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NanoBlog

What p-brane all about?

morreale Saturday 06 of March, 2010
I was captivated by Brian Greene's book The Elegant Universe which describes the universe in terms of string theory which attempts to unify quantum mechanics with general relativity.

String Theory describes spacetime as having 11 dimensions with 10 for space and 1 for time (at the time the book describes spacetime with 10 dimensions so an extra dimension has appeared). Thus, objects in spacetime can have many dimensions. p-brane describes the dimensionality of the object as follows:
  • 0-brane: infinitely small point particle (0 dimensional)
  • 1-brane: an object with only length like a 1D line
  • 2-brane: membrane
  • 3-brane: a blob, 3D object
and so on until you get to a 10-brane what ever that might be. My pea brain overloaded with trying to imagine every point is space having 6 or 7 curled up dimensions so that we can only see 3 spacial dimension. These curled up dimensions are known as Calabi-Yau space and a projection of that space can be seen in the photo below thanks to user Lunch on Wikipedia.

Calabi Yau