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I remember many years ago in the mid-90s — during the zenith of paranoia in the alien abduction phenomenon — the whole affair being offhandedly dismissed by Car Sagan, I believe it was. Sagan (I think) mentioned that every description of aliens who were visiting Earth and carting off country folk for probing and the like all shared a suspicious similarity to humans. Despite the differences — like communicating telepathically — the alien abductors bore a real resemblance to people in that they had a roundish head atop a neck, a face that featured a mouth and eyes, used, ostensibly, to engage in sensing the world. They walked on two legs and were capable of and driven by malicious  intent or callous indifference to the suffering of their captives. They were pretty much a rough sketch of how humanity saw itself.

Sagan undermined it all by pointing out what a short-sighted idea this all was. Why wouldn’t intelligent alien life exist in some form that is totally incomprehensible to us? What if they were intelligent crystals or were nano-scale in size? What if they existed in more than just the three dimensions we humans exist in and we couldn’t see most of them some of the time?

That last one always stuck with me and so I was reminded of it when I read about a new paper from a guy at the University of Buffalo. In it, the physicist floats the idea that the dimensions that make up the universe grew along with its expansion. In the earliest universe just after the big bang, there was only a single, linear dimension. As time went by, the universe expanded and another dimension was cracked open, creating a plane. Eventually, the expansion continued and the third dimension that lends depth to things appeared. It’s here where we humans find ourselves, though the physicist postulates that enough time has passed that perhaps a fourth dimension has by now opened up along the leading edge of the universe’s expansion.

What’s so neat about this idea is that it manages to explain why physicists can’t come up with a theory of everything, one that marries the three fundamental forces — electromagnetism, weak nuclear force and strong nuclear force — with the one  that no one can get to fit: gravity. The Buffalo notion explains this, because gravity can only exist in at least three dimensions, so if there are parts of the universe that exist in only one or two dimensions, gravity wouldn’t figure there.

Pretty neat.