Dark Matter: The scientific concepts behind the Apple TV+ series

In 2016, American author Blake Crouch published the book Dark Matter, a work of science fiction that sold thousands of copies and was highly successful worldwide. It’s no surprise that Apple TV+ decided to turn the interesting and mysterious story of the book into a series. In fact, science fiction uses some actual scientific concepts.

*Firstly: To be careful! This article contains mild SPOILERS. I will not write about the entire plot of the series, but I will touch on different points in the story that may help explain the scientific concepts of some scenes.

In the plot of Dark Matter, physicist Jason Dessen (1) is disappointed with his failed future, but everything changes when an alternate version of himself kidnaps him from his reality. In the other universe, the kidnapper Jason (2) is a rich and successful man who has conquered everything around him except his wife and children.

From this disappointment He creates a box that can access multiple realities and finds a world where he marries the woman he loves and has children. Determined to have this life, he forces her to exchange roles with Jason (1) in this universe. However, the kidnapped physicist is not happy with the new reality and tries everything to return to his original world and family.

Scientific concepts of Dark Matter

To try to understand a little more the scientific concepts presented in Dark Matter, I gathered information from scientists and experts in the field and explained what is real.

“Emerging physics increasingly argues that reality is a creation of our minds. Reality does not exist independently of observation, of consciousness. Biocentric beings create reality. A lot of these things were much less fashionable when I was writing the book. They are bananas. It’s so mind-blowing when you really think about it,” Crouch said of the book’s science.

The author of the work was not a physics professor, so his understanding of the subject before writing was limited. to help him, He consulted Clifford V. Johnson, an expert in high energy physics, quantum gravity, quantum field theory, particle physics, and other fields. The scientist helped the author develop the ‘box’ design that transported people to various dimensions.

Schrödinger’s Cat box

Dessen (1), played by Joel Edgerton, is a frustrated middle-aged physicist, father, and married to Daniela (Jennifer Connelly). On the other hand, Jason (2), who came from the other reality, had no time for his family because he became a successful physicist, businessman, and Nobel Prize winner of sorts. However, the character in this reality is unhappy with his personal life and decides to use one of the realities he created to change the reality around him.

Dessen in the universe where he is a successful physicist (2) managed to reveal the principle of quantum superpositionA concept widely promoted in popular culture by the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment.

In this experiment, the cat can be in a quantum superposition of living and dead at the same time because it is in a box containing a radioactive element, a poison bottle, and a mechanism that depends on the disintegration and release of the radioactive element. poison.

While the box is not opened, some scientists suggest that the animal is in a superposition of living and dead.

Schrödinger’s idea is used to explain Dessen’s machine (2), because the box allows your mind to be everywhere at once. Therefore, he can fictionally access infinite realities at the same time and thus manages to escape his ‘self’ from a reality in which he is happily married.

It is important to emphasize that Schrödinger’s Cat is just a thought experiment, not a real theory. Later, The main representation shown in Dark Matter isn’t exactly realhowever, it is based on scientific concepts researched in quantum physics.

“I think he built the (2) boxes as a thought experiment that became a real enterprise. He couldn’t help but notice the sacrifices made in spending 10 years building this thing. [que ele fez]. I always imagined him going into the box and surfing a bit and then one night he saw that family. In a period of regret (kind of the other side of Jason’s regrets (1)) he decided to do something crazy. [e forçar a troca de realidades]Crouch explains:

Multiverse: endless realities

For the box to work, The “Dark Matter” universe also makes clear that the multiverse is real. For this reason, characters who want to go to other realities must imagine the universe they want to enter. Inside the box, the entire multiverse is superimposed in a quantum state that offers gates to infinite realities.

The multiverse is a scientific concept predicted by different theories, but None have been able to empirically prove the existence of other realities. One of these theories is inflationary cosmology: The idea is that right after the Big Bang, everything expanded and inflated over and over again, creating a bubble network of different universes.

Is it possible to travel between realities?

No, at least for now, it is not possible to travel between realities as in “Dark Matter”. This is because not all scientific concepts are established; Some are just theories and thought experiments, like Schrödinger’s Cat.

Some of the scientific community believes this Reality is a perception created by the human mind. In other words, if there were no living things, there would be no reality to experience, because hypothetically our minds create everything we observe around us. The debate is philosophical as well as scientific, but we have not yet reached a conclusion.

The series works similarly to this theory, as the box presents all these realities, but our minds can only enter one reality at a time. Therefore, the study explains that they must take medication so that their minds can enter the superposition state without suffering any damage.

The theory of biocentrism explains this somewhat: There are infinite realities, but consciousness reduces these realities to a single reality – although this is not widely accepted by scientists.

Physicist who helps scientific concepts Johnson states that it is not yet clear whether it will be possible to make a box like the one in the series.But it was fun to imagine the possibility.

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