So the extra dimensions have to be teensy-tiny and curled up on themselves at scales so small that they evade normal efforts to spot them. These spatial dimensions aren't visible to the naked eye, of course otherwise, we would've noticed that sort of thing. It's proven to be an especially thorny problem to solve, due to a variety of factors, not the least of which is that, for string theory to work (in other words, for the mathematics to even have a hope of working out), our universe must have more than the usual three dimensions of space and one of time there have to be extra spatial dimensions. Now, we need to turn to string theory, which is our attempt (and has been our main attempt for 50-odd years now) to unify all of the forces of nature, especially gravity, in a single theoretical framework.
At everyday low energies, this symmetry disappears, and to account for that, and out pops a new particle - the axion.
However, this new symmetry only appears at extremely high energies. One solution to this puzzle is to introduce another symmetry in the universe that "corrects" for this misbehavior. But this symmetry doesn't seem to fit naturally into the theory of the strong nuclear force. There's one kind of symmetry, called the CP symmetry, that says that matter and antimatter should behave the same when their coordinates are reversed. Physicists love symmetries - when certain patterns appear in mathematics. The axion, named by physicist (and, later, Nobel laureate) Frank Wilczek in 1978, gets its name because it's hypothesized to exist from a certain kind of symmetry-breaking.
First, we need to get to know the axion a little better.
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