In the world of ‘normal experience’ we have 3 dimensions, with ‘time’ sometimes discussed as the fourth dimesion.
Yet string theory, to the little I understand it, deals with in excess of 10 dimensions.
I can understand that there may be dimensions that our minds simply aren’t wired to easily comprehend.
But if I return to the the world of ‘normal experience’ I can note that a block of wood, for example, besides having height, width and depth, and lasting for some period of time, also has things like a mass, a temperature, a color, and maybe more paramaters that describe it.
But are these things actual ‘dimesions’ or are they ‘properties’? For that matter what is the difference between a ‘dimension’ and a ‘property’?
It depends on the context. If you were developing a model for describing blocks of wood, and wanted to study, say, the relationship between temperature and strength for the blocks, then you might refer to temperature and strength as dimensions, in your model. Along similar lines, a friend was working on a project where he was trying to recover a 1000x2000 pixel image, and set it up as a two million-dimensional optimization problem, with the value of each pixel being a dimension.
But when we say that the string model has 10 dimensions in it, we really do mean “dimensions” in the familiar sense of the word, directly comparable to length, width, or height. Objects can move in those extra directions, and we can describe an object’s position in those directions using familiar units like meters.
As chronus said string theory is spacial demensions. Go to wikipedia and look up fourth demension and fifth demension.
The only way to comprehend a fourth demention would be something along the lines of a cube shape on paper.
What I mean is a cube has three demensions but you can’t have three demensions, yet we can draw a cube on a piece of paper so that the mind can almost see it as three demensions, if you stare at it right
In the Wikiepdia article there are rough estimates of a fourth demension