The science of Stranger Things, true or false: many worlds, wormholes and Planck's constant
Universe · Science · True or false
From 1983 to 1986, Mr. Clarke and Dustin cite real physics, and the series keeps some of it to the end. Here is each idea, what science knew of it at the time of the story, and what it says today.
The science of Stranger Things is right in its words and invented in its passages. Everett, Planck, Einstein and Rosen existed, and Dustin's compass obeys physics. None of these ideas opens a door to another world.
The essentials
- Many worlds: Hugh Everett, 1957. Branches that do not communicate
- The flea image: A tiny dimension, closed on itself, not a neighboring world
- Compasses: True: a magnet stronger than the Earth's field deflects the needle
- Isolation tank: Real, developed by John C. Lilly in 1954
- Planck's constant: In 1985, Suzie recites the value from the 2014 adjustment
- Wormholes: Found in 1916, published by Einstein and Rosen in 1935, still theoretical
Contents
- Many worlds or a hidden dimension: the 1983 lesson
- Compasses and magnets: what magnetism really says
- The isolation tank, an invention of 1954
- Suzie's Planck constant, the number from the 2014 adjustment
- The Einstein-Rosen bridge, from 1916 to 1988
- Exotic matter: what would hold a wormhole open
- The verdict, idea by idea
Many worlds or a hidden dimension: the 1983 lesson
In November 1983, at the wake after the funeral, three boys ask how to travel to another dimension. Their teacher draws on a paper plate a rope, an acrobat and a flea. The chapter is called “The Flea and the Acrobat”.
The wake is Will's. Mr. Clarke thinks first of Hugh Everett's many worlds, proposed in 1957; Bryce DeWitt names them many-worlds in the 1970s, and the term therefore exists in 1983. Lucas is right to set that lead aside. “Yeah, that's not what we're talking about.” Everett's branches do not communicate. No information passes from one to the other. There is neither a door nor a journey.
The flea image comes from another idea, hidden dimensions. On The Particle Adventure, the acrobat moves forward or back, and the flea also goes around the rope: a small closed loop that brings it back to its starting point. “He can even go… underneath the rope.” Theodor Kaluza adds a dimension in 1921. Oskar Klein, in 1926, rolls it up on a tiny circle. In physics, the underside of the rope is that circle, where nothing lives. The series slides the image toward an entire world.
The boys already call this world the Upside Down. They found that name the day before the funeral, before the drawing on the plate, thinking back to the game board Eleven had flipped to show where the missing boy was.
Hidden dimensions also have their television version: in episode 10 of Cosmos, in 1980, Carl Sagan explains a fourth dimension of space with an apple.
To get through, the lesson demands an enormous amount of energy and a tear in time and space. A gate would disturb gravity, the magnetic field and the surroundings.
Acrylic keychain with an iridescent outline, silver carabiner. White letters run on a black ground, between two strings of colored bulbs. It marks the place where the flea passes under the rope.
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Compasses and magnets: what magnetism really says
The same year, Dustin notices that the group's compasses do not show true north. He concludes that a stronger field pulls them toward the gate. “The needle's naturally drawn to the Earth's magnetic North Pole.” Near a stronger source, the needle turns toward it.
At ground level, the Earth's field measures 30 to 60 microteslas, according to a 2019 survey. A powerful refrigerator magnet reaches about 10 000 microteslas, hundreds of times more. The reasoning holds.
To find true north, he trusts the sun, which supposedly rises in the east and sets in the west. The sun rises nearly due east only at the equinoxes. From September to March, at temperate latitudes, it rises in the southeast quarter. In November, the method is approximate.
In 1986, Dustin's needle drifts as the group goes east, as far as Skull Rock, not far from Lover's Lake. He concludes there is a smaller gate. He speaks of an electromagnetic field: it is its magnetic part that the needle follows, like that of the 1985 coil. That is not false.
In 1985, the teacher cobbles an electromagnet from a transformer and a coil, then he lowers the current. The demonstration is in “The Mall Rats”.
