Imagine for a moment that there's another version of you out there. Are you who made different choices, took different paths, and is living a completely different life? It sounds like science fiction, but some of the most brilliant minds in science believe it could be a reality. On this show, where we tend to delve into a specific story from the weird and wonderful world of the unexplainable. Today is a little different. We're having a conversation about parallel universes.
Do they exist, and if so, what does that mean? This is a study of strange. Welcome back to the show. I'm Michael May, and joining me on a study of strange. This week is our special guest, Rachel Null. Everybody's favorite. Rachel. Noel, I don't know, I was trying to think of a joke, and I couldn't think of one fast enough. Welcome to the show, Rachel. Thanks so much, Mikey. I'm happy to be here. So Rachel is a an actor, a filmmaker, a writer. And you're on today.
You have two films making the rounds right now. One is are both out or one just doing festivals and one is out. Yeah. So ingress is currently out on streaming, on Amazon Prime. And then inheritance is doing the festival run right now. Great. And ingress is the reason I wanted to ask you on today because this is a this episode is going to be slightly different. I wanted to have a discussion about a topic that I'm thoroughly fascinated with.
But yet, as I mentioned to you right before we started recording, I'm also an idiot with science and stuff, so I'm feeling a little petrified to have a discussion about it. But I love the topic and and it's essentially parallel universes, the multiverse, alternate reality, all of these things kind of homogenized together. They all kind of connect to quantum physics in various ways. And your movie ingress deals with this subject matter.
So why don't you tell us a little bit about the movie and how it connects to this topic? Sure. So, yeah, ingress is, sort of a female centric sci fi film. It's about a woman who can move between parallel realities. Just something that she's been able to do her whole life. And, her husband passes away, and it's kind of an exploration of, you know, her journey trying to get back to him, which is ultimately more of a journey of, you know, dealing with her grief,
dealing with the loss of, you know, this person and her life and moving on. And, so, yeah, diving into all that multiverse stuff, but in a very grounded sort of way. Yeah. And it is, you know, it is in the zeitgeisty and it kind of has been for ten or so years and pop culture and movies and books and comics and stories, this idea of these parallel universes. So what drew you to this topic? Were you like, how did you first become interested in it? So a couple pieces to that.
First of all, what's actually really interesting is when I first started writing the script, it was like just before Marvel started, really only this multiverse concept. So when I would tell people about, like, the multiverse, they're like, the what? So it was like this. Even so, the film's already pretty fringy, but like it was even fringe year because nobody knew what the multiverse was.
But then it was funny because by the time I actually got it made, and then when it was coming out, like all of a sudden that was like everywhere, and Marvel had made it really, you know, really well known. So, it came from, for me, a couple of things. So my dad, is a physicist and was a physics teacher.
And so when I was growing up, I had all kinds of cool books on quantum physics, like the parallel realities of self and, the holographic universe and all these things that talk about, you know, from the quantum physics perspective, just how little we actually know about reality and that, you know, this idea of, you know, every time we make a choice, a different reality branch is off where we made a different choice. And it's interesting because now I feel like they've actually proved that.
And that breaks my brain so much because I don't even know how you could possibly prove that. But they say they've proven it now, which is fascinating. So, I think for me, like, I've always really loved grounded sci fi. So there's a movie called, do you ever see the movie Another Earth? No, I know of it. Yeah. Yeah. So it's really cool because it's it's technically about like another about another version of Earth, like, appears in the sky and they realize it's like a duplicate of Earth.
And there's another you living on that earth. And so it's like, very like a cool sci fi concept. But what I loved about it is it was essentially an indie drama about two like Broken People that just happened to be set against this kind of, you know, out there backdrop. And so that was an inspiration for me when I was thinking about ingress, because I wanted the sort of parallel reality jumping in that to feel very grounded and to have it feel like something that we might all kind of go for.
