Calabi-Yau

You’re probably wondering what this tangled mess of tubes and folds is. Go ahead, fix your eyes at any one place in the thing and try to follow its path, tracing each twist and turn in one continuous motion. Use your finger or a pencil, if that makes it easier, but who are we kidding- it’s impossible, or at least very difficult and tedious, and probably requires more time than you or I have.

But don’t feel bad! I mean, seriously, what else would you expect, you, a 3-dimensional being, trying to trace an 10-dimensional shape rendered- which is to say squashed down and flattened and corrupted- in the 2-dimensional space of a computer or phone screen?

The Calabi-Yau Manifold that appears before you is a visual representation of the 10 dimensions of string theory. And while the existence of 10 dimensions is impossible to conceptualize, physicists can incorporate 10 dimensions in mathematics. A theory that requires 10 dimensions may not seem like a satisfying theory of everything; how are we to accept a framework that has no practical application in our everyday, 3-dimensional world?

Remember, string theory is just that: a theory. It has not been proven. It cannot be proven. And while the mathematical results are precise, string theory remains a relatively recent development. It wasn't until the 1970s that the idea of strings as the fundamental constituents of the universe was proposed, which in physics time, may as well have been yesterday, especially given the dimensional challenges of the theory. String theory is exciting in its potential to bridge the gap between quantum mechanics and general relativity to better explain our world.