Netflix’s sci-fi smash hit of the summer, “Stranger Things,” may walk the line between sci-fi and horror, but the show doesn’t deliver on scientific accuracy, according to University physics professor Jorge Pullin.
The show’s Spielberg-esque plot follows a group of children who spend the majority of the season attempting to rescue 12-year-old Will Byers, their friend who was kidnapped by a mysterious creature.
Later in the show, viewers learn Byers was taken to a parallel universe that appears to coexist with his own world, dubbed the “Upside Down.” A point of entry to the Upside-Down originates from a mysterious government organization, the Hawkins National Laboratory. The energy department is also the headquarters for scientific experimentation on telekinesis.
Accompanying the main plot is the storyline of Eleven, a psychokinetic girl who escapes from the government facility and runs into the Byer’s friends.
“The series is trying to get on the right track in thinking that energy and electricity can produce some sort of anomaly,” said Pullin, who holds the University’s Hearne Chair of Theoretical Physics and conducts research in general relativity and quantum gravity.“What they’re driving is the idea of black holes — if you compress mass, you can create a region in spacetime where nothing can get out.”
While they make for good TV, the scientific concepts presented in “Stranger Things,” including traveling between dimensions, don’t measure up in reality, Pullin said.
The presence of another dimension in conjunction with our world, like the one in “Stranger Things,” is impossible, Pullin said. To produce a black hole on Earth, the planet would have to be shrunk to an inch in size, Pullin said. The amount of energy required to form a black hole isn’t feasible on Earth, and is much more dense and energetic than anything that can travel through a phone line.
“They have some decent ideas, like saying that energy could allow you to move, but they’re off by large factors,” Pullin said. “This is far from established physics.”
When “Stranger Things” attempts to explain the string theory, Mr. Clarke, the boys’ science teacher, delivers an almost-correct explanation
Clarke uses the analogy of an acrobat on a tightrope who can only move back and forth. To the acrobat, only three dimensions ares visible. However, a flea on the tightrope can travel around the rope, between the regular three dimensions and in extra ones.
Pullin’s research focuses on understanding what happens in the final moments in the life of a black hole. Black holes are regions so dense that nothing can escape. They radiate wave particles shrink, until they eventually disappear.
Pullin is investigating what happens to everything that enters the black hole before it disappears. He hopes to have a concrete prediction within the next few years.