I've experienced something like that. Like, is it possible that I actually did that, you know, to have it be something that feels relatable and not like some crazy, spacey, sort of Doctor Strange in the multiverse kind of thing? Your dad, you said, it is a physicist or taught physics, and he's in the movie, isn't he? I thought you're both in it. Okay. My parents play. My parents? Yeah. That's great. I was like, I think that's actually Rachel's parents. That was really cool.
Let me back up here a little bit and I'm going to give a little bit of not necessarily history, I guess a little bit of history, but a little background to just the idea in case listeners aren't super familiar with it. So the idea of a multiverse is relatively new in terms of like modern science and quantum physics and all these things. However, the idea that there's multiple universes or connective realities, has actually been around a really long time.
I didn't know this till this week, when I kind of did a little periphery research. But the Greeks had two different groups of people that would argue about philosophy and things, and they they essentially discussed the idea that parallel worlds existed, and they were not that different from our own. The ancient Buddhist, thought that there were parallel worlds.
And essentially there's this cyclical, very cyclical Buddhist type of idea that things start and renew again, and it's like it tied into this idea. Schrodinger Mister Mister Cat fan in the 1950s, excuse me, had some equations that he described as, different histories, and he said that they're not alternatives, but all really happened simultaneous, which is just such a great quote I came across. And then the idea more specifically for the multiverse came about in, I think it was 1954.
I didn't write down the date. So I'm I'm trying to remember that off the top of my head. But a gentleman named Hugh Everett at Princeton came up with the idea of a parallel universe exactly like ours that exists. And there's multiple universes, and they branch off and and we also note it as an alternate history or parallel universe. And that's where the the idea stemmed for from. And obviously it's grown and moved and everybody's kind of aware of these different things. And yeah.
Do you mind I'm going to read a quote from Live science.com. I said, okay, of course. All right. So this is from Live Science. Dot com multiverse theory suggests that our universe, with all its hundreds of billions of galaxies and almost countless stars spanning tens of billions of light years, may not be the only one. Instead, there may be an entirely different universe distantly separated from ours. And another. And another.
Indeed, there may be an infinity of universes, all with their own laws of physics, their own collections of stars and galaxies. If stars and galaxies can exist in those universes, and maybe even their own intelligent civilizations, it could be that our universe is just one member of a much grander, much larger multitude of universes a multiverse. Yeah. So that's kind of a little bit of the background of it. I didn't dive too much into the science, because that's where my head explodes.
But but the science is there. And like you said, people have been studying this, theorizing about it, running equations. One of the sort of the, I guess, converse idea behind this is that they do say it's not testable, but I guess now it kind of is testable. I think it's like really recent that they've been able to to test these ideas. Yeah. So what have you come across in your research for this? Well, okay.
So there's some the whole like so the holographic universe theory to me is like a whole other level of crazy around all of this because essentially, like as they get deeper into the quantum, right, like they're really tiny, tiny. And then as they get more into the macro macro, they start to see that, like science just breaks down, like it just doesn't make sense anymore. And so that's where you mentioned Schrodinger's cat.
But like, yeah, that that concept, but also like the particle wave experiment where essentially like when a particle is observed, it does one thing and when it's not observed it does something different. Like that's insane. So the idea that like tangible reality, isn't actually solid at all, and kind of this sense of like what I like about quantum physics is I feel like traditional science is very much like we've we've done these experiments and we've proven this, without a doubt is true.
And quantum physics is like the more we learn, the less we know about anything. And I think that just feels way more true. Yeah. And so when you were diving into this and trying to find that grounded science base for your science fiction film, the you just mentioned it, sort of the split particle experiment, whatever it's called, but it's almost like an infinite, an infinite amount of things can happen unless there's an observer.
And so when you were thinking about this multiverse type of idea, is that because, hey, every decision I would just break it down for like a personal way as an example. But like I'm going to decide to take a sip of water. But I also could have decided not to take a sip of water or walked over there. And every time those decisions are made, they all of them are made. But it's just our observing, the one that that happens in our own reality.
