Abstract
In this chapter we will study the idea of extra dimensions, as proposed by Kaluza and Klein. The idea of having extra dimensions, besides our usual 3 \(+\) 1, is an old one. Already Theodor Kaluza (in 1921) and Oskar Klein (in 1926) had considered it. The general idea of Klein was to consider that our space is a product of our four dimensional space \(M_4\) and a small compact space \(K_n\), i.e., \(K_D=M_4\times K_n\), with \(D=4+n\). Then if the volume (or rather, the radii) of the extra dimensional space is really small, they would be unobservable. Perhaps the size is comparable to the Planck length \(l_\mathrm{Pl}\), which would be natural in a quantum gravity theory, or maybe otherwise larger, yet still small.
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Năstase, H. (2019). Extra Dimensions and Kaluza–Klein. In: Cosmology and String Theory. Fundamental Theories of Physics, vol 197. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15077-8_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15077-8_12
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