String! Theory! What is it good for ?!?

1. String theory doesn't 'call all kinds of other concepts dimensions'. It agrees with the definition in wikipedia. String Theory holds that in order to precisely specify a point in the universe you need to give 10 coordinates, however a reasonable approximation (ie macro scales) can be given with only 4 coordinates.edit: If you were playing pacman on a rectangle you'd note that one dimension in pacman's universe is bigger than the other. If the rectangle was so extreme that it was as wide as the pacman sprite, you could describe Pacman's position with just one dimension (4cm to the left of the cherry for example). However, Pacman's eye dot would require the precision of full 2D to describe. And of course you would need to specify a time in each example adding another dimension into the mix.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

Funny you should say that. There are several string theories, most say 10 coordinates, one suggests 26. Each theory is better at explaining one thing about the universe than the others, but they all disagree on points. M-theory overcomes the inconsistencies in all the present string theories by bringing in an eleventh dimension.So it might well actually be eleven.

Time is a line, but not all lines are time. Length is a line too, by this definition. As is height. And depth.I should note actually that a time isn't really a line. A line is just something that has one dimension rather than being a dimension itself. I figured that might end up being confusing. Maybe it would better to think of time as linegiving. The existence of time as a dimension allows timelines to exist.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

Well that's true. But if you wanted to express hopelessness of an actual cogent explanation of a theory, you needn't have come so far. Quantum Physics already gives us that anyway.

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Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.

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I'd be amazed if it hadn't been attempted somewhere. Geek chic being 'in' and all. 11 total, including time. No. You can specify a point in this universe without needing a temperature to do so. If you want to hypothesise a dimension you need to do the maths.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

What do you mean identify? We can't point to something and say 'that is a point in time'. But we can define a point in time quite easily. I can also say '1 hour after event x'. I can be as precise as it seems possible to be.If we moved through space at a constant pace, we could identify a point in space in just the same way. That thing 5 metres ago.A point is a mathematical concept so is somewhat abstract. Like any coordinate system we need to define an arbitrary point and measure from it. I could talk about the thing that is five metres north of my chair, 1 metre west and 1 metre above the floor 10 minutes before I typed the period at the end of this sentence. At that location might be my cat, jumping off something or other. Nope. Nor is there a point where length actually is. Time isn't 'coming and going'. It just is. We move through this universe along the time dimension. It is puzzling why it seems that although we can change the rate at which we travel through time, we can't change the direction. But time isn't doing anything anymore than space is 'coming and going' when we are walking down the road. We don't exclaim 'oh look, there goes some width'. Well - for the most part yes. Just like we are forced to abandon some decimal places when we are talking about length. We could use fifty decimal places when telling someone where the pen is, or we could just say 'it's about a foot into the bed, halfway along its length'.Fortunately, it turns out (as someone has mentioned already) that there are a finite number of decimal places in nature. So we could, define as precisely as possible even the smallest 'event' (a 'point' in spacetime).This isn't a mathematical point in the sense of something that has zero dimensions - but that's not a problem because the maths doesn't actually need these kinds of points to describe the universe - because they don't really exist

This is an incredibally confused set of questions.I will try to answer them as best I can: I have not suggested you can't identify a point in space without knowing the time. We can't define a 'place' in the universe without reference to time, for sure. Of course, it turns out that with time and length and width and height, different observers will have different understandings of the coordinate system. So we need to be clear on the frame of reference.The person observing the time is the same person as who is measuring the length. And if you want to have temperature be a new dimension (or any other name for any dimension), you'll need to show how it is mathematically consistent. The dimensions are 'defined'. No - that's silly. They are just seperate directions. It turns out you can't go very far at all in those directions so their impact on our experience is nill. Well multiple universes are an entirely different concept to extra dimensions. Extra dimensions just represent extra coordinates required to define points in this universe.
Don't get drunk on bad Sci-fi concepts of 'extra dimensions'.We normally think of three points to define a place: Height, length, width. I can define a place in my room by using 3 Cartesian coordinates. If I wanted to describe the total existence of a fly through my room, I'll need an extra dimension - time.String theory suggests that there are other dimensions that are needed to precisely define some point. These extra dimensions are small enough to not matter at large scales, but sudddenly seem to become required at subatomic scales.Imagine looking at a telegraph wire at a distance. It is just a 'line' Your eyes can't discern any other dimension. If you wanted to describe where a bird has landed on that wire, you just need one dimension. You could say 1 metre from the telegraph pole alpha (or 14 metres from telegrap pole beta, or whatever).Now imagine an insect walking along the wire. If we only use one dimension to describe its motion it seems to make no sense. Sometimes there is no insect (because its on the side of the wire that we can't 'see'). Sometimes it is different shapes and sizes (it seems to have variable length) (as it walks around the 'circle' of the wire). All of these 'mindbending' results of quantum insectronics make sense as the behaviour of an insect acting in three spatial dimensions, where two of the dimensions are not normally noticed (one of them is height and the other is depth - both are equally large (that is not very) components of the position of the insect).No extra universes are postulated, just extra dimensions.