It's axiomatic that the individual human intellect can't wrap itself around the real shape of the universe, but it's interesting to see how science, since we decoupled it from religion more or less five centuries ago, keeps presenting us with stranger and stranger versions of what might really be going on. In the beginning, Copernicus and Galileo unseated our planet as the center of the cosmos - such a counterintuitive development, as any human can easily see that the sun goes around the earth, and that the fixed stars wheel around us pinned to the inside of a giant sphere. It seems so evident that the Earth is the center of the universe, doesn't it?
It also seems evident that natural space is made of four dimensions: three of space and one of time. New work, however, is suggesting that this wasn't always the case. Way back at the beginning of time, during the first few moments of the Big Bang, it now appears that the universe may have possessed only two dimensions: one of space and one of time. What's more, the Large Hadron Collider (in between creating black holes with which to destroy the solar system) may be able to furnish us with evidence to support this hypothesis - which if true, suggests something even stranger: Our universe, as it ages, may be dimensionally "promoted" again, so that the same natural space we now move through will be made up of five dimensions, not four.
What seems evident right now is that I need another cup of tea, before anything even weirder occurs. I'm not sure I know how to boil water in the fifth dimension.
Read more about it here: ONCE UPON A TIME, THE UNIVERSE WAS REALLY WEIRD via Discovery News
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