I’m not so sure anyone will turn up here who is of the calibre to facilitate an “Ask the String Theorist”-type thread, and so we might largely have to make do with the understanding gleaned by those of us who’ve dabbled here and there.
Admittedly, I am limited only to popular books, articles and maybe the odd paper on the subject, but it seems to me that there is a blatantly obvious question which needs answering:
Why do we only have three spatial dimensions?
Three is a rather arbitrary number in physics (one lecturer told me that if the answer isn’t zero, infinity or one, and can;t be normalised to one, you’ve probably gone wrong somewhere).Why not two, or four? Granted, a two dimensional universe wouldn’t have strong enough gravity to allow for “interesting” structure like galaxies, stars and ultimately us, and a 4-D universe’s gravity would be too strong: Three dimensions appears to be the little bear’s bed and porridge which the Goldilocks of intelligent life finds just right. But that is taking the anthropic principle a bit far, surely?
No, say some. Indeed, they ask, would it not make non-arbitrary sense if we merely lived in a three dimensional region of the universe? Might evidence of the 2-D or 4-D region be apparent at high enough energies in the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva next year, or its successor, or its great-great-grandchild in centuries or millennia?
Perhaps, perhaps not. String theory was, itself, far too arbitrary to be the Theory of Everything: it gave five different types of string with no reason to favour one over another except by inelegantly forcing our universe’s variables into it with a veritable tyre iron. Its successor, M theory, attempts to remove its arbitrariness by explaining the 3-Dness of the universe we inhabit. (As this excellent article implies, maybe those ‘extra’ dimensions are unnecessary, or so Witten suspects). However, it is not yet strictly a theory, but a model. Models only become theories if they predict things, and we are at too early a stage for that. (Sadly, it might never if the required engineering slips out of reach of the physics - what if it needed a collider bigger than Earth?)
As for the dimension called ‘time’, this is just a measure of the change in a spatial configuration of the universe: if the universe does not change in any way (eg. expanding or contracting), no time can be said to have “passed”: Time is just an axis on which configurational ‘events’ exist. The Big Bang, Big Crunch (or whatever) and 26th January 2005 are all different places in the 3-D region of the universe. There is no such thing as ‘now’.