Well, let's deal with what we are.
....Are we afraid to touch realms we truly know nothing of? Wow.
I told about the book, I can give you excerpts, sorry you cant wiki it, I know how you kids do it now days(no offense), afraid of the good ol'
library.
...zero and infinity are not the same, more like polar opposites, not quite the same, there is even more than one kind of zero (infinite zero,
absolute zero, void....all are different ideas that are collectively explainded by a symbol that happens to be the symbol that takes up the least
amount in existence, the dot.
But here we go, all excerpts are from "The Biography of zero, a dangerous idea."
"Physicist began to to think that string theory would unify quantum mechanics withh relativity; they believed that it would lead to the theory of
quantum gravity- the Theory of Everythig that explains every phenomenon in the universe. However, string theory had some problems. For one thing it
required 10 dimensions to work."
"For most people, four dimensions are one too many. It is easy to see three of them: left-right, front back, and up-down represent the three
directions we can move in. The fourth arrived when Einstein showed that time was similar to these three dimensions; we are constantly moving through
time like a car that's speeding down a highway. The theory of relativity shows that just as we can change how quickly we rush down a highway, we can
change the rate at which we move through time- the faster we go through space, the quicker we move through time. To understand Einstein's universe,
we have to accept the idea that time is the fourth dimension."
"Four is reasonable, but 10? We can measure four dimensions, but what happened to the other six dimensions? According to string theory they are
rolled up like little balls,too tiny to see. When you pick up a piece of paper, it seems two-dimensional. It has length and breadth, but it doesnt
seem to have any depth at all. Nevertheless, if you take a magnifying glass and gazeat the edge of the piece of paper, you begin to see that it has a
wee bit of depth. You need a tool to help you see it, but that third dimension is there, too tiny to see under normal conditions. The same is true
with those extra six dimensions.
"
"What do these six extra dimensions mean? Nothing, really. They dont measure anything that we a re accustomed to, like length, breadth, width, or
time. They are simply mathematical constructs that make the mathematical operations in string theory work in the manner that they have to Like
imaginary numbers, we cant see them or feel them or smell them, even though they are necessary for doing calculations. Though it is a strange concept
physically, it is the predictive power of the equations that interest scientists, rather than their comprehensibility-and an extra six dimensions do
not constitute an insurmountable problem, mathemativally. Spotting them might.(Ten seems small nowadays. In the past few years physicists realized
that the many competing varieties of string theory are actually, in a sense, the same thing... Scientist now believe that there is a monster that
underlies all of these competing theories: the so-called M-theory, which lives in 11 dimensions, not 10).
"Strings (or their more general vounterparts, branes, a term for multidimensional membranes) are so tiny that no instrument can hope to spot them-at
least until our civ becomes much more advanced...Particle physicists look at the suvatomic realm with particle accelerators...viewing strings would
require a particle accelerator about 6,000,000,000,000,000 miles around. Even traveling at the speed of light, a particle would take 1,000 to make
the circuit...No instrument currently imaginable will give scientists the power to observe strings directly;nobody can think of an experiment that
will give physicists evidence about whether black holes and particles are indeed strings."