This might be a bit much for eli5, but I find any googling yields results far too complex for me to understand. Ive heard that there are up to 11 dimensions. If up/down, left/right, and forward/back are the 3 spatial dimensions, what are the others? And what of time being a dimension itself?
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In recent years it’s become popular in scientific circles to refer to our universe as having 3.5 or 3+1 dimensions because although it’s useful to treat time like a dimension in a mathematical construct, time is not actually a dimension. And our universe only has 11 dimensions — none of which represent time — if string theory holds true, but there’s no evidence of that. Our intuition is however bound to 3-dimensions so beyond that it’s difficult to understand without analogies or through pure math. Having said that, it’s worth mentioning that complex systems of information can be sometimes be better navigated or understood when it’s formatted in more than 3 dimensions, so 5- or 6-dimensional (or more) math is still useful even if it doesn’t represent the spatial dimensions of our universe.
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