My favorite (Rod Serling) episode of The Twilight Zone has got to be “Little Girl Lost”. I even remember the original music melody for that episode. I’m dating myself here, but I saw this story when it originally aired and when I was about the same age as the little girl who gets lost in the story. So where does she get lost, you ask? Well, a trans-dimensional portal opens up under her bed, and then her dog goes thru, and then she does, and then her dad… man, I never even LOOKED under my bed after that. Some kids worry about monsters from another dimension in the closet; I worried about just the mere existance of trans-dimensional holes in there.
Another thing I remember about this episode (seriously) is that when the mom and dad realize they need help, they agree to go get a neighbor they specifically mention is a physicist. Now, back then I had no idea what a physicist was, but if it was somebody that got called in to look at Twilight Zone stuff, then by God I wanted to be one. Thus my career dream to be a physicist was born. (Today, of course, I wish I were a certain FBI agent instead.) And do you know, in all the years since I’ve gotten my degrees, NOT ONCE has a neighbor called me over to pull their daughter out of a trans-dimensional hole in their wall. I probably wouldn’t be of much help, but some University of Chicago physicists sure would. At the recent AAAS Denver meeting they outlined the recent evidence for additional spacetime dimensions besides the four we directly sense and discussed what comes next in the search for them. Even though scientists currently lack direct evidence of extra dimensions, “we have a number of hints from experiments and theoretical ideas that make us think they’re probably out there. That’s why we’re so excited about looking for them,” says Dr. Joseph Lykken. “[The so-called] Standard Model itself may be our biggest hint that there’s this world of extra dimensions,” he added. New experiments at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are producing data that just don’t fit the standard model, notes Maria Spiropulu, an Enrico Fermi Fellow at the University of Chicago. “We have things in the data that leave our mouths hanging.” Be sure to check all the lecture note and slide links in the University of Chicago source link above; this is really interesting stuff.