Throughout its five seasons, the Netflix show Stranger Things follows a ragtag group of teenagers and their parents as monsters from another universe — unleashed by the secret work of a government laboratory — wreak havoc on a quaint, fictional town in Indiana.
Don’t worry, Demogorgons, Shadow Monsters and psychokinetically gifted 12-year-olds are strictly fictional creations. But the ‘parallel universe’ concept at the core of the show — which is set to conclude its nearly decade-long run at the end of this year — comes from a real scientific theory. And it’s been hotly debated by physicists over the past 75 or so years.
Although the series is as much in the realm of fantasy as science fiction, Stranger Things nods to many concepts of basic physics. Principles of electromagnetism explain haywire compasses, as well as magnets that spontaneously fall off a refrigerator. And in the third season, the characters save the world by using Planck’s constant during their quest to close a gate to the other universe, called the Upside Down (although the show uses the 2014 value for Planck’s constant, which wouldn’t have been standard in the 1980s setting).
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