So is that the idea that all these infinite things can happen is that in your story, kind of the idea of I can jump between all these different, you know, options of whatever happens. See, this is where I get dumb. I don't know how to say it. You know what I'm talking about, though I do. Yeah. I mean, I guess what I was kind of playing with is like, sir, you know. Yes, like the small moments. Right? But like, in this case, it was like the death of someone you love.
And that sense of like, okay, if we're thinking about parallel realities, like in one timeline, Toby dies, in another timeline, Toby lives and every, you know, variation in between. And so what if, as a person, you could actually slip between these different versions and what would that actually look like?
And another crazy concept that came into my world that kind of shaped this is so this one's very like brain breaky, but, essentially so this concept of like we think about reality as the spotlight, like a steady stream of light. Right? So there's the past. It comes into the present, it streams into the future. And it's like one continuous line. But the concept was that reality is actually more like a strobe light, meaning moment moments that are completely separate from each other.
So like this moment, you and me in this room, right? Or you were in our separate rooms. We're talking over this, you know, video chat. When I look around, like what I can see, what I can hear. This is reality right now. And in this moment, I can't actually prove that anything outside of this room exists. Including, like, my cat in the other room. I can't prove I have a cat unless it comes into this room. In this moment. So this concept that, like reality, is actually just the present moment.
Memories are a story. The future is a story. And the other crazy thing that kind of played into this was this, you know, memories are fallible, right? So what if this is kind of where the ingress concept came from? Like what if I actually like in this moment? I know myself, as you know, Rachel living in Washington, having like a certain set of experiences. But what if I just landed here and like, prior to this, I was somewhere completely different.
But the minute I landed here, memories filled in to create the sense of, like, a continuous timeline, right? But I actually can't prove that those memories really happened. They're just a story that filled in in my brain. So ingress kind of plays with that. This idea of like, in the moment she's existing, she has memories that fill in that kind of land, her there as if she'd always been there, but she hadn't. And like, what if that's true for all of us? Like, it's that crazy.
What if of quantum physics, where it's like, can I prove that? No. But also, can I prove the opposite? No. So it's kind of like that. That's the space that becomes fun as a storyteller, I think, because it's like in all the unknowns, we can create kind of anything we want. Yeah. And that's where this, this idea really is amazing for for fiction, for art. Because you can take it. So you can take it just like the theories itself. You can take in these infinite amount of directions.
And, and obviously people have everything everywhere, all at once. The movie, I think that it's a fantastic kind of unique job at looking at this kind of stuff. But it is it is strange, which is why I wanted to talk about it, because it is based in science, and people are legitimately working their butts off trying to understand this and, and, you know, test ideas and all this kind of stuff.
But it's bizarre because the quantum world is so different than than, you know, Einstein's theory of relativity and basic physics. And in fact, here I'm going to I'm going to get a little nerdy. Yeah, I made it, made some notes on actual paper. So there's a gentleman named Max Tegmark. Did you do anything you read with him? So he's an at MIT or was at MIT? And he came up with four classifications of multiverse series, I'll call him. And probably misquoting that.
But, one is the extinction of our own universe. And, look, I'm going to, like, bring this down to dummy talk here, but, it's the idea of we have the observable universe. We can look back and observe near the beginning of time and quote unquote, the Big bang. And we have the observable universe. But what's outside of that? And it doesn't mean the universe ends. We just don't know what's outside of that. The second classification is pocket universes.
So when inflation happen, which is like the expansion for the Big Bang, you could get these little offshoots of, of universes off of our own observable universe as that goes on, where physics can be entirely different. And this ties in with string theory, which is working to kind of match up and make physics blend with quantum physics.
Then there's the mini worlds classification, which is very similar to your movie, which is we're we're not separated or we're separated by time, but not place, I guess is one way to think about it. Again, I just made your eyes roll. That's because I. Know that that wasn't what you thought. That was a thinking eye roll, not an Imax. Yeah, it's, And that one. Yeah, that's very similar to a lot of sort of the movies and books out there.
