Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - The science fiction Universe of "Dark Matter"

Episode Date: August 8, 2024

Daniel and Jorge talk to a screenwriter and scientific advisor for the multi-verse show, "Dark Matter"See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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All the Smoke featuring Michelle Obama. To hear this podcast and more, open your free IHeart Radio app. Search All the Smoke and listen now. Hey, Jorge, have you seen a new TV show about the multiverse? Oh, which one? I feel like there are multiple ones out there. I know there are so many. It makes me wonder, like, if there are multiverse aliens out there, would they want to watch shows about, like, a single universe, a moniverse? What?

Wait, so if there is a multiverse and aliens, what you're wondering about is whether they watch a show, a particular show? Yeah. That's the first question you would ask them? I don't know if it's the first question, but it's on the list, yeah, for sure. what's on but that's an interesting concept like to them a show about a single universe would be weird and strange to them yeah exactly and you know the stories that people tell the stories people are interesting that tells you a lot about how their mind works so i think that would be

super fun Hi, I'm Jorge McCartunist and author of Oliver's Great Big Universe. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I'll watch almost any science fiction show that's out there, honestly. Oh, would you like it and not like it at the same time, or do you like them all or do you just want to see them all? Oh, I watch almost all of them. I don't like all of them. I can usually finish them anyway, even if I sort of hate watch them at the end, yeah. can't do that. If I don't like something, forget it. I drop it. Books, TV shows, movies,

I'll stop watching a movie in the middle. I always just have this hope that they're going to pull it off. You know, that somehow, even though it seems like nonsense, there's an explanation waiting at the end. I'm almost always disappointed, but I still have that hope. You know, I think that's why they invented Wikipedia, Daniel. Are you saying you stop watching something and just read the plot somewhere in Wikipedia? No. I do. No. I do. It's such a time saver. trust me and then if what happens it sounds interesting then i'll go see how they did it wow amazing maybe instead of living your life you just just read about yourself on wikipedia i mean it saves time right well who do you think is writing my wikipedia is that you if you write your own wikipedia

that's against the rules Jorge i mean what what better source about my life than me yeah actually i think they probably are better sources people tend to not be unbiased recounters of their own life story but anyways welcome to our podcast daniel and horhe Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio. A show in which we explain how the universe works to you. We want to answer your questions and really unwind the explanations so that they click in your mind. Even better than if you just read the article on Wikipedia. We do the Wikipedia translation for you.

So many people write to me and say, hey, I read about this on Wikipedia and it still doesn't make sense. Can you explain that to me? That's what this show is about. Explaining everything that's out there in the universe in a way that actually makes sense to you. That's right, because it is a pretty interesting universe full of cliffhangers, interesting plot twists, and amazing characters out there, hopefully without a series finale yet. I think it's going to end in a cliffhanger.

What do you think? But what's on the other side of the cliff, Daniel? I just hope we get another season. That's all, you know? Yeah, yeah. How do you know we're not in the second season? We could be in like season infinity, right? If it's just a series of bangs and crunches, everyone is a new season.

We could be like the soap opera of the meta-mediverse, meta-universe. You know, it just goes on forever. Yeah, exactly. As the universe turns. And we like exploring the physics of the real universe, but we also like thinking about other hypothetical, even fictional universes. Because this is a great way to stretch our brains.

To imagine the way that our universe might be, there's a great history of science fiction authors being super creative about the way physics might work in some universe. in their mind and sometimes even inspiring real physics in new directions. Yeah, because also isn't it sort of the job of physicists to think about possible futures or possible ways in which the universe might work and then go out there and test them? Yeah, absolutely.

That is the job of theoretical physics, not just describe what we've seen in the universe, but think about what else might be out there. Come up with new experiments we could do to discover the way the universe is. And in order to do that, you have to be creative. If you have to say, maybe the universe works this way, maybe it works that way. How would we know? What would it mean? You know, all the big discoveries in the history of physics, Einstein's revolution with relativity, comes from thinking about the way the universe might work.

And science fiction authors do the same thing in another direction. They maybe even take it further. Now, does that mean that physicists can just lay back and read what science fiction authors, right? Dude, you figured out our secret. That's embarrassing. I know. That's why I watch so much science fiction. I'm like, I need a new idea for research.

Let's turn on the TV. Yeah, that's right. Do you ever, like, reference that in your scientific papers? You should. Hasn't actually happened yet, but, you know, I'm waiting for the day. I'm keeping best. Oh, I see. You're waiting for the day for someone to make a TV show about a gripping drama

that takes place at the Large Hadron Collider. How about a particle physicist who has a podcast? And then it turns out to be an international spy. Mm-hmm. Yeah, exactly. You know, the show we're talking about today actually is about a physicist who turns out to discover something exciting about the universe. Hmm. Interesting. Well, let's dig into that because to the end of the program, we'll be tackling. The sci-fi universe of dark matter. Now, wait, Daniel, I thought we were talking about the multiverse, not dark matter. I know. Yes. The title of this show. was maybe a touch bit misleading.

I agree, yeah. Misleading or inaccurate or maybe in season, infinity will turn out that dark matter is what powers the multiverse. Well, I don't want to give away any spoilers. So people got to read the book or check out the TV show. This TV show is inspired by a book of the same name by Blake Crouch. It was that book that actually kicked off our whole series of science fiction episodes. Yeah, remember we recorded an episode where we talked about the bug.

This was a long time ago, right? Five years ago? four years ago? Yeah, we actually chatted with Blake about a different book of his recursion about time travel.

But reading that book and thinking about the physics and wondering how authors used physics as they developed their shows and how they developed the science fiction universe is what inspired

our whole series of episodes of interviews with authors, which has been super fun. So thanks Blake for writing that book. Yeah, thank you, Blake. And so he wrote the book Dark Matter on which the TV show is based on,

which you can see right now on Apple TV. That's right. By the time this episode airs, the finale will have been out already. And so it's a fun science fiction show on Apple TV. Oh, does that mean we're going to do spoilers or not spoilers? We are not going to do spoilers because I want people to hear this episode and then watch the show. And or read the Wikipedia page.

No, do not do that. It might save you time. I don't know. Let's see. Yeah, let's see. But anyway, it's a show out there right now and it's a limited series, right? How many episodes will there be? There's nine episodes in the first series,

and there hasn't yet been news about whether they'll extend it for a second series. The story in the first series basically captures what happens in the book. Okay. Does it vary from the book, or did they change anything? Or leave it as is this? There's a few subtle modifications, but basically it follows the story as laid out in the book, yeah. Okay. What's the general story of the book or movie?

So it's a multiverse-inspired story, and it's a story about a physical. assist. And in one of the universes, he invents a box that connects the multiverses. So it's essentially about being able to travel from one universe to another universe to imagine like alternative lives you might have lived or to maybe even change the universe you live in because you regret some of your choices. Whoa. Wait, wait. So first of all, it's a box. Not a doohiki or a machine. It's a box. How big is this box, like phone booth size box or briefcase size box? No, it's big enough for a few people to stand in.

