A friend recently forwarded this article about scientists being able to get a glimpse of four spatial dimensions with quantum mechanical experiments. It got me thinking.
Most of us are limited in what we can understand by the limitations of what we can easily perceive. People like Albert Einstein were geniuses because they could perceive things that others could not, for example what happens to time when speeds of objects approach the speed of light. Relativity is real even though almost all of us have had no experience of it under our current circumstances.
Perceiving more than three dimensions seems to be an impossible task, but concepts like this may hold the key to us getting a better understanding of the Universe that we inhabit. String Theory, a theory that tries to unify all the known forces that constitute our Universe, can begin to make sense mathematically if you speculate on the existence of 10 or 11 dimensions in space, a concept that some of us would dismiss as sheer nonsense. (String Theory has become less popular in recent times, although it seems that there is still considerable research going on in this field in the world of Physics.)
Anyway, even though we may not be able to imagine such things, it is quite possible that the Universe consists of more than three dimensions. I found this really cool video that illustrates the concept of four dimensions using a Virtual Reality application.
Splattered Brains 