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importance, the circular dimension is not merely a circular bump within the familiar extended dimensions as the illustration might
lead you to believe. Rather, the circular dimension is a new dimension, one that exists at every point in the familiar extended
dimensions just as each of the up-down, left-right, and back-forth dimensions exists at every point as well. It is a new and
independent direction in which an ant, if it were small enough, could move. To specify the spatial location of such a microscopic
ant, we would need to say where it is in the three familiar extended dimensions (represented by the grid) and also where it is in the
circular dimension. We would need four pieces of spatial information; if we add in time, we get a total of five pieces of spacetime
information—one more than we normally would expect.

And so, rather surprisingly, we see that although we are

aware of only three extended spatial dimensions,
Kaluza's and Klein's reasoning shows that this does not
preclude the existence of additional curled-up
dimensions, at least if they are very small. The universe
may very well have more dimensions than meet the eye.

How small is "small?" Cutting-edge equipment can

detect structures as small as a billionth of a billionth of a
meter. So long as an extra dimension is curled up to a
size less than this tiny distance, it is too small for us to
detect. In 1926 Klein combined Kaluza's initial
suggestion with some ideas from the emerging field of
quantum mechanics. His calculations indicated that the Figure 8.4 The grid lines represent the extended dimensions of
additional circular dimension might be as small as the common experience, whereas the circles are a new, tiny, curled-up
Planck length, far shorter than experimental dimension. Like the circular loops of thread making up the pile of a
accessibility. Since then, physicists have called the carpet, the circles exist at every point in the familiar extended
possibility of extra tiny space dimensions Kaluza-Klein dimensions—but for visual clarity we draw them as spread out on
theory.58 intersecting grid lines.

Comings and Goings on a Garden Hose

The tangible example of the garden hose and the illustration in Figure 8.3 are meant to give you some sense of how it is possible
that our universe has extra spatial dimensions. But even for researchers in the field, it is quite difficult to visualize a universe with
more than three spatial dimensions. For this reason, physicists often hone their intuition about these extra dimensions by
contemplating what life would be like if we lived in an imaginary lower- dimensional universe—following the lead of Edwin
Abbott's enchanting 1884 classic popularization Flatland59—in which we slowly realize that the universe has more dimensions than
those of which we are directly aware. Let's try this by imagining a two-dimensional universe shaped like our garden hose. Doing so
requires that you relinquish an "outsider's" perspective that views the garden hose as an object in our universe. Rather, you must
leave the world as we know it and enter a new Garden-hose universe in which the surface of a very long garden hose (you can
think of it as being infinitely long) is all there is as far as spatial extent. Imagine that you are a tiny ant living your life on its
surface.

Let's start by making things even a little more extreme. Imagine that the length of the circular dimension of the Garden-hose
universe is very short—so short that neither you nor any of your fellow Hose-dwellers are even aware of its existence. Instead, you
and everyone else living in the Hose universe take one basic fact of life to be so evident as to be beyond questioning: the universe
has one spatial dimension. (If the Garden-hose universe had produced its own ant-Einstein, Hose-dwellers would say that the
universe has one spatial and one time dimension.) In fact, this feature is so self-evident that Hose-dwellers have named their home
Lineland, directly emphasizing its having one spatial dimension.

Life in Lineland is very different from life as we know it. For example, the body with which you are familiar cannot fit in Lineland.
No matter how much effort you may put into body reshaping, one thing you can't get around is that you definitely have length,
width, and breadth—spatial extent in three dimensions. In Lineland there is no room for such an extravagant design. Remember,

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Surprisingly, the physicists Savas Dimopoulos, Nima Arkani-Hamed, and Gia Dvali, building on earlier insights of Ignatios Antomadis and Joseph Lykken, have pointed out that even if
an extra curled-up dimension were as large as a millimeter in size, it is possible that it would not yet have been detected experimentally. The reason is that particle accelerators probe the
microworld by utilizing the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces. The gravitational force, being incredibly feeble at technologically accessible energies, is generally ignored. But
Dimopoulos and his collaborators note that if the extra curled-up dimension has an impact predominantly on the gravitational force (something, it turns out, that is quite plausible in
string theory), all extant experiments could well have overlooked it. New, highly sensitive gravitational experiments will look for such "large" curled-up dimensions in the near future. A
positive result would be one of the greatest discoveries of all time.
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Edwin Abbott, Flatland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).