It's sort of like the size of a small garage, I guess. Looks to me like it's, I don't know, three meters across or something. But it's a box because it's inspired by Schrodinger's cat. You know, the idea of putting a cat in a box and then not knowing whether it's alive or dead because there's a quantum triggered poison in there with a cat. So I think they used a box because it's evoked by Schrodinger's cat experiment. I see. So does that mean that the multiverse in the show is the quantum multiverse version? Because I know we've talked about there being multiple versions of multiverses.

Yeah, exactly. This is the quantum multiverse, the idea that if there are random things happening in the universe, like an electron could go left or could go right. And quantum mechanics tells us that there's just a random probability for either one, then you might ask, how does the universe choose? And in the Copenhagen interpretation, the universe just picks one. how, you know, rolls a die somewhere behind the scenes and an electron goes left or goes right. That's the wave function collapse. But there's another version of quantum mechanics, the many worlds theory or Everettian, that says it doesn't collapse. It does both. The universe splits into two.

So the electron goes left in one universe and right in another universe. And so those are two elements of the multiverse. So now after the electron splits, there are two universes that exist, one in which the electron went left and one in which the electron went right. Whereas before, there was only one universe. Yeah, and you have to be careful what you mean by universe here. We use the word universe here to evoke the universe that we experience, you know, our stars and galaxies and our space and our bodies and all that kind of stuff. And then we imagine many of those, we put those together into a multiverse.

Some people who support this theory of quantum mechanics think that that's a little bit misleading. You're not really creating new universes. You just have one big universe that's now split into independent branches that can no longer talk to each other. So it's a bit of a quibble about the naming, but I think that leads people to imagine that like all this new stars are being made, somehow, all this mass is being created when it's really more like it's splitting into both possibilities. Hmm. Now in the show, the scientists, physicists, I imagine built the box and then what happens to the box?

If you get in it, you can go to another multiverse or you can experience it or what? What does it mean that it connects the multiverses? Yes. The idea is that inside the box, the universe is not made a choice about what's happening. There's nobody observing it. There's nobody looking at it. So it's still in this sort of quantum superposition where it can have both possibilities. And so in that sense, it's like there are multiple possibilities within the box. The same way that when you put a cat in the box and you don't look inside yet, the cat could still be alive or still be dead. And quantum mechanics says both possibilities exist

simultaneously. So now to experience both simultaneously in the show, they develop some sort of chemical, some sort of like shot that you take that allows your brain to exist in a superposition so that you can go inside the box without collapsing the possibilities. So now you are inside the box and you are still in this quantum superposition. So you're sort of like experiencing multiple universes simultaneously. It's like you're the cat in Shoredinger's cat. And if the cat took a pill or something or some medicine, it can now experience being both dead and alive. I guess the dead cat would not be experienced anything yeah exactly and in the show they described this as turning off the observer effect what i described earlier you know when the electron goes left or goes right when it's

making that choice that's what we call the observer effect when you ask the universe okay which one is it i want to observe the electron and in the Copenhagen interpretation they say when it's observed that's when the universe makes a choice and so in this story they sort of like turn off the observer effect by taking the special drug that allows your brain to be in a superposition and then you can basically choose which universe you want to go into, you reopen the door, you walk out in a new universe. In that universe, you made a different choice in your earlier life or, you know, society has gone a different way or something. It's different about the universe. Yeah, I hear there are all kinds of drugs that will let you experience all kinds of universes. You don't need a box.

But wait, so wait, so taking this bill, going into the box, that gives you access to all of the multiverse is ever created, or just the ones that happen after you go into it? the box based on the choices you make inside the box. You know what I mean? Like it would make sense if you can access the ones that you're a super proposed in, but maybe not the ones that were created a long time ago or will be created in the future. No, it's a very good point. And there is a bit of a scientific quibble there, right? What might make sense is you create this box. Now you haven't looked at what's inside the box.

Several things could be happening inside the box. If you now go inside the box, you can then choose any of those possible outcomes. from when you created the box right that's not what happens in the show in the show you can visit any alternative universe in which you were born so not like the full breadth of all possible universes including ones where you never existed or the earth never formed just universes in which you were born but I agree with you that that doesn't really make sense because how could the box have those universes connected to it right it exists in our universe yeah yeah oh okay but that's a lot less exciting right if you create a box and then you can go inside the box and then be in any universe in which you made this box five minutes ago that doesn't really give you many new options it doesn't allow for exciting stories like I'm going to go inside the box and then instead of being a physicist who created this box I'm going to go back and find the woman I should have married instead of building this box I guess either version would be kind of interesting like I could go into this box right I can watch a

TV show and also at the same time I can maybe you know write a novel and then And then at the end, I'll have done both. Is that how it works? Well, eventually you have to come out, right? Not everybody in the universe has taken this drug. And so then when you come out, you're either going to be Jorge who wrote a novel or Jorge who watched a TV show. And I can choose which one?

You can choose which one. Yes, but you can't be both. You can't have both watched a TV show and written a novel, which I think is what you're going for. But if I wrote the novel, do I remember having one written the novel or remember having watched the novel, the TV show? No, because when you come out of it. out, then the universe collapses and makes your choice, right?

Okay, but I'll have known, like, if I picked a novel, then I know that the novel I wrote is better than the TV show I watched. When you come out, you won't. You'll only have been Jorge who wrote the novel or Jorge who watched the TV show. Yeah, or Jorge, we just read the Wikipedia article about it. But let's go back to the show. Sorry. So then the physicist has then the option to go anywhere at any point in his life in which he made a position and go that that way or not. Yeah, exactly.

But then if he goes the other way, then he'll have been that person who made the other choice. Or does he stay the person he was before he went into the box? He stays the person he was before he went into the box and now he's experiencing this new universe. So one of the main storylines in the show is that this physicist, the one we're following, actually didn't build the box. He decided not to go into physics and instead follow his wife's career and become a teacher. But then another version of him that did build the box decides.

You know, life being a physicist isn't as exciting. I should have chosen love and comes and kidnaps the original version of him and takes his place. Wait, what? So wait, the main protagonist is not a physicist. He's a physicist by training. He got a PhD, et cetera. But now he's teaching. He's not doing research.

He decided not to devote himself to building this box. He's not a practicing physicist. But then the physicist's version of him in the multiverse turns out to be kind of evil. Yeah, exactly. You know, he decided following his career was maybe the wrong path, even though it allowed him to create this box now it lets him come back and live both versions right he wants to be Jorge who wrote the novel and watch the tv show he got to have a career build the box and now he wants to go back and experience love so so basically the moral the story is if you become a physicist uh you become a

supervillain is that takeaway here i don't know i mean Bruce banner has seven PhDs so maybe the guy just needs more PhDs so it becomes you know on the good side yeah yeah but i think for But for Bruce Banner, he has PhDs in non-physics fields. What? Maybe that balances it out. You got seven PhDs and none of them are in physics, really? Some of them, I think most of them are not in, I don't know. I mean, looked at this transcript.

