6-D

The movies will never catch up with Professor Abraham Pais of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. They have achieved three dimensions after a fashion, but Pais uses twice as many. Last week he told a convention of physicists in Kyoto, Japan that thinking in six dimensions may be necessary before man can understand the inner workings of matter. Said Pais:

"The shortest possible description of the theory is to call it an attempt to explain the large number of particles in the nucleus, not as different forms in themselves, but as different states of one form.

"If it is correct, it would bring a great simplicity to our theories of the nucleus, and this is one reason it has appealed to many of the physicists. For hundreds of years we have learned that the great truths of nature are usually explained in classically simple ways."

Professor Pais' idea of simplicity is not the usual one. "It seems necessary," he continued, "to extend the usual space-time description and, in a very abstract sense, one may say that a higher dimensional frame of description is necessary. In my theory, this means six dimensions."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.