A Higher Dimensional Universe?
			
		
		
			Applet Credit & Copyright:  Mark Newbold
		
		
			Does our universe have 
higher but unusual 
spatial dimensions?
This idea has been gaining popularity to help explain why vastly separated parts of our universe appear so similar, 
and why the geometry of our universe does not seem to result naturally from the 
amounts of matter it seems to contain.  
In a 
new incarnation of an old 
extra-dimensional idea, some astrophysicists 
hypothesize that we live in a universe dubbed Ekpyrotic, where our four dimensions 
(three spatial plus one time) resulted 
from the fiery collision of two four-dimensional spaces 
(branes) in a 
five-dimensional universe.  
This big-bang hypothesis is meant to compete with another big-bang hypothesis that our universe underwent a 
superluminal inflation event in the distant past, and does make distinct testable predictions.  
Above, a dynamic three-dimensional drawing (two spatial plus one time) of a four-dimensional depiction of a five-dimensional cube (a hypercube with four spatial dimensions is also known as a 
tesseract) is shown.  
Donning red-blue glasses will give the best 
multi-dimensional perspective.