horrible way. Finally, string theory was only consistent in 26 dimensions. Because of this, string theory was abandoned until Green and Schwarzs discovery. They started by changing the scale of the string, in order to account for the observed force of gravity. The strings shrank to 10-33m, making them prodigiously small entities. Also, all strings became closed loops, because of previous problems with open ended strings. They also had to force the strings to be manifestly co-variant, i.e. they have to be the same to all observers in all frames of reference, so as not to violate general relativity. All the string equations had to be quantised, producing the wave equation of the string. The strings then had to incorporate in the existing supersymmetric theory, resulting in the all mighty Superstring! In 1984 Schwarz and Green published, setting off a veritable tsunami of research. They proved that there were only 5 possible string theories that were renormalizable. They all required ten dimensions, and were self-consistent. The six dimensions which are not visible to us are said to have compactified, as mentioned previously, and all the symmetries of the subatomic world are the by-products of the hidden symmetry of these miniscule dimensions. There are, however, a myriad of ways that these extra dimensions could have compactified. This means that to locate the true description of our universe, scientists must identify the correct compactification that yields the SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1) symmetry groups seen in the Standard Model. Originally, before the symmetry break of the big bang, the universe was 10-dimensional, and all of the fundamental forces were one. This state, however, was a false vacuum, and was highly unstable. At the same instant that the four dimensional universe we inhabit exploded into existence, the remaining six dimensions imploded, and hid. The reason that current theory states the necessity of ten dimensions is as follows: Strings vibrating in space-time are described by the Ramanujan modular function. The term [1(D-2)/24] appears in the equation, where D is the dimensionality of the space in which the strings oscillate. To obey special relativity and manifest co-variance this term must equal 0, thereby forcing D to be 26. This was held true in the original string theories, however in the more general Ramanujan modular function, which is used in modern superstring theories, the term becomes [1(D-2)/24], making D become 10. Essentially, the mathematics demands that space-time have 10 dimensions for superstring theory to be possible, but no-one actually knows why. The man currently hottest on the trail of The origin of String Theory is Edward Witten, arguably the most intelligent man on earth. As of yet, there are no experiments that will verify the superstring theory; the distances involved are so small and the energies so great that to probe for strings a particle accelerator would have to be built as long as the galaxy itself! And needless to say, there is still a huge amount of work ahead for the theory. In fact, the superstring theory has been called "a piece of twenty-first century physics", and indeed some think that the theory will only continue to develop under the guidance of advancements in the field of mathematics. In all, our universe is a shadow of hyperspace, a mere rattle on the drum of higher dimensionality, and we inhabit the very plainest, ugliest of realms. Hyperspace could hold the key to one of the greatest questions ever asked by man, but it could be yet another false start. Superstring theory could be the theory of everything that has been long sought after, or it could just be yet another step towards it. Nature is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose J. B. S. Haldane

Hyperspace

Maxwell Lamb

1/17/2013

Bibliography

Davies, P.C.W and Brown, Julian (editors). Superstrings: A Theory of Everything? Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1988. Kaku, Michio and Thompson, Jennifer. Beyond Einstein: The Cosmic Quest for the Theory of the Universe. Anchor Books: Toronto, 1995. Kaku, Michio. Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey through Parallel Universes, Time Warps and the 10th Dimension. Oxford University Press: New York, 1994. Lampton, Christopher. New Theories on the Birth of the Universe. Franklin Watts: New York, 1989. Stwertka, Albert and Stwertka, Eve. Physics: From Newton to the Big Bang. Franklin Watts: Toronto, 1986. Weinberg, Steven. Dreams of a Final Theory: The Search for the Fundamental Laws of Nature. Pantheon Books: New York, 1992. [Link] Witten, Edward, "The Holes are Defined by the String", Nature, Vol 383. (September 19. 1995) Hawking, Stephen W. and Penrose, Roger, "The Nature of Space and Time", Scientific American. (July, 1996.)