And then there's a fourth classification, which I so did not understand. But it's called Mathematical Universe is, which sounded way more kind of like out there and weird to the point that what I was reading about that I was like, I don't understand a word of this. But anyway, those are the four classifications, that this gentleman came up with that I think people have been scientists have been playing around with. But I do like. Oh, cool. Yeah. It is so cool, isn't it? Yeah.
So now that I said that when you were researching, did you come across any stories from people that said that they had some kind of experience that made them think maybe they were seeing into a different universe or living in it or whatever? And yeah, what what did you come across and what can you share? Absolutely. You know what's really interesting? So this film has has found kind of an interesting cross-section of humans.
One is like the sort of sci fi quantum physics side, but it's really found roots in the metaphysical community. Yeah. Because, so in my movie, there's a character who's a spiritual channel, which is a concept that for people who aren't in that kind of more metaphysical New Age space, there's people who, channel what they call, you know, entities that are other dimensional. So, you know, the one of the most famous ones is, like Abraham Hicks, who this woman, Esther Hicks channels.
There's a guy named, Daryl Anka who channels, an entity called Bashar. These are like, you know, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of these on YouTube, you know, do conferences all over the world kind of thing. But, a lot of the channeled content talks about this stuff and other worlds, other realities, kind of different ways of looking at our reality. So I have had access to a spiritual channel. I grew up in Santa Fe, and my parents were kind of very cute into that sort of spiritual community.
And so a good friend of theirs is a spiritual channel. And so throughout my sort of adolescence and into adulthood, I had a lot of conversations with her and the entity that she channels. And that was just so fascinating to me in terms of it's just like hearing a completely different perspective.
And again, whether you think that's total nonsense or whether you believe that's true, the concepts brought through, I think are fascinating, and they're very in line with kind of everything we've been talking about today. So from that, there's been several people, especially once the film started coming out who had messaged me or come up to me after screenings and say either like, oh, I do this all the time, or like I've had experiences like that or and let me tell you my story.
You know, about like just crazy things, you know, sitting in in sort of a flexi place where a loved one was alive and a loved one was dead, and they could see both and not knowing which way it would go or, you know, this idea and I again, the way I made the movie and if you see the movie, you know, you can let me know if if it's exceeded.
But the concept that like the way that, you know, these symptoms, these things that happen that that illustrate that she's moved into another reality are all things that, again, I experience and it makes me wonder, like, so, you know, when I get like a random ringing in my ears just out of nowhere, like, what's that about? Or like I'll have experiences where I'm walking down a street. I've been down like a thousand times, and all of a sudden there's a brand new there's a house right there.
It's not like they just built it, like, not new, like, oh, they've been doing construction and there's a new house. But like, that house was not there yesterday, and now it's there. And my brain immediately is like, well, you probably just never looked over there and it's been there all along. But this whole movie is dealing with like, but what if that's. Not. Like, what if it actually just is a new house? And what if I actually just step into a new reality and I don't even realize it?
So I think just threading that line of like, I don't know, maybe things aren't what they seem. Yeah. And it's it's really fun because much more in sort of a topic that I feel more comfortable talking about. But there are people that theorize that maybe ghosts are just seeing into some other alternate dimension, which could be, you know, some sort of multiverse or parallel universe.
You're you're getting some sort of lift into, there's also talk, which I think is hilarious, but that, that things like Bigfoot or Cryptid are actually just beings from another unit, like parallel universe that have somehow we're seeing or have gotten into ours, or there's a bunch of different thoughts about that. And so it ties in to all of the more like creepy stories that we also have as a culture and society, where you can tie in this theory to a multiverse into those things as well.
Have you did you read it sounds very similar to, what you're talking about in the stories you've been talking about with people that have come up to you, but it reminds me of time slip stories. You can read Time Slips. So I had an episode about one of the most famous ones, which is Sir Victor Goddard, who was a pilot, in, before World War Two, and he was flying his open air airplane in England and passed over a, an airport that he thought was defunct after the First World War.
