Abstract
In the summer of 1916, Finnish physicist Gunnar Nordstrom (1881–1923) arrived in Leiden to carry out research with Paul Ehrenfest (1880–1933), Hendrik A. Lorentz’s successor in the chair of theoretical physics. Nordstrom had recently published the first five-dimensional unified model of the universe, a theory that went virtually unnoticed by the physics community. Ehrenfest’s personal journals reveal that Nordstrom’s visit coincided with a flowering of Ehrenfest’s own interest in dimensionality, which resulted in his well-known paper on the connection between the fundamental laws of physics and the three-dimensionality of space. I examine Nordstrom’s and Ehrenfest’s collaboration and explore the relationship between their ideas and the Kaluza-Klein model of five-dimensional unification.
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