The number of times you have actually contemplated the nature of our three dimensional world can likely be counted with a single hand. These types of existential questions don’t pop into the heads of every-day folks who are busy paying bills and taking care of their family. However, that doesn’t mean that it is a question not pondered over by researchers at the highest level. Thomas Kephart, a researcher at Vanderbilt University, recently took it upon himself to discover just why our existence is rendered out in a three dimensional plane. There is a reason that the laws of physics exists. There is a reason for everything, and Kephart decided to share his theory with the world.
Kephart along with four other colleagues, physicists and all, decided to put together a theory that might just explain everything that we know about our three dimensional world. They did this by taking on the fundamental question next to that of the nature of our existence: why do we exist in a three dimensional plane? Kephart and his team started from the ground up by utilizing mathematical theories and particle physics, working with a concept called ‘flux tubes’ in order to try and make sense of it all. They were of course also working from the concept that string theory, a notorious and complex theory, involved nearly ten dimensions of space.
The whole of their theory revolved around the concept of something seemingly pulled out of ‘Star Trek’: Quarks. Quarks are elementary particles comprised of neutrons and protons. These neutrons and protons are glued together by something aptly called a Gluon Bond. Kephart posits that during the Big Bang that these Quarks were pulled and stretched to the point of breaking. The Flux Tubes therein would split and break apart into a second line of energy. Flux Tubes are just another fancy way of talking about long energy strands that pull together all of these particles. Kephart wrote of Flux Tubes saying, “Such intercommunications lead to the well-known scaling behavior in cosmic string networks, which has been observed in several examples of non interacting strings.”
While much of what Kephart and his team researched may seem new to the casual reader, it really backs up prior science. Their research would go on to re-affirm work done back in 2012 by a team of Japanese scientists that had also been focused on the Big Bang. This new theory could give more ground into the nature of our very existence.
