They say that there is no such thing as a stupid question. In a pedagogically pure sense, that's probably true. But some questions do seem to flirt dangerously close to being really quite ridiculous. One such question might well be, “How many dimensions of space are there?” I mean, it's pretty obvious that there are three: left/right, up/down, and forward/backward. No matter how you express an object's coordinate, be it Cartesian, spherical, cylindrical, or something exotic, it's eminently clear that we live in a three-dimensional universe.
REFERENCES
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Abbott
, Flatland: An Edition with Notes and Commentary
(Cambridge University Press
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).2.
L.
Randall
, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions
(Harper Perennial
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B.
Greene
, Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory
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Lincoln
, Understanding the Universe: From Quarks to the Cosmos
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LHC Safety Assessment Group
, lsag.web.cern.ch/lsag/LSAG-Report.pdf.© 2013 American Association of Physics Teachers.
2013
American Association of Physics Teachers
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