But there were people there, and the uniforms didn't match the real military uniforms. And he thinks he saw into the future, because those uniforms were what the uniforms became later on. And the planes were different. And in my episode, people can listen to it. I, I enjoyed the episode, but there are some discussions to sort of debunk what he thinks happened.
But there there have been a lot of other stories about time slips, people wandering down streets, and suddenly they think they're in the 1960s and the story they were going to, which is like a gap, is now an old bookstore. But when they leave, it's a gap again. And that could tie into the multiverse as well. If those two, like you're saying, what if what if that is a real experience? Yeah. What if that's sort of sort of slip into an alternate reality?
Well, because when you're getting into quantum physics, like time is also a construct, time is a construct. The human brains understand. And like they've even proven that like many, many animals. And again, how do you know, like, I always wonder this when they're like, cats don't see colors. I'm like, but how do you know cats only see you as big cats and like, well, that sounds cool, but how do you know anyway? But they say that a lot of animals don't experience time the way we experience time.
And so we're so married to our timeline based in like linear time. But if that's a construct, then it's like if you start even just having your brain try to comprehend like, well, what if time isn't actually a thing? What if it doesn't exist? Like, did you see the movie arrival with Amy? Yes. Oh yeah, I love that movie. Oh, I mean, it did such a great job of like, exploring a really complicated subject, but that concept of, like, circular time. Yes.
And how she comes into a place where, like past is influencing future is influencing present. And again, lately they've been proving that the present can alter the pack. And like, I don't know how they do this, but it's so interesting. It's like that they all somehow connect with each other where it's like future, present past, like their relationship maybe is not what we think in terms of this one directional line going like that, right? Yeah, yeah.
So what are your thoughts on because in the movie your character has these experiences and I don't want to use this word, but I can't think of a better one right now. But like a power to kind of have these experiences with these alternate dimensions or universes, whatever you want to call them. In the real in, in our reality. Is that even possible? Or if it is, what would actually make it possible in your in your opinions or ideas? Yeah.
I mean, I personally think it's possible and I think it's probably happening all the time to all of us though. And one thing I explored in the film and is like, you know, this concept of like mental illness. And again, I don't want to discredit the fact that, like some people and the mental illness they have is something that requires medication or requires, you know, institutionalization like, depends like there's some very crazy stuff that goes on.
But we are very good at diagnosing and compartmentalizing people if they have experiences that don't match what we understand to be true. And so what this film also explores is like two people who are experiencing reality in a different way, both kind of getting diagnosed, being afraid of being othered and kind of trying to shut it down. And I think so many of us would do that all the time, like the parts of us that we're like, well, that's a little weird.
And I don't know if like, you know, reality or friends or society will accept that part of me. But like, I think if we all open up to that weird a little more, like the thing I learned in making this movie is like, by kind of putting my weird out on the screen in this movie, other people started being like, hey, me too. And then I didn't feel so weird and alone. You know, it's kind of like, I just think there's so many things that we all experience that we kind of just push away.
And I think if we all were more open to just being like, well, that that was an experience I had and I can't explain it, but that doesn't mean I'm crazy or it didn't happen. Maybe it would just open up a little window toward some superpowers that all of us are maybe harboring that we're not even aware of. Right? Empathy, intuition, like things that, you know, have kind of been relegated to, like the supernatural.
But I think we've seen people who have predict the future can read dreams are psychics or energy healers or, you know, like, what is that thing? Qigong where like, they can shoot energy and it like, breaks things or like, hits a gong across the like, there's crazy stuff that we've seen happen that we kind of like, forget about that.
People are doing monks who meditate in caves and don't eat for like three months and they don't like they don't eat or drink and they put themselves in some kind of stasis and they don't die. Like there's all kinds of incredible stuff happening. I wrote down a couple of quick little stories that I think are fascinating. The first one, honestly, I think just because of the types of stories, these are like, quote unquote time slip stories. But again, I think that fits into this theory.
