New Dimensions New Hopes

We live in a four dimensional world. But the idea of unification of fundamental interactions lead us to higher dimensional theories. Recently a new theory with extra dimensions has emerged, where only gravity propagates in the extra dimension and all other interactions are confined in only four dimensions. This theory gives us many new hopes. In earlier theories unification of strong, weak and the electromagnetic forces was possible at around (10^{16}) GeV in a grand unified theory (GUT) and it could get unified with gravity at around the Planck scale of (10^{19}) GeV. With this new idea it is possible to bring down all unification scales within the reach of the next generation accelerators, i.e., around $10^4$ GeV.