An object is demagnetized with an alternating field whose intensity is reduced little by little. Tube televisions had a coil made for that. The lesson first says that this field acts on any charged object nearby. A refrigerator magnet is not a charged object. It is its dipoles that react, as the teacher himself says a little further on, when the current drops.
To reach a house and the center of town, he talks about billions of volts. A magnet's field falls off as the cube of the distance: ten times farther, a thousand times weaker. Pulling the magnets off the whole town, the one with the machine hidden beneath it, belongs to fiction.
The isolation tank, an invention of 1954
In 1983, Dustin wants a sensory-deprivation tank so Eleven can find the two missing people. He calls the teacher at home. “It's ten o'clock on Saturday.” The group fills a paddling pool with 1 500 pounds of salt, about 680 kilos, road salt taken from a storeroom. The chapter is called “The Bathtub”.
John C. Lilly develops this tank in 1954, while he is working at the NIMH, the US National Institute of Mental Health. According to the Wellcome Collection, the first subjects, himself included, are fully immersed in water at body temperature. The version in which you float, lying on water saturated with Epsom salt, comes after he leaves, at the end of the 1950s. The first commercial tanks are sold in 1972. Today, people often describe 25 cm of water at about 35 °C, with a density of 1.25 to 1.26. His work inspired Altered States, in 1980.
The series replaces Epsom salt with road salt. The floating holds up. What is found in that darkness belongs to fiction.
The baths imposed on the test subjects of the real program belong to another story, that of MK-Ultra.
Suzie's Planck constant, the number from the 2014 adjustment
Planck introduces this constant in 1900. It links a photon's energy to its frequency: the energy equals h multiplied by the frequency.
On July 4, 1985, opening the safe that holds the machine's keys requires this constant. Murray, who translates Alexei, presents it as a very well-known number. The code he gives is wrong: six, six, two, then six, zero, eight, then zero, zero, four. Dustin gets the right one by radio, from Suzie. “Planck's constant is 6.62607004.”
The price of the answer is a duet, sung over the radio: NeverEnding Story.
The number recited, 6.62607004 × 10⁻³⁴ J·s, is that of the CODATA 2014 adjustment, released in 2015. According to a CNN article of July 11, 2019, scientists at NIST noticed it while watching the season. In July 1985, the recommended value was that of 1973: 6.626176 × 10⁻³⁴ J·s. The 1986 adjustment is published in 1987, and it replaces that of 1973.
Since May 20, 2019, h is no longer measured. Its value is exactly 6.62607015 × 10⁻³⁴ J·s. The vote dates from November 16, 2018, at the 26th General Conference on Weights and Measures, from the CODATA 2017 values. The season that shows the scene comes out on July 4, 2019, a month and a half after May 20. The last two digits of the number recited, 04, are no longer those of the exact value, 15.
The wrong code, 662 608 004, differs from the number recited by a single digit, an 8 in place of the 7. The right number, from the wrong year: it is an anachronism.
Trucker cap: yellow front, green mesh and visor, orange button and cord. The green print lines up a telescope, a microscope, vials and a molecule diagram. The 1985 science camp, the one where Dustin meets Suzie.
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The Einstein-Rosen bridge, from 1916 to 1988
Warning: from here, and through to the end of the article, it is about season 5.
In November 1987, in the third episode of season 5, the lesson on Einstein-Rosen bridges takes place in Erica's class, and she makes it her favorite.
He presents these bridges as wormholes, entirely theoretical. You would go from one point to the other without crossing the space between them, as far as another galaxy, or another time. If they existed, they would tear as they formed.
Ludwig Flamm finds the solution in 1916. Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen publish it in 1935. The word wormhole, in the sense of a shortcut in space-time, appears in 1957 in an article by Charles Misner and John Wheeler. Arthur Eddington had written worm-holes as early as 1928, in a figurative sense, to name particles of matter. In 1962, Robert Fuller and Wheeler show that the bridge is unstable. It closes too fast for anything to cross it. For 1987, the lesson is right.