I need to check out Bruce Banner's CV, yeah. Yeah, there you go. I'm sure he posted on Wikipedia. Okay, so then he gets kidnapped by his alternate version and then what happens? When he kidnapped and then placed in the other universe and now he's trapped or what? Yeah, basically. And he has to figure out what happened and try to get back to his original universe. and then the story gets pretty wild.

So it's a pretty fun story. Yeah. Do you give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down or a both thumbs up and thumbs us down? It's definitely a lot of fun to watch. I recommend it if you're into science fiction. I think the signs of it is pretty solid, but there are some quibbles. But I think there's sort of necessary fudge factors to make the story work.

Otherwise, it just wouldn't be possible. But it's definitely fun to watch. And it tries really hard to follow rules, you know, to set up a universe and to follow the consequences of that. I think it does a good job of imagining where the story might go that you wouldn't expect. Yeah, I know following rules is very important to you. Well, we think the universe follows rules and we're trying to figure it out. And so it's most fun to follow rules in these stories. The science of it, I do have a couple of quibble. I mean, number one is the issue you already brought up. Like, if you create this box, how is it possible that has access to choices you made

before you made the box? That doesn't seem to work with me. My question is, how do you pick which universe you want to go into? Like, is there a computer where you say, I want to go to the universe in which I didn't become a physicist? Yeah, they actually dig into that in great detail in the show. I don't want to spoil how it works, but they definitely grapple with that question. That's not something they gloss over. Oh, interesting.

Like, is there a user interface or do you check out all the other universe and pick the one you like? You're going to have to watch the show or read the Wikipedia page to find out. Really? That's a big spoiler? The user interface is a big spoiler? I don't want to give it away, man. I want people to watch the show.

But this does raise a question, which is, you know, the role of the human in observing. There's a lot of people out there who imagine that quantum mechanics depends on, like, having a conscious observer. When we talk about the observer effect, the wave function collapsing, choosing one universe out of many, a lot of people think that it requires a person, like a conscious observer. And I think that's just basically a misunderstanding of the observer effect. Because what quantum mechanics tells us is, that the wave function collapses any time a quantum system interacts with any classical object, meaning like something big, you know, like a baseball or a screen or a detector or your eyeball,

doesn't have to be something conscious. In this show, they imagine that it has to be like a conscious person to collapse the wave function and that by taking this ampule, you're like removing that so it doesn't collapse. So they're imagining that humans are special somehow in collapsing the wave function. That's not the way it really works in quantum mechanics. So they need this fudge for the show to work. So, you know, I can forgive it. But I want people to misunderstand that quantum mechanics requires a conscious human observer. Right, right. Things collapse just when they interact with other systems, right? And a human brain is just another system is what you're saying. It depends on the system they interact with. A quantum system

will not collapse if it interacts with another quantum system. Like two electrons can interact and still stay in quantum superposition because they're both quantum objects. But if an electron interacts with a classical object, a screen, a detector, your eyeball, whatever, then it will collapse. And people are probably thinking, huh, what's the difference between the classical and a quantum system?

Where do you draw the line? Isn't the classical system actually built out of little quantum particles? Yes, absolutely. Not a question we have an answer to. That's the famous measurement problem in quantum mechanics. Isn't the answer just that classical objects

are quantum objects, except that they're just made up of so many quantum objects that it statistically kind of overwhelms the uncertainty? Well, we don't really understand how that happens. You know, the transition between quantum and classical. If quantum objects can interact with other quantum objects and remain in superposition, why can a billion quantum objects not do that or a trillion? That's not something

we understand. According to mathematics, it should be possible, you know, so we don't understand when something becomes classical. What about this idea that you can connect multiverses together? Is that something that physicists think is impossible, or do you think it's possible to travel between multiverses. I'm very skeptical of that idea. Most of the multiverse theories involve universes that cannot interact in any way. In the many worlds theory, for example, the way function has split. And there's no way for those branches of the way function to interact. Just simply having a box in one of the universes that you haven't looked inside of doesn't connect the universes in any way. There's no way to connect to that other universe. So yeah, that I don't

think is actually possible. But, you know, again, I'm willing to fudge it. Although it raises the question like if one person in one of these universes built a box, then all of a sudden there's a box in all those other universes that you can step out of. That means that in any of the universes, anybody built a box and makes a box in the other universes, then all the universes should be filled with an infinite number of boxes. What? Wait, wait, there's only one box in the show? No, there's an infinite number of boxes because he builds one box, and that makes the box appear in all the other branches of the universe so he can step out of the box in those universes.

Wait, what? Who built those other boxes in those other universes? Yeah, unexplained. It just sort of is created when he builds the one and then doesn't look inside of it because it's now in a quantum superposition. It exists in all those universes. That's not really explained. And so if any other version of him also builds the box, then it should exist in our universe as well. And so we should have an infinite number of those boxes. The whole universe should be filled with boxes.

Well, isn't that a big plot hole? Like who built the boxes in the other universes? Yeah, great question. And a question I'm going to put to the writers of the show in just a minute. Oh, well, this is pretty exciting. Daniel, you got to interview two people involved in the show. One is one of the screenwriters, and the other one is the scientific consultant for the show. That's right.

I talked to Jacqueline Ben Zekery, one of the screenwriters for the show. She wrote a couple of the last episodes. I talked about writing for the show and her process and how they consider the science. And I know they involved a physicist as a scientific consultant who happens to be a physicist. that you and I know, and who happens to be here with me at the Aspen Center for Physics this week, where I am. And so I reached out to him, and he agreed to talk to me about what it's like to be a science advisor on this kind of show. All right. Well, we'll get to Daniel's interview with a screenwriter and scientific consultant for the Apple TV show Dark Matter when we come back from the break. LaGuardia Airport.

The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal, glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of ed. enemy emerged. And it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to

predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Oh, wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her.

Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age. It's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him?

Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential. I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills and I get eye rolling from teachers or I get students who would be like, it's easier to punch someone in the face.

When you think about emotion regulation, like you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome as a result of it if it's going to be beneficial to you. Because it's easy to say like go you go blank yourself, right? It's easy. It's easy to just drink the extra beer. It's easy to ignore to suppress seeing a colleague who's bothering. you and just like walk the other way avoidance is easier ignoring is easier denial is easier drinking is easier yelling screaming is easy complex problem solving meditating you know takes effort listen to the psychology podcast on the iHeart radio app afo podcasts or wherever you get your

podcasts and here's heather with the weather well it's beautiful out there sunny and 75 almost a little chilly in the shade. Now, let's get a read on the inside of your car. It is hot. You've only been parked a short time, and it's already 99 degrees in there. Let's not leave children in the back seat while running errands. It only takes a few minutes for their body temperatures to rise, and that could be fatal. Cars get hot, fast, and can be deadly. Never leave a child in a car. A message from NHTSA and the ad council. All right. We're talking about the Apple TV show, Dark Matter, which is a science fiction show about the multiverse and being able to travel between them and being able to, I guess, high five and or kicknap other versions of yourself that made bad choices according to your current version. It's a little fuzzy. Yeah, well, that's really the theme of the show is like thinking about other parts of your life and decisions you made, sort of like that sliding window movie was it called or sliding glassed away.

