![]() ![]() And if the fourth dimension grew large enough, the gravitational forces on Earth would drop tremendously, causing our planet to grow larger, particularly along the equator. Comets, when they came close to the Sun, would evaporate more quickly and develop more spectacular tails. Kevin Gill / flickrĪsteroids, at first - the ones loosely held together that spun rapidly - would come apart, as their gravity would be insufficient to hold those rocks and grains onto their surfaces. Based on a 3-D model of asteroid Itokawa by Doug Ellison, and with data from NASA-JPL. In other words, if the electromagnetic force changed because that force made its way into a large, fourth spatial dimension that reached the scale of Ångströms or so, human beings would immediately have their bodies shut down and die.Ī computer-generated rendering of a rubble-pile asteroid and a debris field of surrounding rubble. Enzymes would denature proteins would change shape ligand-gated neurons wouldn’t fit together anymore DNA wouldn’t encode the molecules it was designed to encode. If you change that force, you change the configurations of everything. You don’t think about it, but at a molecular level, the only thing holding you together is the relatively weak bonds between electrons and nuclei. If there was a change in how strong that interaction was. Imagine what would happen if all-of-a-sudden, the forces binding electrons to nuclei became weaker. These fundamental configurations govern how atoms behave and exert inter-atomic forces. The atomic orbitals in their ground state (top left), along with the next-lowest energy states as. But electromagnetism would be very problematic. For nuclei, the change might not be so bad: the sizes of nuclei would be slightly bigger, and some nuclei might change in their stability, either becoming radioactive or by having radioactive ones becoming stable. In general, those forces have more “space” to spread out into, meaning they get weaker with distance faster if there are more dimensions. If you allowed those forces to “bleed” into another spatial dimension, which they could do once that dimension reached a large enough size, the force laws governing them would change. Nuclei and the atoms formed from them are the building blocks of all the matter that makes our world up, and they’re on extremely small scales: Ångströms for atoms (10^-10 meters), femtometers (10^-15 meters) for nuclei. Consider an atom, where electrons orbit a charged nucleus, or the inside of an atom at the atomic nucleus itself. Slight changes can have huge consequences, and a fourth dimension would lead to no small change. biological systems, not to mention very sensitive physical systems. The strength of forces, like the electromagnetic force, is incredibly important for chemical and. ![]()
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