Why invoke a fifth dimension?
Theories of extra dimensions have been considered many times over the ages, and have been discarded as useless, or at best, “mathematically intriguing and clever, but useless”. These ideas were quite often dismissed because they couldn’t be experimentally measured. Riemann was the first to formalise a geometry involving more than three spatial dimensions. Sadly, because Euclid’s book, Elements was so widely loved, ideas involving any further dimensions were considered crackpot. It seems now that such reasoning as Ptolmey’s ‘proof’ that four spatial dimensions was impossible is flawed. He proposed that we draw a line on a piece of paper, then a perpendicular line. Further, he said, it is possible to construct a line perpendicular even to that. However, any further perpendicular lines from the same origin are impossible. This merely shows that it is impossible to visualise such a line. Upon noticing that when electric currents passed down wires in a magnetic field cause the wire to move,