As early as 1973, Homer Ellis, and, independently, K. A. Bronnikov, show that a wormhole can be traversable if it is held by a field of negative polarity. Ellis refuses to call that field exotic. In 1988, Michael Morris and Kip Thorne make it the reference model, held open by matter they call exotic. On September 26, 1988, with Ulvi Yurtsever, they argue that such a wormhole could become a time machine. The journey to another time, mentioned in class, precedes these articles by a few months.
Carl Sagan had consulted Thorne for the wormholes of his novel Contact, published in September 1985. It is the Sagan of Cosmos: a coincidence, nothing more.
Exotic matter: what would hold a wormhole open
In the sixth episode of season 5, Brenner's journal says what holds the whole thing together. It is not magic. Dustin talks about exotic matter, the name theoretical physicists use. A little later, he concludes. “It's not another world. It's a wormhole.”
In The Bridge, he specifies in front of the group that the bridge is very unstable, held nonetheless by this matter.
Ross Duffer said it to Deadline. “We've known it was a wormhole since Season 1.”
In 1988, for Morris and Thorne, the traversable wormhole holds thanks to a spherical shell of this matter. The series lodges its own in a sphere, which resembles that. Matter with negative energy is required. Negative mass stays speculative, and the closest real example, according to Wikipedia, is the Casimir effect. For Sean Carroll, at Johns Hopkins, wormholes are a simplified model, very interesting and useful to physicists.
No wormhole has been observed to this day: they are hypothetical objects. In 2022, an experiment on a quantum chip was presented as a holographic wormhole. Peter Woit judged its promotion scientifically dubious. Carsten Welsch, in Liverpool, uses the series in his classes.
Dustin speaks with the words of 1988, those of Morris and Thorne. The idea of a field of negative energy, for its part, had existed since 1973. The word is right. The object, to this day, remains unfindable.
The verdict, idea by idea
Physics does not cover three things. The lamps that blink when the missing boy calls, and the radio that crackles, receive no explanation: all we know is that electricity is flowing. What Eleven does gets no explanation either. Nor does the town frozen on November 6, 1983.
One method stays right to the end. To find Dustin, the teacher wants to locate a point from three signals.
The rule set in 1983 still holds. “Science is neat. But I'm afraid it's not very forgiving.” The names and the principles are right. The passages to another world are not.
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1983 Everett
Correctly cited. His worlds do not communicate.
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1983 The flea
A tiny, closed dimension, not a world.
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1983 The compasses
Right: a stronger field deflects the needle.
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1983 The bath
The tank has existed since 1954. The darkness in which the missing boy is sought, no.
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1985 The magnets
Demagnetizing, yes. A whole town, no.
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1985 Planck
The right number, the one from the 2014 adjustment.
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1987 The bridge
Unstable, like the physics of 1962.
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1987 Exotic matter
Morris and Thorne's term, from 1988. No observation to this day.
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Frequently asked questions
Is the science of Stranger Things accurate?
The names and the principles, yes. The passages to another world, no.
What is the Everett theory cited by Mr. Clarke?
The many-worlds interpretation, proposed in 1957. Bryce DeWitt names it in the 1970s.
Can you pass from one world to the other in the many-worlds theory?
No. No information passes from one branch to the other.
Is the Planck constant Suzie gives right?
It is the right number, but the one from the 2014 adjustment, released in 2015. In 1985: 6.626176 × 10⁻³⁴ J·s. Since May 20, 2019: 6.62607015 × 10⁻³⁴ J·s.
Can a compass locate a hidden magnetic source?
Yes, if that source is stronger than the Earth's field, 30 to 60 microteslas at ground level.
Do isolation tanks exist?
Yes. John C. Lilly develops his in 1954. The first commercial tanks date from 1972.
Has a wormhole ever been observed?
No, not to date. Flamm finds the solution in 1916, Einstein and Rosen publish it in 1935, and the object stays theoretical.
