- My name is James Boedicker.
I'm a professor of physics, astronomy, and biology
at the University of Southern California.
As a physicist, really one of your goals is to
understand kind of the fundamental laws of the universe.
I'm pretty familiar with Rick and Morty.
I'm a big fan of cartoons in general,
and Rick and Morty is definitely one of the more
sciencey cartoons out there.
- Who cares about the (burps)
thing you guys are talking about?
The whole point of freezing time
was to stop giving a (bleep).
- In the episode A Rickle In Time,
Rick decides to stop time and as a result,
there ends up being multiple timelines
in which Rick, Morty, and his sister exist.
You know, this brings up a very interesting
area of physics, is there even a possibility
of there being a multiverse?
After the Big Bang, there's kind of an exponential rate
at which the universe increased in size.
Because it's increasing at such an enormous rate,
there might be multiple very similar universes
that kind of coexist, maybe on different timelines.
You know, is it possible to move between timelines?
The sort of abnormalities in the space-time continuum,
wormholes, like would it be possible to go into a wormhole
and somehow come out?
Kip Thorne, who just won the Nobel Prize in Physics
for gravity waves, he postulated that
even if a wormhole were to exist, you know,
it would basically disappear as soon as it appears.
There's certainly not strong evidence,
things like hopping between universes,
or even traveling through time are possible.
- Jerryboree, you created a daycare for my dad?
- In the episode Mortynight Run,
they drop Jerry off at this Jerry daycare,
where all these Jerrys from different realizations
of the universe get together and they're watched
so that Rick and Morty can go have fun somewhere else.
That brings up kind of an interesting thought.
Even if there are multiple worlds,
you know, would you even end up with a lot of Jerrys?
On one hand, you would say Jerry seems like such a unique
being that events that would have happened
though the history of that whole universe
to end up with there being a Jerry are very unlikely.
But you kind of have the juxtaposition that,
with the sense that because there's so many multiverses,
even if only in a very small fraction of them
there might be a Jerry, there's certainty that, you know,
there's 20 Jerrys in existence
and they're all slightly different from each other.
- I came here accidentally though a wormhole
located in what you call the Promethean Nebula.
- In the episode, there's this gaseous being
that is some sort of alternative form of life
that appears not to be carbon-based.
Thinking about what alien life might look like,
people also think about, you know,
how might have life actually evolved on Earth?
Speculation about the earliest forms of life,
I mean, carbon wasn't necessarily involved,
and certainly when you think about, you know,
what aliens might look like,
there's no strong reason to think they would
necessarily be carbon-based.
There's no important features of life that involve carbon.
They could be some sort of gaseous clouds.
If life does exist elsewhere, that it wouldn't necessarily
resemble what we know as life on our planet in any way.
(dramatic music) (roars)
- Don't move, Gonorrhea can't see us if we don't move.
- In the episode Anatomy Park,
Morty's actually shrunk and he goes inside
another human being to this amusement park
that exists there called Anatomy Park.
It seems somewhat physically impossible.
You'd have to change the size of atoms.
Like could you breathe air that was normal size atoms,
or would it have to be smaller atoms?
- Oh, what are those things?
- Tuberculosis coming in fast.
- When they went into the lungs,
they actually saw microbacterium tuberculosis,
which the way they present it is actually somewhat accurate.
A third of the world's population is actually infected
with tuberculosis, but a lot of times,
it's asymptomatic for very long periods of time,
and not only in biology, but also in chemistry
and things like nanoscience,
we're able to construct things that exist
on very small scales, even smaller than a cell.
I mean, now we're talking about things that might be
nanometer, which is 1,000 times smaller than a cell.
People are now even in our lab,
we're making nanomaterials, things like quantum dots,
things like very tiny wires that are only
tens of nanometers in diameter.
(dramatic music) (lasers firing)
- Oh man, they're hot on our tail, Rick.
- I guess they really do have concentrated dark matter.
- But you know how to make it too, right Rick?
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, check the engine room.
- Another very classic episode, in my opinion,
M. Night Shaym-Aliens, they're these Shaym-Aliens
that are trying to trick Rick into giving them
some secret recipe to make fuel
out of concentrated dark energy.
That's actually a very hot topic in physics.
It's a little mysterious what dark energy
or dark matter might be.
A lot of these observations or calculations
that we make about how matter is distributed,
you know, there seems to be this missing mass
or this missing energy.
Basically, people started calling that dark energy
or dark matter, and it's dark because
there's actually at least currently,
we're not able to observe it.
There must be something that we're missing,
there must be something that we're not detecting,
and so the idea of using dark energy as a fuel source,
I mean, that's interesting because
we don't really know what it is.
I suppose as we learn more about it
or eventually actually detect it,
maybe we could somehow put it to some use, it's unclear.
(explodes)
I'm actually a big fan of Rick and Morty.
I think I've seen almost every episode.
They really dive into somewhat accurate kind of science,
or maybe it's slightly on the edge of science fiction,
but it's certainly the modern topics that real physicists
are grappling with when they go to work.
Who knows, I mean maybe one of these guys
doing string theory calculations,
I mean maybe the key insight is really in
one of these Rick and Morty episodes
that will really tie something together
that we don't fully understand yet.
(dramatic music)