The overall broad theory of this. But there's a case it's called the Dunster case, which is in 1993 when it happened. You know, it's a couple I think their name was the Roberts. And they were visiting a village in Somerset, Dunster, and they were making their way to their hotel around 7:30 p.m. after exploring. And they got lost in a village called mountain, and they saw beautiful flowers and landscape, you know, sort of that, that idyllic hillside, British hillside sort of idea.
There was a plaque that had a mention of like the best village, and it was from 1976, and they went back the next day like they ended up finding their way back to their hotel, and they went back because they wanted to take pictures of the flowers and the beautiful scenery. And when they went back, there were no flowers. Everything was bare. Everything was sort of falling apart. There was no plaque from 1976, and it seemed like the whole village had shifted into a different version of itself.
And so again, that's a kind of a brief version of that story. There's one I, I wrote this down from memory. I don't remember specifically who it was or when it took place, but I love it because I could see this being the setup for a movie. But there was a woman again in England is full of time slip stories, so a lot of them are from there.
But a woman in England is passing through its small town, and she saw this beautiful old church, and she went there and she actually, like, went to church that day and saw the beautiful congregation and had a great old time. And she loved it so much that weeks later she's like, I'm going to go back to that church today. And she went back to the church, but it was like burned and like torn apart. And she asked someone nearby like, hey, what happened to the church?
And they're like, oh, it was bombed during World War Two. So it wasn't in, in the, you know, the correct state when she was there before. Which is just like a fascinating little setup for a story. Now, I don't know if that story is true or not. It could a lot of these sort of urban legends, that you come across when you research it. But they're, they're fascinating stories, which, again, is why this fits so well with movies or books or anything that you can come up with some fantastic stuff.
Totally. Yeah. And when you, you know, you mentioned one like England and you know, because the England and Ireland and Scotland, they also have this fairy culture. Right? And they're like, oh yeah, we'll talk about like getting lost in fairy land and coming out in different times or losing time or the Rip Van Winkle thing of like what? You know, you think you've lost a day, but you've lost 50 years, like, right. All kinds of.
So it's like whether we're calling it fairies, parallel realities, time slips like there's what about the Bermuda Triangle? I'm sure you've done a podcast about that or. Well, but again, there's just like, there's stuff that's like been in our zeitgeist for so long, that is just like enough people are having crazy experiences that it just makes it. Yeah, as you said, like we can't prove without the shadow of a doubt that this stuff is, quote, true.
But quantum physics is like, yeah, duh, you don't know what the hell is going on here. And I think that's what makes it. It's like, what if it could be? And that's what makes life so fun. It yeah, that is a great way to put it. And I think quantum physics is where, where that realm of the strange kind of mixes with our perceived version of reality in a way that might explain all these weird things that can happen in the world. And it's super fun. So why don't we do this?
Thank you for being on Rachel. And where can people find ingress? Yeah. So ingress is currently streaming in the US, on Amazon Prime, Fandango at Home and Vimeo on Demand. We're hoping to be going more wide, in the next few months in terms of more of an international streaming release and, more platforms. So I'll definitely be posting about that. But please go watch it on Amazon. And if you like it, give us a rating, give us a review. I always love hearing what people think.
And of course, and I will put some links as well in the show notes for these things. And you have another movie called inheritance, which is, going to come out soon, I'm sure. And I'm excited about that. That one does not deal with, alternate realities of any kind. Not that I know any way. You know? But. Yeah. Yeah, I'm really excited about that. And. Yeah. Thank you again. I was I'm feeling again.
I was I'm still a little petrified that I'm talking about something so scientific, and I just feel like such a dumb dumb. But this is a topic that I've wanted to explore and I continue to read about, and I do. I watch YouTube videos, like at night in bed and, my brain will explode and you know that I'll read some sort of scientific journal a day later about the same topic again. My head will explode.
But it's so interesting and I really appreciate you taking the time just to explore it a little with me and teach me some stuff too. Oh my gosh, it's so fun! Thank you for letting me geek out about this stuff. Talk for hours. That'll do it for the show. Thank you for listening to a study of strange. Next time, I'm going deep into a serial killer story that has intrigued me for quite some time, so it will be a very different episode.
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