What was that movie with Gwyneth Paltrow, you know, other choices you might have made that lead to other lives. The sliding glass window. Yeah, I think that's what it's called. I don't remember. The sliding rearview mirror. Yeah. There you go. That's really the theme of the show. And they use the multiverse as a way to explore that.

Well, you got to interview both as screenwriter and the scientific advisor for the show. And so here is Daniel's interview with screenwriter Jacqueline Ben Zekrie. Okay. So then it's my great pleasure. pleasure to welcome to the podcast. Jacqueline Ben Zechari. Jacqueline, thank you very much for taking some time to talk to us. Of course. And you can call me J.BZ. That's what most people do. So it's easier. All right. Great. So tell us a little bit about your background, how you got into science fiction writing and working in television. For people who want to have your job, how

did you get it? Oh, very meandering and weird. It's kind of how it all happened. Yeah, I don't want to go back too far in time, but I'm dyslexic. I grew up having a really difficult time. Like, I didn't really know how to read until I was sixth grade or so. Somewhere in there, I actually figured out how to not just read, but understand what I was reading. And it became an obsession, like the idea of words and what they mean. I think it's not that they have greater meaning to me than other people, but I think that I appreciate them in a different way. I see them in a different way. So always from a very young age, I was obsessed with books and with the idea of reading and like this concept that it makes you smart, if you can understand what you're

reading, which is like so silly and simple, but, you know, like I was a kid. And, you know, once I got a little bit older, I ended up working at Amazon for a while doing some, you know, I was in process improvement and statistical analysis and Six Sigma. I really loved, you know, mathy, mathy, mathy, all day. It was really great, but I was missing some of that creative energy. So I ended up, it was a semi being headhunted semi. I was looking for an opportunity to be more in, I would say, a creative role. So I got a job working in publishing at Thomas and Mercer, Amazon publishing. And I really loved that job. I really loved being around story and writers. And it's just, you know, life has a way of sort of evolving over time.

You know, I started off in marketing and trying to understand how people react to story and why they buy what they buy. And slowly I became more convinced that the way to sell a better book is to have the book be better. And so I became an editor. But then I was really not very good at that aspect of the job because I saw potential in every single book. Like, it was very easy for me as the marketing person to say, this book will sell well and this one will not. But when it came to actually interacting the story, it's very difficult for me to say, ah, this story can never get good enough and can never become a good enough.

As a writer, it'll never be written the way that we want it to be written. And so I kind of immediately sort of started my own side business editing books as a developmental story editor, which is a little different for those of you who don't know much about public. It's like there is sort of the acquisitions editor whose job it is to sort of make the money work and make it make sense. And they do give a lot of notes. But developmental editors are the people that like as you're writing the book help you figure stuff out and help you figure out your characters. And, you know, in some cases, just write better. And so I started doing that on the side. And then eventually that business grew to being my full-time job and I quit my big, stinky corporate job.

That must have been an amazing moment, right? It's an amazing moment that came a little bit with on the heels of a tiny amount of failure. Like I had to had a memory breakdown, which I don't want to go into too much detail here, not because it's not interesting, but because it's not what we're here to talk about, but I spoke in gibberish in a meeting. I was very confused. I had fugue states. I was walking home strangely.

And it was kind of like this big moment where it's like, oh, you either have brain cancer and you're dying and this is your whole life. working 60 hours a week making some amount of money that doesn't make you happy or you are doing this to yourself it's stress and you're creating this problem

within your own brain it was like the dark night of the soul weekend and I kind of just looked at the math and I was like I can make enough money off my business and not be unhappy and it kind of doesn't matter if I have cancer if it's stressed so I quit my job and then found out I wasn't dying

you know the story has a happy ending for those you aren't sure And it was stress, yeah. Well, that's great. It was a big moment for me when I got to do that. And then from there, I was in publishing for a long time, and I've been Blake Crouch's developmental editor since Pines. And so when he was developing a couple of other projects,

I've always been in the mix of that. And we were working on developing another television show that was, like, pretty close to going. And, you know, we'd gotten pretty far down there with some producers, and there was like money already starting to come in for it and dark matter got greenlit and it was this immediate moment where it's like you can't do both that's literally impossible so um it was like okay well i guess we'll do dark matter instead and that's kind of how the whole thing happened it's so weird and random but a lot of fun too i've really enjoyed the ride wonderful well congrats in the show it's a lot of

fun the show features a lot of themes of quantum mechanics you know you got superposition a multiverse exciting to you as a writer about these themes? What opportunities and challenges does that create that you were excited about? Wow, that's a really good question. Theme-wise, I think I'm very drawn to duality in general. I think there's something really fascinating about, you know, for those you were watching the show, and if you haven't, I don't want to spoil anything, but for those who've watched the show, we're dealing with one person who is expressed in multiple versions of himself and and kind of how it works is like we have Jason 2 and Jason 1 and they were the same person until 15 years ago when one decided to have a family and the other decided to pursue his career and to be clear no one here is saying you have to do one or the other but like for this story that is what happened and it was the idea of like that that Jason 2 later does a bunch of really I would say incredibly dastardly things and really horrifying terrible things and Jason 1 kind of, you know, maintains this positivity. He's a good guy. But the reality is that they are the

same person. And when writing him and writing his actions and what he's doing, you have to actually look deep within yourself to the things that keep you from doing bad and that keep you from doing good and how they are, just like the Batman and the Joker, they are two sides of the same coin. And that's exciting to look at. It's exciting to think about, you know, why we make the choices that we make and who we are when you strip away all those trappings of life and circumstances, like how would you actually interact and react to things? So those are thematically the funest things. But I am a big sci-fi dork. Like definitely on the scale, that's not, I don't say not normal. That sounds really insulting. But, you know, on the scale of like, you know,

the minutia and the science that all really matters to me. So I was also equally excited to be able to go in here and be like, let's actually, you know, talk about some of these issues to a wide audience of people. This kind of science is kind of thinking. I do think of physics more as philosophy than anything else. This philosophical way of thinking about the universe and expose that to a lot of people who would never normally choose this show because we made it about regular people doing regular things and the science is just it's another character it's not the focus of every second and that was probably the most exciting part for me the show is sort of like a mystery or a thriller you're trying to like unravel what happened and to me i'm always really impressed when somebody writes that

kind of story in a science fiction universe because it's so challenging for the audience to know if the rules are being followed and what the rules are how important is it to you as a writer that the universe you've created follows like a coherent and consistent set of rules, even of course, if they aren't the rules of our universe. Or are you like, let's just make the story happen and we'll, you know, fill in some science frosting when we need to. Oh, I'm definitely the more of the first type. And this goes back to being a developmental editor, you know, the tropes, which is kind of

what you're talking about, right? Like, here's what the audience expects tropes. Like when I say mystery, it means you don't know the solution to the problem to the last 25% of the show or movie or book, right? Like that's a mystery versus thriller, which is like, you know the problem very early on is how are you going to solve it? You know, so like that's what the audience is expected. And then there's the writing trips, like actually how you structure things. So like, for example, fantasy, we structure it where you have multiple stories interacting at various points.

