Stuff to Blow Your Mind Live: Stranger Science

how you doing? Hey, nice cozy crowd. Did everybody grab some some shirts or some buttons or shirts and buttons? Stuff is legit free. Yeah. In fact, we don't want to bring any of it back home, so grab more of it until there's none. You can't regift it for Christmas or Halloween. Car for Halloween. Yeah. So this is the Stuff to Blow your Own podcast. How many of you guys listen to this show? You know to expect Okay, cool, But who's a newbie here who's never heard us before?

Get ready? The pressure is uncle I press you then, uh we're pretty weird. Um, we might make you uncomfortable. I hope you're who Who's Well, we'll get into this at the beginning. But yeah, so basically we're recording. This is gonna publish next week. Uh So we're gonna start the show like we normally do, and it's recording over there, and then we'll just proceed as normal and then hopefully afterwards we'll have a couple of minutes to hang out. Yeah, definitely, Okay, cool,

all right, well let's kick it off. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Christian Saga and I'm Joe McCormick. So if you are not familiar with us, if you're one of those newbies out there who raised your hand, we are the hosts of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast, which is a science podcast of the How Stuff Works

office in Atlanta. The core of our show is science, but we take a pretty interdisciplinary approach, so we get into philosophy, religion, mythology, history, pop culture of course, and that's where we're going tonight. So, because we're here at the same time as New York Comic Con, how many of you are actually going to New York Comic Con? So a lot. Okay, we were worried. There was like confusion about whether or not you could come if you weren't a part of New York Comic Con. Yeah, were

you confused? I was confused? All right, is anybody here in costume? No? Yeah? Okay, sort of okay, Um. So yeah, So we that we were doing this at the same times New York Comic Cons, So they were like, can you do something pop culture related? And we talked about it for a bit um and we decided, hey, how about the science of the show Stranger Things, because we have fans of Stranger Things out there. Yeah, let's dude, raise your hand if you have not seeing Stranger Things. Okay, Okay,

we're gonna try. But we're gonna talk about how science relates to the show. We might drop a couple of things, because that's one of the really cool things about Stranger Things is that, you know, it's a fabulous show that's chock full of nostalgia, but they do a great job of bringing some science and some tantalizing pseudoscience, uh into the show, sometimes just as kind of window dressing, but but it adds to just the potency of the show. Yeah,

we actually have a quote from a physics expert. Later on he spoke to them and basically said, those guys did their homework, so that that made it even more fun for us to cover this for an episode because there's a lot to dig into. Right. So season two is coming up. We're big fans of the show, so we're gonna talk about a few subjects related to plot

points in the show. We're going to be talking about Parallel Universe, is government psychic research, and the real life figure in the history of twentieth century science who we think inspired. Is it fair to say he's the favorite character of all three of us? Dr Brenner. Oh yeah, played by the one and only Matthew Modine. Hey, do you guys remember when Matthew Modine used to follow us on Twitter? He did follow us on Twitter for like a week and a half and when that was like

the highlight of our careers. Uh So, Matthew Modine followed us, and Robert and I did a high five, and then like maybe a month later he unfollowed us. And then a month after that, Stranger Things came out and we were like, what's going on here? We watched the show and we were like, wait a minute, Matthew Modine is playing John C. Lily in this and John C. Lily is one of our favorites, Like if you ever listened to the show, we bring him up pretty much every

episode and we have a whole episode all about him. Yeah, yeah, we do. And some of you might be wondering who is John C. Lily? What does he look like? Well I'm gonna explain some of this, but also you all have tiny pocket computers in your possession. We will not be a finn did if you look up John C. Lily or if you need a refresher on what Doctor Brenner looks like, I will refresh you though. Uh. Doctor Brenner, of course, played by Matthew Mdeen. Silver hair, as you recall, glorious,

glorious silver hair. Uh you know slim tank. Pardon his hair? Do you think it's natural? Oh? Yeah, silver, that's the actual color. Yeah. But Brenner, as he's uh presented in the show, he's obsessed with, I think, connecting with other minds. So for part of that show, it's connecting with human minds, and then it becomes more about connecting with these extra

dimensional minds. Andy he initiates this contact with other people with extra dimensional beings through an isolation tank, a float tank and uh and and then uses that float tank to enhance Eleven's psychic powers. Okay, so give me the compare and contrast essay, how does that compare with the real John C. Lily? Okay, So for starters, John C. Lily invented the isolation tank. Everybody out there, if you've ever gone and floated somewhere, you can thank John C.

