5th Dimensional Field Equations

Posted on November 1, 2004 by PlatoHagel

http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/seahras/images/Kaluza.jpeg

In 1919, Kaluza sent Albert Einstein a preprint — later published in 1921 — that considered the extension of general relativity to five dimensions. He assumed that the 5-dimensional field equations were simply the higher-dimensional version of the vacuum Einstein equation, and that all the metric components were independent of the fifth coordinate. The later assumption came to be known as the cylinder condition. This resulted in something remarkable: the fifteen higher-dimension field equations naturally broke into a set of ten formulae governing a tensor field representing gravity, four describing a vector field representing electromagnetism, and one wave equation for a scalar field. Furthermore, if the scalar field was constant, the vector field equations were just Maxwell’s equations in vacuo, and the tensor field equations were the 4-dimensional Einstein field equations sourced by an EM field. In one fell swoop, Kaluza had written down a single covariant field theory in five dimensions that yielded the four dimensional theories of general relativity and electromagnetism. Naturally, Einstein was very interested in this preprint .

Dialogos of Eide
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2 Responses to 5th Dimensional Field Equations

  1. Unknown's avatar Anonymous says:
    November 2, 2004 at 5:30 pm

    The Fifth Element and it’s ArchetectureIn Kaku’s preface of Hyperspace, page ix, we find a innocent enough statement that helps us orientate a view that previous to all undertanding, is counched in the work of Kaluza.In para 3, he writes,Similarily, the laws of gravity and light seem totally dissimilar. They obey different physical assumptions and different mathematics. Attempts to splice these two forces have always failed. However, if we add one more dimension, a fifth dimension, to the previous four dimensions of space and time, then equations governing light and grvaity appear to merge together like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Light, in fact, can be explained inthe fifth dimension. In this way, we see the laws of light and gravity become simpler in five dimensions.Hope it helps the understanding of what the fifth element means, and all the time we are still speaking about the energy here, not as a understanding of the aether, but of what that missing mass means.

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  2. Unknown's avatar Anonymous says:
    November 2, 2004 at 5:34 pm

    Hyperspace, by Michio Kaku Page 84 and 85,”To see higher dimensions simplify the laws of nature, we recall that any object has length, width and depth. Since we have the freedom to rotate an object by 90 degrees, we can turn its length into width, and its width into depth. By a simple rotation, we can interchange any of the three spatial dimensions. Now if time is the fourth dimension then it is possible to make “rotations” that convert space into time, and vice versa. These four-dimensional “rotations” are precisely the distortions of space and time demanded by special relativity. In other words, space and time have mixed in a essential way, governed by relativity. The meaning of time as being the fourth dimension is that time and space can rotate into each other in a mathematical precise way. From now on, they must be treated as two aspects of the same quantity: space-time. Thus adding a higher dimension helped to unify the laws of nature.”

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