You don't do that per se in like science fiction usually. Those are structural differences. So for me, like when it comes to the mixing of like mystery and. thriller and you know all these different things into our speculative fiction i am pretty obsessed with the rules because i think the rules are how you keep people grounded so like there's the rules of the science which i think have to be established very early on and it needs to be blunt like it's the one area in all of writing where you're like hey we can be on the nose here just say what you mean which is lazy and fun right um there is the playing with the rules which is like the

assumptions that we make. And there is the assumption that we make scientifically, like consciousness connects to reality. We know that that is some element of that is true, right? But then we sort of expand that out and say, okay, if consciousness connects to reality, then I guess you have to have consciousness in this world in order to be able to go to this world. So now we have a rule. You have to have been born in that world to be able to go there. And so it is a lot of fun to take theoretically realish rules and then sort of play with them as well. I don't definitely think we did both in this show. And I don't think you can ask people to trust you so much that you throw a bunch of nonsense at the wall and say, that's not real science. That's not real storytelling and expect people to go along with it. Like people want to feel like they're satisfied at the end of it. Like, oh, I got it. And not only did I get it, I got something hard. And so we do have to always be coming back to the rules and always be coming back to the things that make sense and always coming back to what you've established so that it's also satisfying. And that's a trope thing, you know? Yeah.

Well, how much of the rules of the universe you're writing in are the rules of our universe and how much did you, like, extend and fill in the gaps where we just don't know how things work? And also tell us a little bit about how you use the science advisor in this show. I happen to know Cliff Johnson quite well. I'm in love with him if you could let him know that. I think he knows. I think he knows. But if you could let him now, I think he's very charming. He is super charming and just really just nice and smart. Yeah, I asked him a question about entanglement once, and he was way too nice to me. How much of this is the rules of our universe?

I hope my understanding is that, and God, I would love to know what Clifford thinks, I think it's probably 85% theoretically possible, right? Like, we're playing with math that exists, for sure. but we're expanding it pretty considerably in like just just go with me here you know we get philosophical to real um so i'd say yeah it's pretty close but there's definitely some stuff that's like you know totally BS that we just sort of you know added in there because it's a lot of fun um but i think the thing that we play with more in our universe is sort of history i think that that's the more fun thing to play with like for me especially but i also know for blake

like getting the science as close to possible to being plausible so that you could go out and interact with other forms of this science and understand it better, that's really important to us. And so we try to stay in that sphere, but like, you know, imagining a world where completely different things happened, like that's a lot more fun than playing with science, I think, and that tends to be where we kind of really go off the rails. Like one of the worlds that we explore, world 26 is the sort of utopia world. We were like, well, what if they just, you know, instead of developing the bomb, what if they put all those resources into creating what's called endless environmentally conscious energy? What if that was what we did instead? That's not a

judgment on the Manhattan Project. I grew up in Hanford. I tend to have a very strong attachment to that concept and that it's one of the greatest achievements in all of human history, right? Like it's doing that scale of science and doing it that quickly and that engineering and on that thinking. But, you know, the outcome wasn't really always like the most pleasant thing. And so what if we'd done something inherently more positive? What does that mean if you chose that over a destructive device? Well, you're probably a world where there's more empathy. You're probably in a world where we communicate better. And so I think a lot more liberty was taken with history and sociology than was taken with real science.

You know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. I think that's really creative. I really like that part of the show. I found myself excited every time they open the door to a new universe, like, what's this one? What did they dream up this time? Yeah. I was always impressed.

I just want to say this because I didn't really answer your Clifford Johnson thing. Clifford was really great about being a good carrot and stick guy. I just want to say that. Cliff was like, yeah, I mean, sure, you could make it look like this. It's not a problem. But then I remember there were a couple of times in no atmosphere world where we had charred and burned stuff. and he's like, no, absolutely not. That would not happen.

Those are not the colors. That's not how it would look. Like, I just love when you can tell that something really matters to your scientific advice. You're like, oh, don't touch that. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, hopefully that's representative of like the nerds watching your show and you don't want to

piss them off either. Absolutely. I don't like being wrong. I don't think anyone does, right? So for the nerds out there in the audience, of which I count myself one, since I get to talk to you, I do have some questions about the rules of the union. universe and how it works. Okay.

One thing I was wondering about what you thought about, how you guys worked out is how the box exists in the other universes. Like if Jason creates the box in his universe, he builds it, he physically puts it together, then he goes to another universe. He steps out of the box. That box is also in that universe. And I found myself wondering, like, who built it or how did that come to be? Do you guys grapple with that kind of question?

Or you just kind of like, hmm, we need a little bit of fudge there. Yeah, you're going to get into there. See, now I'm going to contradict myself. Like now we're getting into woo-woo, right? Okay. Like, let's go there. For sure, for sure. Like, we know the laws of thermodynamics would not allow this to happen, right?

Because, like, our theory is that it spawns and that it just arrives there because it is a gateway. So once Jason creates it in his world, it's sort of like, I guess I would describe it as like an anchor point. It is the nexus by which all universes are connecting. So in theory, when you see that box, say in no atmosphere. world or in the world where they're in the water, that is actually the same box. It's just being represented there physically so we can go in and out. And that's why the corridor is just the box repeating across because it's just your mind making sense of it.

But definitely, like, you know, things start to fall apart when you really think about it. Because, yeah, where did that energy? Where did that matter come from? I mean, I think it's the same matter. But, yeah, you know, send me some hate mail about that. It's probably not good. No, it's just fun to think about. And I like that the show encourages you to like think hard about how things work and what it means and, you know, it changes how the characters behave in the world.

I think it's great. You know, it's a sign of a really good science fiction. But in this case, you guys weren't just starting from scratch and creating something new. I mean, Blake had written this novel already. What's it like to adapt a book like that to the screen rather than start from scratch? What are the challenges there? I think the biggest challenge, I'll start with that one, which might reveal I'm a negative thinker, but the biggest challenge is like what people expect, the expectations, you know, I'd help like develop this story. So I remember being in, we were in Portland and like the idea of like, oh, how much your emotions would affect the worlds that you land on came directly from a dork conversation I was having with him about robocop.

You know what I mean? And so I'm so enmeshed in the story that that aspect of it was very easy. It was like, oh, okay, we can do that. But then you get letters from people that are like, I was considering, you know, ending my life. And then I read this book and I thought, I can actually be empowered to make changes. And when you are facing that kind of fan reaction, when you have literally hundreds of people saying, I hadn't read a book in 20 years and I've read Dark Matter and one day and I'm now a big reader, Like, I think that that had more of an emotional impact on me than anything else was like how much the story meant to a lot of people and wanting to fulfill those fan love feelings, but also creating that now for a whole new audience of people who, for whatever reason, would never read this book, but we'll engage with this material in this way.

