Physicists Close to Proving New Dimensions, Says Researcher at AAAS Annual Meeting

Our understanding of reality—that is, a world where events happen over time within a three-dimensional space—may be turned on its head by the year 2005, scientist Maria Spiropulu said today during the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting.

"The way we think about things is about to change completely," said Spiropulu. "This is truly a revolution in the way we understand our world."

Spiropulu, a 32-year-old scientist with the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, is hot on the trail of extra dimensions. She's using new methods to prove, experimentally, whether our reality is more complicated than we previously assumed.

"We are very close" to a new reality, she said. "Right now, we imagine space and time as a static question, and we solve equations as a function of space and time. But, what we're learning is that, at the very large scale or the very small scale, space and time are dynamic. What is happening at those scales, we cannot explain. So we have to wonder, do these scales hold some extra dimensions?"

—Ginger Pinholster

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