Higher-Dimensional Spacetime Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics [1]

Penrose (2004: 880-1, 882):

How is it that physicists could take seriously the possibility that the dimensionality of spacetime might be other than the four that we directly experience (one time and three space)? As mathematical exercises, such higher-dimensional things seem fine, but this is supposed to be a physical theory where ‘spacetime’ really means the combination of actual space with time. Indeed, as we shall be seeing, string theory (as it is currently understood) requires that spacetime must indeed have more than four dimensions. In the early theory the dimension number was taken to be 26, but later innovations (which involved the ideas of supersymmetry) led to this spacetime dimensionality being reduced to 10. … 

Whatever the status of these newer ideas, this suggestion of a higher-dimensionality for spacetime has, at this stage in our deliberations, a status no more compelling than that of a ‘cute idea’ — which the original Kaluza–Klein suggestion certainly was. Whatever may be the mathematical attractiveness of this idea, we have to address the question of whether there are good physical reasons for believing in such a scheme.

 

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, physical theories that propose higher-dimensional spacetime, such as the variants of String Theory, mistake geodesic trajectories in space over time for the spatiotemporal dimensions in which these are located.