(SeaPRwire) – By: Fiona MacIntyre
Apple TV’s Season 2 of Dark Matter is streaming now, and the multiverse keeps expanding. Jason Dessen, the college physics professor at the center of it all, has been bouncing between alternate realities since the premiere season. He was kidnapped and thrown into a version of reality where he is a celebrated research lab co-founder instead of a family man stuck in a dead-end academic job. The show cleverly limits its multiverse to universes where the traveler was born or could have been born. That is a smart narrative constraint. It keeps the audience oriented. But strip away the screenwriting and what is left is a massive chasm between pop culture’s multiverse and the actual physics. Leonard Susskind, co-founder of string theory, estimates the number of possible universes at 10 to the power of 500. Our observable universe contains roughly 10 to the power of 82 atoms. The show treats these as doorways you can walk through with a fictional neurochemical and some plot convenience. That is not science. Not even close. What it reveals is how hungry streaming studios are for speculative hooks that require zero R&D investment to sell.
The real physics is stranger and far more constrained than any television script. Physicist Paul Halpern places most multiverse theories into two categories: those emerging from cosmology and those from quantum physics. Hugh Everett introduced the many-worlds interpretation. Erwin Schrödinger gave us the thought experiment that made quantum superposition famous. David Deutsch pushed the argument into the mainstream in the 1970s, arguing that when an electron takes one quantum path, another universe may branch off where it took the alternative. Think of a spinning coin. Until it lands, it is simultaneously heads and tails. When you observe it land on heads, you do not destroy the universe where it landed on tails. You simply can no longer see it from your end. On the cosmological side, Alexei Starobinsky and Alan Guth developed inflation theory across the 1970s and 1980s. The universe underwent violent expansion less than a second after the Big Bang, ballooning from subatomic scale to something approaching its current size. NASA calls the faint temperature variations left behind “stretch marks.” Eternal inflation goes further. Distant regions of space may never have stopped inflating, breaking apart into separate bubble universes, each producing more bubbles in an endless cascade. Physicist Paul Davies described our observable universe as “a tiny blob of space buried deep within a vast labyrinth of interconnected cosmic regions.” He also argued that our physical laws are not universal. They are, in his words, “local bylaws.” Blake Crouch based his 2016 novel on Everett’s framework, and the show uses a fictional chemical that alters brain chemistry to let characters process superposition. None of that neurochemistry exists in any laboratory. Quantum branching as a concept is grounded in real theory. The mechanism the show proposes is pure fiction.
David Deutsch took the argument to an extreme that still sounds outlandish. He proposed that quantum computers might catch glimpses of other universes. He went further, suggesting that given an infinite number of universes, any fictional story that obeys the laws of physics could eventually become real. That is where physics speculation bleeds into science fiction, and it is exactly where the industry’s capital is accelerating. Quantum computing roadmaps promise exponential computational leaps that would dwarf anything in current silicon. Patent filings on quantum error correction and qubit architecture are climbing. Yet the gap between laboratory qubit counts and stable, error-corrected quantum advantage remains measured in years, not television seasons. Marvel’s Multiverse Saga launched in 2021. DC ran its Crisis on Infinite Earths decades ago. Star Trek introduced its mirror universe in 1967. Everything Everywhere All at Once and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse won Oscars on multiverse premises. Every franchise in streaming and film now treats the multiverse as a narrative reset button. The actual multiverse, if it exists at all, operates under rules so alien that no existing technology could interface with it. The entertainment industry will keep selling those doorways. Physics will keep saying the locks cannot be broken from this side.
Author bio: Fiona MacIntyre, an independent physics researcher and consultant for emerging compute hardware clusters.