[johnnujler]

Ah! That makes sense. I realise that talking about complex concepts in terms of analogy can be misleading, but is it like the fabric is elastic and long enough and is only getting stretched? Is there a way to reconcile this with the (3 dimensional) inside and outside aspect of our experiences.

[brodie]

I think it’s more like the balloon analogy or baking bread analogy is required because there’s no good way to explain what we observe without either analogies or math or unintuitive descriptions.

That doesn’t mean there can’t be a higher spatial dimension that our observable universe is part of; we just haven’t observed it or can’t observe it.

I guess we’re sort of like ants crawling on the surface of an opaque, seemingly-indestructible balloon. We’re pretty clever ants, but we probably aren’t gonna peer inside the balloon anytime soon.

[dotancohen]

  > That doesn’t mean there can’t be a higher spatial dimension
  > that our observable universe is part of; we just haven’t
  > observed it or can’t observe it.

Maybe we can not observe higher spatial dimensions, but we can observe a force that seems to propagate in higher spatial dimensions, thus there seems to be evidence of those dimensions.

Light intensity, gravity, and electromagnetism decay at 1/r^2, which is the same rate at which the area of the surface of an expanding 3D bubble grows. So each unit of light / gravity / electromagnetism could be seen as taking up a specific "patch" of expanding area.

However, the strong nuclear force decays much faster than 1/r^2. In fact, at some distance it goes negative and then decays back to zero. This could be (wild speculation) a force that propagates in many more dimensions. And it's not the only force that does this, the weak nuclear force also decays much more rapidly than 1/r^2 with distance.

I'm not a physicist and I would love nothing more than to hear what holes could be punched into this hypothesis.

[alok-g]

>> I would love nothing more than to hear what holes could be punched into this hypothesis.

I'm not a physicist either but believe that this is a well-known idea.

[brodie]

You may not be a physicist but you’d make a convincing string theorist!

I say that partly pejoratively, with a Sabine Hossenfelder sort of jocular but judgmental tone.

I’m personally excited to see how astrophysicists will take dark matter out of its darkness and cast it into intuitive lights, like some have with the rising dough analogy for cosmic expansion.