As a scientist who has made videos about such things as extra dimensions and multiverses,
I was already convinced that I was pretty cool.
But it wasn't until I sat down to watch “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” that I understood
the extent of my own coolness.
There on the screen was fictional scientific equipment that was very clearly inspired by
the actual apparatus that my colleagues and I use to try to unlock the mysteries of the
universe.
Amid the action, the coming-of-age story, a little romance, and a few twists and turns,
the movie shows a fictional gadget located in New York City called a collider, which
connects parallel universes and brings together many different versions of Spider-Man into
a single universe.
The collider on the screen was animated and cartoonish, but the real-world version of
it is called the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, which is the most powerful particle accelerator
in the world.
The LHC circulates beams of protons traveling in opposite directions near the speed of light
and collides the beams together.
Visually, the part of the equipment seen on the screen in the Spider-Verse isn’t actually
the LHC itself, but rather the Compact Muon Solenoid, or CMS, which is one of the detectors
located at the LHC.
The real-world CMS is a five-story tall particle detector which can inspect collisions between
pairs of protons forty million times a second.
And the equipment seen in the movie is visually very true to life.
CMS was built by scientists from around the world, and the parts that you see on the screen
are ones to which the Fermilab scientific and technical team made key contributions.
Is there any truth to the science at the core of the movie?
Well, yes.
And no.
And sort of.
The movie refers to parallel universes, multiverses, and alternate realities as if they're all
kind of the same, even though they are distinctly different when real scientists talk about
them.
For instance, the idea of alternate realities arises from an idea that deals with all of
the counterintuitive qualities of quantum mechanics.
That idea is called the Many Worlds Theory.
Our standard understanding of quantum mechanics says that, at the subatomic level, two mutually
exclusive things can simultaneously exist until somebody looks.
The most famous example of that is what is called Schrödinger’s cat.
In this example, a cat is put in a box with a Geiger counter, a bottle of poison, and
a single radioactive atom.
When the atom decays, the Geiger counter clicks, and the bottle breaks, killing the cat.
Before the decay, the cat is alive and well.
And, according to quantum mechanics, the atom exists both decayed and undecayed until someone
detects it.
Because the health of the cat is tied to whether the atom has decayed or not, the cat is both
simultaneously alive and dead until you open the box.
According to the Many Worlds Theory, what happens when you open the box is that the
universe splits into two universes; one in which the cat is alive, and a second universe
in which it's dead.
The problem with the Many Worlds Theory is that the universes are continually splitting.
Tea or coffee?
That’s one split.
Cream or black?
That’s another split.
Would you like a cookie, yes or no?
Yet another split.
The constant splitting of universes from every different decision leads to an infinite number
of universes.
That just seems unlikely to me, although there are researchers who find the idea appealing.
There’s another semi-credible scientific idea that appears in the movie and it’s
called the multiverse.
Multiverses are a proposed answer for why the laws of the universe allow for human life.
Given all of the possible ways the laws could be, this seems unlikely.
I made a couple of videos on the idea of multiverses, but basically the idea is that universes exist
with all possible laws and we just happen to live in one that allows for humanity.
For many scientists, the idea of a multiverse abdicates our need to understand the origins
of the universe.
Others think the multiverse theory makes a lot of sense.
And, perhaps obviously, in a movie with the word “spider-verse” in the title, the
writers clearly had the theory in mind when they wrote it.
Many Worlds and the multiverse are actually unrelated topics, although they are conflated
in the movie.
It’s a common occurrence, although it can confuse people who are casually interested
in advanced physics.
So, as a scientist, am I offended by this overly-casual use of real scientific ideas?
Heck no!
I mean, not only is the movie science fiction, it’s an animated superhero movie which pays
homage to the Spider-man comic book franchise, which started before I was born.
It' d be awfully irritating to hear any scientist start a conversation with a stuffy and pretentious
“Well, actually…”
It’s not meant to be real.
It’s meant to be entertaining.
And entertaining it is.
I enjoyed “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” a great deal.
But remember, multiple dimensions and the multiverse are, at best, speculative and they
are most likely not real.
Okay- do you think they bought it?
I’m sure they did, Don.
I mean, are you sure?
'Cause this is getting old.
First, I had to make the Mandela effect video to throw people off, and then the time crystal
one.
And you know what a mess that was when acolyte Dolen got eaten.
Don’t worry.
Nobody suspects anything.
They’re just sheeple.
I hope so, because could you imagine the panic if people found out the real truth?
If they found out that- hey, wait a minute- is this thing still recording?
Okay- so that was fun.
Who wouldn't enjoy talking about movie science?
If you enjoyed this video, be sure to like it and subscribe to the channel.
And tell all your friends.
With any luck, they like physics just as much as you and I do, and why not?
Because, after all, physics is everything.