So that was probably the biggest challenge was figuring out where to be true to that original stuff to make the fans happy, but also soliciting. at that same emotional reaction from new people. I would say the funnest part about it, for sure, I love producing. I think the funnest part is like looking at 700 versions of Ash World, that's the world where the vault worlds are crumbled and watching that VFX for the 7,000th time and being like, I'd like this window to be slightly brighter.

Like it just speaks to some deeper OCD that I might ask. From our writing standpoint, though, like adapting this book, I think that the funnest part about it was getting to expand the characters because we don't really know Amanda, we don't really know Daniela, we don't really know Charlie. We kind of get to know Ryan a little, but we don't know him. We definitely don't know Leighton. And you need to know them for the show to make sense. Like, you know, you need to expand everyone because when you see them and they don't have

reactions to certain things. It's not a flaw of the book. The book is a single POV game. It doesn't matter what else is happening around you. But now you're actually asking humans to embody that, and we have to know more about them. And that was the most exciting, I think, besides being weird about details and what color of watch is Jason wearing in this scene and what color shirt is he wearing in the game to make that all work.

Those puzzles aside, expanding the characters, especially the women, was the best part of the whole thing. Well, as a viewer, I found one of the greatest challenges, just like keeping track of like, which Jason am I watching now, especially, you know, later on when you get so many different Jasons. How do you handle that as a writer? How do you give the audience the clue, you know, without like giving everybody a unique haircut, you know, or hovering a number over their head? Yeah. I mean, that was probably one of the hardest things to do because the easiest answer is like, you know, because we have, for those of you have seen eight, we have Burnface Jason. We have Jason 13, who's the guy that talks to Jason one in the, you know,

tavern. I want to call it the demon tavern. That's the real name. The village tap, sorry. When they're talking, like, these characters look different, so it makes it a lot easier. But when we start getting into the 50 other Jasons that are there, that was a lot harder. And what I ended up doing with our costume and our hair and makeup people was, and our 80s, because those people really need to understand what's happening. They have to organize this whole thing. It was creating, like, a rubric of like, based on how violent the Jason is. We determined that that is when he lost his Amanda because we feel like Amanda, psychologist, she's giving him, we see the whole show.

She's giving him therapy the whole time. She's comforting him. She's helping him figure this stuff out. So the earlier Amanda dies or leaves him is the more violent and more, you know, sort of crazed and unhinged the Jasonist because we know that that's in him. We've established that. We've seen prison world where Jason has obviously done something terrible to someone. We've seen what Jason 2 is capable of.

We know that Jason 1's capable. So it's about what actually breaks his brain and how broken is it? And so once we knew what that was, we just focused the costumes on where we think he branched from Amanda. So careful viewers will see like Jason in the snow outfit from Snow World. If he's still in that outfit, that means Amanda died close or left him close to that time periods. That means that he went 20 days alone in the box, which is. is a lot crazier than going three days along the box, which is what our Jason did. So that kind of makes a big difference. If you look back like some of the first guy that gets killed by

Jason 1 in the alley, the most violent guy that we've seen so far, he's wearing the original costume. So that was kind of fun to play with. And then we just did really subtle things from there, green beanie or blue beanie, you know, like just so that you could know it's not the exact same guy you saw last time. But we also embrace the idea that like, it kind of also doesn't matter. Like if you're a little bit confused here and there, that's actually part of the joy is like, you know, it's the same thing inception does. Do we know if he got home? Like, I think he didn't aside. But it's kind of like, does it matter? That's not the story we're telling. The story we're telling is about the complexities of coming back to your life. That's what we're

talking about. So I think it doesn't really matter. But yeah, it's definitely all very carefully planned and if you freeze the show and you look at the color of the ring of thread on their fingers and you look at the color of their hats you will actually be able to tell who is who awesome i'm sure somebody out there on reddit is doing exactly or if they're not they're probably getting like hack into my computer i get the except itself but you'll know everything so i asked our listeners if they had questions for you and listeners who are watching the show we've only seen six or seven episodes so far their number one question was why is it called dark I mean, obviously there's physics in the show, but it's mostly like multiverse, quantum mechanics, superposition. Where's the dark matter in the show? It came from a conversation and I was there for it, but you know, it might be good to ask Cliff actually about this. There's a debate if dark matter exists, right?

And there's also a debate about what it does and like black holes. Like I personally believe in the sort of mirror universe of going through the black hole. Like, you know, the chair just exists on the other side. maybe not scientifically very accurate, but I think it's an interesting theory. So that idea of the complete sort of unknown, but also it's a word that you've heard enough that you're like, ah, science fiction, that's honestly the truth. Like she was like. I see. Okay. Mysterious, science-e. And it doesn't actually, if you dig into it, actually for sure, mean anything yet. Like,

it's still, you know, like, yeah. So, yeah, but it's also a little confusing because, you know, pearl jams out there touring with dark matter and so you know it's maybe the most ideal name either so my last question for you is a more personal one imagine you have the box in front of you you can go inside of it you can visit another universe in which you exist what's your alternative reality what are you choosing like am i intentionally choosing like i get to go see a version of myself not like i accidentally sort of wash up on shore at a terrible place yeah you can pick some other version of your life to go visit or, you know, kidnap and replace them. Where are you going? Huh. You know, the first thing I really wanted to do with my life, I went to like a music

magnet high school and I was very involved in music. And for a long time, I thought I was going to be a musician. And it's one of those sort of stories I think that everyone has where like you get to a certain point in your process where you realize that it's not that you are not, that you're a hard worker. You're actually not talented. And some careers require a certain level of actual talent. And the realization that I was not good enough to actually have the future as like a composer and musician that I thought I was going to have was a really brutal one. And I often wonder if there is a world where I hadn't have decided that I wasn't good enough. And if I had continued to fight and be that level of brave you know what would that life be like i'm not saying she would have

succeeded but i would like to see what she did you know that's the curiosity of mine awesome well it would be cool to get to go and you know attend one of your own concerts and another place in the multiverse totally very cool let me ask you what would yours be wow a great question i'm totally not prepared for that um yeah well you know physicist is sort of what I always wanted to be, so I don't have that, like, oh, I wish I had gotten to be. But there are other paths I didn't take, you know, when I was young. I also wanted to be an artist or a science fiction author, for example, and never got to do that. So, yeah, I'd like to go see if that would have worked out for another version of Daniel.

You still could, by the way. You could still write that book. Like, you know. Well, I live in Southern California where you're obliged to produce a screenplay every two years when you lose your citizenship, you know. Totally. Totally. Totally. Awesome. Well, thanks very much for answering our question. And thanks for this wonderful show. Speaking for everybody out there, we're really glad you created it. Thank you. All right. Thank you. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.

The holiday rush. Parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is,

Back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school. week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up.

Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age. It's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both the meets. So do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not?

