So why is it when I read a book on five dimensional physics…

…all I hear is the sound of the TARDIS?

Most odd…
-the Centaur

P.S. Five dimensional physics is not a joke: the short story is that Kaluza and Klein outlined how one could rewrite Einstein’s gravity equations in five dimensions and shake them real hard to make Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism fall out, and all that modern nonsense with strings is just an attempt to make all the other interesting particles we’ve found fall out of the equations too. For those of you (like me) who are only acquainted with length, height, depth, and age, and are thus puzzled where the extra dimensions go, ask yourself this: you can model a garden hose as a curved sheet with two dimensions, but how significant really is its circumference to a squirrel too large to do anything but run along its length?