Ok so I'm having a debate with a friend and what we understand as dimensions can be explain in simple...

first dimension being a point
second being a line
third being a branch
and forth being a fold

What I'm having trouble grasping is why we believe that there is 10.
When the fourth dimension is time and is considered a temporal dimensions
why wouldn't the remaining dimensions not be considered temporal as well.

I Understand About Half Of What Was Said

fourth doesn't necessarily have to be time.
We can call time - your temporal dimension - dimension n

Where the 4th would be like moving a 3d object in a direction in which none of its point intersect the paths laid behind them.
Although this is for the most part incomprehensible.

I guess the cool way of looking at it is hypercubes.

As far as 10th dimension I don't know how people limit it. =\

First Dimension is a point like a dot on a paper.

Second is a line being point a 2 point B and exceeding outwards to infinity.
length and width

Third is Like a dot off from the Line that connects creating branch.
length and width and height

Fourth being time, now we believe time only as going forward and we can see this effect when traveling close to the speed of light (IE LHC).

The basic idea is that the fundamental constituents of reality are strings of the Planck length (about 10−33 cm) which vibrate at resonant frequencies. Every string in theory has a unique resonance, or harmonic. Different harmonics determine different fundamental forces. The tension in a string is on the order of the Planck force (1044 newtons). The graviton (the proposed messenger particle of the gravitational force), for example, is predicted by the theory to be a string with wave amplitude zero. Another key insight provided by the theory is that no measurable differences can be detected between strings that wrap around dimensions smaller than themselves and those that move along larger dimensions (i.e., effects in a dimension of size R equal those whose size is 1/R). Singularities are avoided because the observed consequences of "Big Crunches" never reach zero size. In fact, should the universe begin a "big crunch" sort of process, string theory dictates that the universe could never be smaller than the size of a string, at which point it would actually begin expanding.

An intriguing feature of string theory is that it involves the prediction of extra dimensions. The number of dimensions is not fixed by any consistency criterion, but flat spacetime solutions do exist in the so-called "critical dimension". Cosmological solutions exist in a wider variety of dimensionalities, and these different dimensions—more precisely different values of the "effective central charge", a count of degrees of freedom which reduces to dimensionality in weakly curved regimes—are related by dynamical transitions.[15]

One such theory is the 11-dimensional M-theory, which requires spacetime to have eleven dimensions,[2] as opposed to the usual three spatial dimensions and the fourth dimension of time. The original string theories from the 1980s describe special cases of M-theory where the eleventh dimension is a very small circle or a line, and if these formulations are considered as fundamental, then string theory requires ten dimensions. But the theory also describes universes like ours, with four observable spacetime dimensions, as well as universes with up to 10 flat space dimensions, and also cases where the position in some of the dimensions is not described by a real number, but by a completely different type of mathematical quantity. So the notion of spacetime dimension is not fixed in string theory: it is best thought of as different in different circumstances.[16]

Nothing in Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism or Einstein's theory of relativity makes this kind of prediction; these theories require physicists to insert the number of dimensions "by hand", and this number is fixed and independent of potential energy. String theory allows one to relate the number of dimensions to scalar potential energy. Technically, this happens because a gauge anomaly exists for every separate number of predicted dimensions, and the gauge anomaly can be counteracted by including nontrivial potential energy into equations to solve motion. Furthermore, the absence of potential energy in the "critical dimension" explains why flat spacetime solutions are possible.

This can be better understood by noting that a photon included in a consistent theory (technically, a particle carrying a force related to an unbroken gauge symmetry) must be massless. The mass of the photon which is predicted by string theory depends on the energy of the string mode which represents the photon. This energy includes a contribution from the Casimir effect, namely from quantum fluctuations in the string. The size of this contribution depends on the number of dimensions since for a larger number of dimensions; there are more possible fluctuations in the string position. Therefore, the photon in flat spacetime will be massless—and the theory consistent—only for a particular number of dimensions.[17]

When the calculation is done, the critical dimensionality is not four as one may expect (three axes of space and one of time). The subset of X is equal to the relation of photon fluxuations in a linear dimension. Flat space string theories are 26-dimensional in the bosonic case, while superstring and M-theories turn out to involve 10 or 11 dimensions for flat solutions. In bosonic string theories, the 26 dimensions come from the Polyakov equation.[18] Starting from any dimension greater than four, it is necessary to consider how these are reduced to four dimensional spacetime.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superstring_theory

one of my favorite geometric shapes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calabi%E2%80%93Yau_manifold

wow just wow

Ok so in order to exceed the fourth dimension we have to believe that a black hole which was thought to lose information
actually dumps it into another dimension where black holes don't exist basically a paradox?

Sorry I'm trying real hard here to keep up with hawking's.

I honestly don't have the brain power/knowledge to comprehend most of the things being explained.
But wikipedia is always right.

I found this good quote in a wiki about supersymmetry:
"It is possible to have supersymmetry in dimensions other than four. Because the properties of spinors change drastically between different dimensions, each dimension has its characteristic. In d dimensions, the size of spinors is roughly 2d/2 or 2(d − 1)/2. Since the maximum number of supersymmetries is 32, the greatest number of dimensions in which a supersymmetric theory can exist is eleven."