To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential. I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills and I get eye rolling from teachers or I get students who would be like, it's easier to punch someone in the face. When you think about emotion regulation, like you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome as a result of it if it's going to be beneficial to you. Because it's easy to say like go you go blank yourself, right? It's easy. It's easy to just drink the extra beer. It's easy to ignore to suppress

seeing a colleague who's bothering you and just like walk the other way. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denials is easier. Drinking is easier. Yelling screaming is. easy. Complex problem solving, meditating, you know, takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In sitcoms, when someone has a problem, they just blurt it out and move on. Well, I lost my job and my parakeet is missing. How is your day? But the real world is different. Managing life's challenges can be overwhelming. So, what do we do? We get support. The Huntsman Mental Health Institute and the Ad Council have mental health resources available for you at loveyourmindtay.org.

That's loveyourmindtay.org. See how much further you can go when you take care of your mental health. All right, interesting conversation there. It's kind of interesting how, as a TV writer, you kind of have to think about what the science tells you might be possible. And then you kind of have to figure out how to get a good story out of that. Yeah, exactly. You've got to balance both things. If you're too strict on the science, it doesn't let you tell the story you want to tell.

But you also have to be plausible, right? You have to have the story makes sense so that the viewer is engaged. It feels like there are rules that are being followed. I feel like, Daniel, you have a flexible rule yourself. What's that flexible rule? Sometimes you like when the rules are followed. Sometimes you don't. I always prefer when the rules are followed.

But, you know, you can't be too harsh. You prefer, you prefer, right? strong preference, yeah. All right. Well, Dan, you also got to interview the scientific advisor for the show, which is a friend of ours, Cliff Johnson. Yeah, he's a professor at UC Santa Barbara and an expert in string theory and black holes and in general quantum mechanics and a lot of fun to talk to. Is he an expert in dark matter or multiverses? I think he's an expert in being a science advisor. He's also worked for a lot of the Marvel movies. If you're an expert in the multiverses, does that make you an expert in everything? Like there's a version of you out there that's probably an expert in some other field that you currently don't know.

Yeah, exactly. If only you could draw on their expertise. Wow. You can make a movie like The Matrix, but with multiverses. The multi-tricks. Yeah. Hollywood, give me a call. All right.

Well, here is Daniel's interview with physicist Cliff Johnson. Great. So then it's my pleasure to be here in conversation with Cliff Johnson. Tell everybody a little bit about who you are, what you're excited about in science. Well, I am a professor at the physics department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I work on things to do with roughly these days, I say, like the quantum nature of space time. So, interest in quantum gravity, black holes, what a theory of quantum gravity looks like. So I work on things like string theory, et cetera, but really thinking about space time, space and time, and what it means of the quantum level.

It's really like on the cutting edge of understanding the nature of the universe. That's fantastic. So tell me about what it's like to be a science advisor in a show like this. What do you see is the role of the science advisor? What is your job? So this is a really important question because there is no model for what a science advisor should be because the industry still doesn't really know what that is. And so a lot of us has been working to try to help cement that.

And I think what we shouldn't do is go in with the red pencil and make it seem like we own this stuff. And they're, you know, they're daring to play with it and we're going to give them a grade. Because they'll never fall in. Right. Others have different opinions. But my opinion is that the primary thing you're there to do is to serve the story they're trying to tell. And to help them tell the story they want to tell. Now sometimes you can give them advice, given what they want to do and the science

that they think they want to use, you might then say, well, if you tell me what your story goal is, I might help you tweak that a little bit, or maybe you don't need this piece, or here's a whole other bit of science you don't know that could be brought in to help you achieve that. And they're very open to that, because now you're on the storyteller's side,

and you're just trying to serve a story. And then sometimes that can lead to the story changing completely, because they get upset about the science. They now understand that good of science pets. They only read about it in a popular account and may be misunderstood. Now they understand it, now they see, oh, I want to use this aspect more or you tell them. So it really is, I think, if you go in, in my opinion, if you go in wanting to help with the story, great things can come from that, especially if it's early enough in the process that they're not wedded to everything being completely set. And so then I think science advising works extremely well.

You have all the other times when you're called in, usually you know, some big studio, it's all ready to go, they're almost ready to shoot, and then they want some buzzwords. And that's only so much you can do that. But if you get to kind of almost become a collaborator or someone to brainstorm, and if you then stick through it right through to the end, you can get some great things. Yeah, fascinating. Well, I think sometimes about the responsibility there because a lot of people watch science fiction. And they know it's fiction, but still they hear buzzwords.

They hear science and they absorb it. And I wonder sometimes if there's a responsibility to the show to get that right and to not use lead people into like common misunderstandings about what is dark. What does it look like? You know, is it a dark log in front of your spaceship or not? What do you feel about that? Is it a science advisor have some responsibility there? We have some responsibility to tell a little bit about what it's really like. We, you know, there's no contract that says they must use a certain percentage of what we tell them.

Right. Right. So, you know. It's an advisor. I'm an advisor. So I'll do my best to say, well, it wouldn't really look like this. Or if it does, maybe you have a reason. You could mention that.

Or it may be what have you. But what happens, and this is by no means, intends. as an apology for science advisors, but it's more the process, right? These projects, it's very different being a science advisor, say, on a book where you're dealing with the author of the book versus being a science advisor to a thing that goes into a big machine. As almost any project that you see on screen will be, it will have gone through many stages, We've gone for many iterations. You may have been the science advisor with the screenwriter

and wrote the thing and got all the beautiful science and then. And then, you know, four years later, you go and watch the thing, and it is not the thing that was the final screenplay that you saw. Because it went from the screenwriter to the studio, to the director they found for it. The director had their own vision, blah, blah, blah, blah. So you've no control. But you try.

And you hope you can get the key people involved, excited enough about the science, that they care to protect some of the things that you got into the screenplay or what have you. And or maybe, you know, some years later at the stage where they're shooting, you get a call saying, hey, you help the screenwriter. Now please help the VFX people. Right. And stuff like that. That's great. That seldom happens.

But when that happens, that's great. Because then there's some continuity. You can kind of look in at different stages. So tell us a little bit about what were the challenges of being a science advisor for this particular show. Because they got quantum mechanics, they got multiverse, they got the observer effect, they got all sorts of stuff going on. What did you do there? How did you change this story? Well, you know, I first have to say huge amounts of credit to Blake, like Crouch, the author of the book it was originally based on, and then, you know, he's also the showrunner. Side note, there's a big difference between TV and movies.

In some ways, TV is very much more writers than the people who do the writing end up. You know, the director works for them. It's a first approximation. The showrunners have the final side. That's very different in some of the models you get in big cinema. So that means that I think Blake, who's hugely enthusiastic about science and is very open to hearing critiques and hearing new ideas and incorporating that, he was also in control of the final show.

So I got the call to come in and chat with the various departments, and they basically said, Blake said, do whatever you say. That never happens. So at the end of the day, I think the main ideas were there. So credit to Blake there, the main ideas were there.

