If you increase the number of space dimensions beyond three, there can be neither stable solar systems nor stable atoms. For instance, going to a four-dimensional space changes Newton’s inverse-square law for the gravitational force to an inverse-cube law, for which there are no stable orbits whatsoever. I got quite excited when I figured this out, and then realized that I’d just broken my personal scooping record: the Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest had discovered this already back in 1917…. Spaces with less than three dimensions don’t allow solar systems because gravity ceases to be
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