Journey to the 1Oth Dimension!

The big problem: It’s not that modern physics doesn’t work, or isn’t true or accurate. In just about every case anyone could conceive, the causal and statistical explanations provided by physics are bulletproof. Physics predicts that time should occasionally slow down? We do the experiment and find that, lo, time does slow down, and by just the right amount. Physics tells us that distant particles can instantaneously affect one another? Nearly fifty years later, we develop technology sufficiently advanced to take a look, and yes, particles behave in just that way. Modern physics is capable of revealing the intricate details of worlds whose existence we never would have suspected had not physics offered up strategies for observing and understanding them. Take, for example, the vacuum of deep space. According to modern particle physics, it is not empty at all. It swirls with innumerable subatomic particles constantly popping into and out of existence, eternally borrowing their short life span from the uncertainty embedded in quantum mechanics. And recent experiments have shown this new and unexpected reality to exist. Modern physics is the most powerful tool for understanding the universe ever conceived.


And yet it is wrong.


Well, that may be overstating it a bit. Theoretical physics
is wrong in a few seemingly minor, carefully selected cases. Something called the magnetic moment of the muon
(don’t ask) is off by 0.00005 percent. And the predicted and
experimental values of another thing, called sin2qW (pronounced “sine squared theta W,” though again, not really worth the effort), differ by 1 percent.


Oh, and there is another anomaly, one that is not so little. In fact, in terms of total energy, this thing, whatever it is, is the largest thing in the universe, about 14 times more energetic than the combined energies of all the stars and galaxies and black holes and protons and electrons and everything else we’ve ever found or thought was out there. In time it could grow strong enough to rip apart all the basic constituents of matter in the universe. We have no idea what it is.


It’s not that people haven’t taken stabs at determining what this stuff—most popularly called dark energy, as it is energetic and mysterious—could be. Yet these stabs are ludicrously wrong. How wrong?

Let T be the theoretical magnitude of dark energy.

Let E be the experimental value of dark energy.

If the theorists were right, then T should = E.

Yet T ≠ E.

T = E x 10¹²⁰.*

There is really no good metaphor to help us grasp this degree of absolute wrongness. One may search far and wide for even semicommon objects and experiences that differ by 120 orders of magnitude. One will fail. It is greater than the difference between the volume of a drop of water and the volume of all Earth’s oceans, innumerable billions of times over. It is greater than the difference between the size of a proton and the size of the observable universe. It’s so wrong that it makes one think there must be a stupid error in the calculation somewhere—someone forgot to carry a 1 and now we’re left with this ridiculous result. But no, many have checked the math (though I haven’t personally done so), and the embarrassing difference between what our theories predict and how the universe actually behaves obstinately remains.


(Actually, physicists prefer to call their theories “incomplete,” rather than “wrong,” as they are pretty sure that these theories can adequately describe and explain 99.999999 percent of everything in the universe. There’s just that teensy little 0.000001 percent that can’t be explained. Yet when smart people are trying to fix this “missing” 0.000001 percent by inventing completely new structures of space and time, telling us that we live in a universe with six or four or two extra dimensions that are out there but that we just can’t see, that the universe may not be made out of the stuff that we thought it was made of but out of little strings instead, that there’s some
mystical Borgian antigravitational force out there that’s more powerful than everything in the entire known universe 14 times over, then it seems to me, dear reader, that these problems are more pernicious than anyone is letting on. That is not tacking an extra bedroom onto an otherwise sound house. That is
razing the foundation and starting all over again, possibly in another state where the tax laws are better.)


But if current physical theories don’t cut it, and string theory still sounds a bit insane, perhaps we should try something completely different.