ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Burkhard Heim

Burkhard Heim was a really smart guy who came up with some really cool ideas about how the universe works.

He thought that everything in the universe is made up of tiny, tiny particles called subatomic particles, kind of like how everything is made of little building blocks. But he thought that these subatomic particles were actually made up of even tinier things called "elementsary particles".

And here's the coolest part: Heim came up with a theory that said these elementsary particles actually exist in ten different dimensions instead of just the three dimensions (length, width, and height) that we're used to.

This might be kind of hard to understand, but think of it like this: Imagine you were a little ant living on a piece of paper. From your point of view, that paper only has two dimensions (length and width). But if you were somehow able to look at the paper from above, you would realize that there's actually a third dimension (height) as well.

Heim thought that the same thing was true for our world, and that there were seven extra dimensions that we just couldn't see or experience.

He also had some really interesting ideas about how gravity works. You know how everything on Earth gets pulled down by gravity? Heim thought that this was caused by "gravitons", which are little particles that carry the force of gravity between objects. But he thought that the strength of gravity could also be influenced by the extra dimensions that he believed in.

So basically, Burkhard Heim was an incredibly smart person who had some really cool ideas about how the universe works. While some of these ideas might be hard for grown-ups to understand, they're still really interesting to think about!