He really wanted, he was fascinated by the classic, conundra in which, quantum mechanics, but then you wanted to play with the idea that it's century, wouldn't it be fun? If you took literally the Everettian interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is that these probabilistic choices that you seem to have in quantum mechanics, really are branches in the universe. You know, you had a 50-50 chance of the quantum outcome being this way or the other, and you could just go, well, that's life, that's probability, but the cat was alive, or you was dead when you made the observation.

Everett will tell you, no, there's another universe in which it was the other, and then that universe carried on. And so these choices mount up, and the universe continues branching. So Blake was going, well, what if you could explore those universes? And essentially, that's what this is about? And then what would that mean physics-wise? So there's some relatively old-fashioned ideas about the collapse of the weight function and things like that.

when you make an observation, the way function collapses. We tend to not really foreground as much when we teach quantum mechanics as we used to. And so I was trying to explain to Blake a little bit about some of the language that people use these days in terms of coherence versus do coherence, coupling systems to its, you know, how much can you isolate a system from its environment

so it doesn't sort of de-coher by being coupled to another system? and what have you. And those are the things you need to control if you were going to do that as a physics experiment. So that leads to then what would that look like? What would that device look like? So that's the box. So we spend a lot of time discussing what the box would look like and stuff like that. And what's in the walls of those box? So you don't, of course, you never learn that in the book or in the show explicitly, but you do hear a discussion or two about the fact that there's tech going on that sort of cancels, things from the outside. And so those are the sorts of things that was given him to make it seem at least another aspect of my job is that while you're watching the thing, you're not popping out going, that's ridiculous, all that doesn't make sense for it. You're at least in the two hours

of what have you, the movie or the hour of the episode, you're going with it. Right. So to help the physicists have the plausible sounding conversation for plausible sounding content that helps make it seem realistic. So, indeed, I'm very pleased to, you know, when I finally saw episodes of the show, I was very pleased to see a lot of that stuff stayed in. And some of that stuff was my scribbling on the screenplay saying, this is what they would say.

And I gather people really like that. You know, you hear, you see the box and you have a sense that this is a real thing that's been bought about. So you wanted to have weight, wanting to feel real, wanted to have it to still feel like it's a prototype. so it's a little sort of grungy looking and so on and so forth that's I really

think is our job we're not we're not doing a documentary yeah but if you I think as much as the creators will listen I'll give you enough material so that if if someone watching it digs a little bit they'll find there's more there there isn't sort of first level and then it all falls apart so you will see you know the character Jason go rifled through his notebooks at some point. We're talking about the original design of the box. That is full of the equations that I gave them.

And that's real quantum physics. I had some friends of mine who actually do real quantum information experiments where they try and create superposition states in quantum devices because these are important for building quantum computers. right um those are the same pieces of science that that character would would be doing but really large in order to make this box so you know i i had notes of my own that borrowed some of their notes with their permission and that's all what you see in jason's notebook so that those are examples of the things that uh that we worked on um at the level of the show um other level of

the book we'd already been thinking about uh trying to give a reality quote and quote to what would be like when you're inside the box when you're in a position because now this is now just all fantasy you know idea yeah um Blake's wonderful idea of having some sort of drug that turns off the observer effect whatever that means that's based on actual experiments that people are thinking about right or have been doing trying to understand the role of quantum mechanics in the workings of the brain, quantum mechanics in perception of what we, how do we construct reality of the physical world

in terms of interacting quantum mechanically with the world? To what extent does our brain chemistry have anything to do with that? I think the answers to those questions is nobody knows. The fact that it's unknown is fun to play with. And it gives the writer a less place to tell you. down well congratulations and you so you've seen the show are you pleased with how it came out yeah i've been um so i'm most of the way through now i think there's maybe a couple of episodes uh haven't seen and i've been although you know i've you know i've you know i read every

script and worked at every script and worked with all the different departments it was sufficiently long ago that i and of course i hadn't seen how it really got uh um it's been great to see how these how it's come out overall as a show tonally which i think is primarily most important things to get right in the tone of the show uh i think it really they really nailed it and um such a strong cast and great direction uh it's a great collection of uh directors they got someone who might spoken with um early on um and uh we were talking about various aspects of the show so i'm very pleased i'm very impressed for me it's a win-win from the point of view of a science advisor who's interested in getting people

engaged in science because there's this feeling you know from episode one or two right um there are millions of people watching this thing and after they turn off this episode they're talking about schrodinger they're talking about Heisenberg and talking about um uncertainty they're talking about all these these things that usually thought of as about as obscure as you can get inside this is out there in a TV show about prime time. That's fantastic. So I've been very happy with that. And this, I think, wouldn't have happened without

writers like Blake who get excited about science and then do this great job in writing great stories built around the science, which is really what it's about. Well, fantastic work. I agree it's important to have science out there and science in these stories. And science can really enable so many fascinating stories. And if your goal was to contribute to the story

and to open the space that they could explore and give it some plausible credibility without filling out a red pen and pissing them off, I think you've done that. I just spoke to Jacqueline Ben Zachary, one of the writers, and she said, quote, tell Clifford, I love him. So I think it ended up pretty well for you.

Great. It was one of the most fun and fulfilling science advising collaborative experiences I've ever had. And I've done some good ones. I've done some really good ones with some of the some of the Marvel people that's a great one coming up which I've been having on fun with and I'm hoping that you know this is the new standard yeah that we can that we that we can convince the filmmakers the entertainment industry to aspire to where you really collaborate with scientists to to find new ways to make at the very least right from the point of view of just selling stories yeah it's it's a great way to just find new ways of telling the same old stories, which is great. We only tell a few stories as a species.

We just tell them and always the science is a great way to find new ways. So this is a great example of that. All right. Well, thanks again for taking a few minutes to chat with us. Really appreciate it. My pleasure. All right, pretty cool. Daniel, have you ever considered being a scientific advisor for a TV show or something like that?

Has anyone approached you? Oh yeah, absolutely. I would love to be a science advisor on anybody's project. And people actually email me their stories all the time. asking me for advice and I give it to them I just talked last week to a team doing a science fiction horror show asking me for plausible explanations for the story they wanted oh interesting can you give any spoilers or did you have to sign an NDA I didn't sign an NDA but I think they would not like me to give away their story on the pod but

if they do get to produce it we'll definitely talk about it on the podcast that would be fun and so I want to encourage all science fiction writers out there think deeply about how the universe might work. Create new universes for us and think about what it's like to live in them. Yeah, because it's an amazing universe and who knows how it will end up or get written up in Wikipedia.

Or he might not stick around to hear the end of the universe. He's just going to read it on Wikipedia, but I'll be there with you. Yeah, I'll read it after the universe ends. Sounds good. It'll save me a few trillion years, hopefully. All right, well, we hope you enjoyed that.

Thanks for joining us. See you next time. For more science and curiosity, come find us on social media where we answer questions and post videos. We're on Twitter, Discord, Insta, and now TikTok. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys.

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