I hate to start what essentially amounts to a pseudoscience thread, but I've got more of a question than a theory, really.

1. I'm not well-versed in quantum physics, but so far as I know, there's not a known explanation for why like charges repel and opposite charges attract; they just do, right?

2. Electric and magnetic fields can be created by the motion of charged objects, e.g. the current through a circular loop of wire creates a magnetic field that, in the plane of the circle, is orthogonal to the circle.

My question is this: is it possible that charge attraction/repulsion can be explained by extra-dimensional spin? In other words, is it possible that protons and electrons are spinning in a fourth (or fifth, if you consider time) dimension, thus creating fields that, in our 3-D slice of the world, appear symmetrically orthogonal to the particle in question? If not, why?

Yeah, but then you can also say that there are very small gnomes that lasso opposite charges together and that push like charges with the help of small poles. It's as provable and, more importantly, as UNprovable.

Originally posted by Redrover
Yeah, but then you can also say that there are very small gnomes that lasso opposite charges together and that push like charges with the help of small poles. It's as provable and, more importantly, as UNprovable.
Heh, maybe so -- I was thinking about how one might observe something like this, though.

If you have two balls in space with opposing spins that are traveling towards each other such that their trajectories are coplanar and the axes of their spins lie on that same plane, and the two balls collide, friction will send them both out of the original plane.

Similarly, if protons and electrons are spinning properly, and if we could get them to collide just right, and if there would be friction between the two particles, then we might be able to send them traveling into the extra dimension. Thus, we might observe an apparent violation of the law of conservation of mass, if only because we were exclusively measuring the mass that appeared in our own 3D slice.

The last paragraph has three huge "if"s in it, though, so it may be unobservable even if it is true.