This is exacly right, and it's a shame that article pushes the "woo, magic" perspective, instead of using the opportunity to highlight the little-known fact (among the lay public and students) of theoretical phyisics:
it's a about model-building, "dimensions" aren't real except in the sense that a certain mathematical model (with N dimensions) is (a) consistent with experiment, and (b) has a lot of symmetry and simplicity relative to its explanatory/predictive power.
Re:Planets in the Fourth Dimension
by Florin_Andrei on Wednesday March 18, 2015 @02:27PM
(#9227601)
TBH, when you stumble upon a really useful parameter space, it does seem like magic.
Also, these days I'm reading Max Tegmark's "Our Mathematical Universe" and, being immersed in that argumentation, the whole "real vs unreal" dichotomy seems a bit transparent. Anyway, having formerly played a bit with computational physics, I'm primarily after what's useful.
General semantics helped me be aware of how easy it is to confuse the map for the territory, as well as adopt models based on their usefulness. As a great philosopher once said, reality is what you can get away with.
We tend to operate in the usual 6-dimensional parameter space for everything we do (3 position vectors, 3 speed vectors), but there are equivalent parameter spaces that do the job just as well. In some cases, the alternate spaces are more useful - polar coordinates are the most common example.
The paper quoted in the article found a parameter space where very interesting transformations and symmetries take place.