Interdimensional travel into “dark matter” is closer to reality than you might think

Blake Crouch isn’t a scientist, but that didn’t stop him from including real scientific theories in his best-selling novel Dark Matter and the Apple TV Plus sci-fi thriller based on it. A theory that really stuck with him was that of alternative universes.

“I was very excited by the idea of ​​multiple realities and even more so by the science behind it,” Crouch told me in an interview. “I [thought] it would be great to write a novel about quantum physics.”

Crouch said he did not take any science or math courses in college. So to incorporate quantum physics into the book and the show, Crouch worked with Clifford Johnson, a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I spoke with Johnson about the physics behind the fiction.

“It’s really a compelling story about the choices we make in our lives,” Johnson said. “It’s a real pleasure to see so much science up front, and that’s why I helped [Crouch] develop many ideas.”

The main theory that explores dark matter is that of the multiverse: the theory that there are infinite other universes beyond our own. To explore this theory, the show uses an interdimensional travel device called “the box”.

The box is an important contraption that may not be as visually appealing as similar devices in other science fiction works, such as the DeLorean from Back to the Future or Dr. Who’s Tardis, but there are actual theories behind how it might work. Who knows, maybe these theories will lead to breakthroughs in the world of physics, or maybe they already have in another universe.

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How does the box work in Dark Matter?

The dark matter box is an example of an interdimensional travel device. According to TV Tropes, these types of devices allow a person or group of people to travel to another universe. This journey starts with the box.

In Dark Matter, the characters enter the box, which blocks everything from the outside, and take a mind-altering drug. Our characters then imagine the reality they want before stepping out of the box into a different universe. Johnson explained that the box is a way to visualize all possible outcomes for a superimposed quantum state.

Okay, explain it to me like I’m five years old, please

An easier way to understand this, and superimposed quantum states, is to use the famous thought experiment of Schrödinger’s cat.

The essence of the experiment is that you put a cat in a sealed box that you cannot see, along with something that can kill it, such as poison or radioactive material. Then, since you can’t interact with what’s inside the box or see if the object in the box killed the cat or not, you can’t observe whether the cat is alive or dead at any given time. Therefore, the cat is both at the same time: it is in an overlap of living and dead. Only after you have opened the box and observed the cat can you report the condition of the cat.

Johnson said the cat in the experiment has two possible outcomes: alive or dead, but when a person enters the dark matter box, they have many outcomes to choose from. The dark matter box is essentially the inverse of Schrödinger’s cat. Instead of an observer not being able to see or interact with a small part of reality, the observer cannot see or interact with anything outside of a small part of reality (the box).

So the way the dark matter box works is that a person goes into it, imagines the reality they want to be in with the help of a drug, and then comes out of the box into the reality they built. with his mind While the person is in the box, they are put into a state of overlap between all the different realities, and the one they focus on becomes real once they observe it when they leave the box.

Could the box really work?

Maybe, but we may never know. Some people have come up with theories about reality similar to dark matter.

“The guys who won the Nobel Prize in Physics a [’22] “They were talking about non-locality and the idea that objective reality doesn’t exist,” Crouch said. “There is no independent reality that is just out there unobserved by conscious, biocentric beings.”

Others have said similar things. Robert Lanza, assistant professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, developed a theory of biocentrism that argues that consciousness is the driving force behind reality and the universe, not the other way around.

“Nothing exists unless you or I or some living creature perceives it,” Lanza wrote in the American Scholar in 2007. “The images you see are a construct of the brain. Everything you are experiencing right now . . . it’s actively being generated in your mind.”

The biggest hurdle to proving these theories is building a device like the box. Crouch and Johnson said designing the box was a challenge, as it had to block everything, and I mean everything, for a person to be on top of.

“Things like the temperature, anything above absolute zero,” Crouch said. “Or neutrinos flying through our atmosphere, constantly flying through our bodies…Wind variations, temperature, all these things…”

Any changes in these variables would make the box simply a piece of metal, as these changes would act on the person inside the box, taking them out of a superimposed state.

“We’ve never built anything like this and it’s not clear that we really can,” Johnson said. “But it’s fun to imagine what that might look like if you could.”

Are there other ways to get to alternate universes if they exist?

If entering a superimposed state to enter another reality seems a bit too far, perhaps a black hole can help. This may sound as fantastic as the Dark Matter box, but renowned physicist Stephen Hawking entertained the idea. Hawking theorized that a black hole could function as a gateway to another place, including another universe.

“They are not the eternal prisons that were once thought,” Hawking said at a 2008 conference. “Things can come out of a black hole, both outside and possibly into another universe. So if you feel that you’re in a black hole, don’t give up. There’s a way out.”

We don’t know for sure what would happen if a person fell into a black hole, but Gaurav Khanna, a professor of physics at the University of Rhode Island, told me in an interview that a person could survive the encounter.

Khanna and a team of researchers found that if a person, or spacecraft, fell into a supermassive black hole, like Gargantua in the movie Interstellar or Sagittarius A* in our own solar system, it could be a smooth, steady ride. .

“Even though we don’t know what the other side of a black hole connects to,” Khanna said, “if we take a leap of faith and imagine that the other side of one black hole connects to another part of our universe, or maybe another dimension, then you could go from one to the other without problems, without too much hassle.”

Khanna said a black hole must meet three criteria to possibly function as a portal: it must be considered supermassive, it must be old, and it must be rotating. If a black hole doesn’t meet these requirements, like it’s too small, well…

“The smallest [the black hole]worse,” Khanna said. “Even if you go into a black hole the size of our sun, I don’t think there’s any hope of survival.”

So could we travel to other universes under the right conditions?

“This is not a plan about how to travel to other worlds,” Crouch said. “This is a speculative idea that says, ‘Oh, if we had a few things, a few advances in these certain areas of technology, maybe we could start to have a conversation about how macroscopic objects exist in a state of overlap.’

If traveling to another universe by putting a person in a superimposed state like Dark Matter proves unreliable, a supermassive black hole might do the trick.

“The door is a little bit open,” Khanna said. “We have some understanding, experimentally, that this might work.”

You can now watch the first two episodes of Dark Matter on Apple TV Plus ($10 a month) and new episodes are available on Wednesdays. You can also check out how February was the warmest February on record and what you need to know about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.