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.