Lily for bringing this into the world. In addition, he was a pioneer in the field of electronic brain and stimulation. He mapped the pain and pleasure pathways of the brain, and he founded an entire branch of science sixploring interspecies communication, mostly between humans and dolphins. He also got into a good bit of trouble with all that, but we'll touch on that a little bit later on. He also really dirty details, So you should you should listen to the

episode that we did just right. We did an episode a year ago. I'll give you I'll give you a quick hint and then we'll just move on because we're not going to talk about this here. But it involves sexual relations with dolphins. And it's pretty great. Yeah, they're not really between Lily himself, but one of Lily at the time was too busy taking massive quantities that all us to be floating himself. He didn't have time for that stuff. Yeah, and and and using this experience to

try and connect with the alien intelligence of dolphins. So we have these two, these two figures right and on again Brenner on the show is this, uh, you know, very well put together an old guy in the old fashioned suit. If you look up pictures of Lily, you will find images of a man and like an older man in brightly colored like loud shirts and sometimes the coon skin cap. He dresses up like he's like about

to fight the Battle of the ALBUMO. Yeah. He he is dressed like you would expect a counter culture Timothy Leary esque figure to dress. And so you might say, well, Brenner doesn't look anything like that. What possible connection could there be? Well, I was looking at a two thousand sixteen interview with Observer dot Com, and Matthew Modine himself mentioned that the Duffer Brothers originally envisioned Brenner as quote,

an unshaven man in jeans and plaid shirts. And then Modine worked with the Duffers to sort of flesh this out and change it. Uh. Modine says that he drew on elements from Anna Atome, Alfred Hitchcock, Carry Grant, and Lawrence Olivier and stuff to blow your mind. Well, he clearly clearly followed us on Twitter solely so that we could help him figure out how to dress for this TV show alleged. Allegedly, Uh, Matthew, are you here? No, I don't think he showed. Not yet. Well, hopefully by

the help him in like him in might be late. Okay. The crazy part though, is that this this version of a lily S figure that we get on Stranger Things. He may not resemble that counterculture uh John C. Lily, but he definitely resembles the establishment John C. Lily that came before him. So there's like a John cy Lily arc where he first he's this buttoned up guy, and then later he becomes this cross between sort of like

George Lucas in the seventies. And if you've ever seen the Mystery Science Theater episode Final Sacrifice, remember the old prospector Pepper Pepper. Yeah, yeah, he did kind of look like Pepper but when he was younger, he was just kind of this square looking but scary I will say, scary government scientists. Um, let me just take a minute to to roll through some of the uh, basically, the

background of John C. Lily So. John C. Really earned his physics degree from cal Tech in ninety eight, his doctor in Medicine from the University of Pennsylvania nWo, and as a faculty member he studied biophysics and psychoanalysis at the University of Pennsylvania, and he was primarily interested in the physical structures of the brain and the seat of the conscious self. So even when he was before he got all um enlightened, uh, he was, he was still

very interested in connecting with other minds. That was always this thing, whether it's physically or via the use of LSD later on. But despite the unorthodox nature of his research, he did do a fair amount of working for the man, right, Yes,

a fair amount. Basically he wanted to pursue his own agenda and if the man was going to use him to, you know, to create ways to torment and and extract information from Cold World War spies, and he was on board until he started cutting up the brains of macaques and dolphins. Yeah. So he did this for about a decade working for the National Institutes of Mental Health or NIM. Uh. Did he make those really smart rats? Well, mostly he worked on maccaux uh. And he had he did a

lot of invasive cortical visa section. So again, not already he's off to some kind of nefarious work. I think a lot of us would agree. He had a pretty high security clearance. J Edgar Hoover allegedly knew him by name, and his projects that he was involved with included reprogramming or brainwashing, sleep deprivation, and the operant control of animals via wires and planted in their brain. Yeah. So some

pretty scary stuff. And according to de Graham Burnett's excellent O Ryan article A Mind and Water, Lily's unpublished paper Special Considerations of Modified Human Agents as reconnaiss sen and Intelligence Devices UH included this quote. Uh he wrote of quote A Coort Covort, he wrote a covert and relatively safe implantation of electrodes into the human brain for the quote push button control of the totality of motivation and

of consciousness. So, but just to be clear here, he didn't put electrodes in the brain of eleven year old girls with shaped heads. Uh, there's no arts that he actually, you know, did any of this to human being, But he was he was up for it. If if I think, if he would have been given me okay, is like you feel like putting an implant in somebody's brain this weekend, Yeah, he would have been. He would have been game because

you really get the impression that he was. He was all in on anything scary the government wanted him to do so long as it, you know, pursued his interest in connecting with other minds. This ended up leading him to conducting some experimentation with dolphins in Florida, and it was here where he began to have this empathic connection

with dolphins. He began to like, he performed a vivisection on on a dolphin, and due to some of the quirks of dolphin physiology, you could not actually put the dolphin under for this, so it was like a live, conscious davisection of the dolphin's brain. And this this had a profound impact on Lily. He ended up going down this path um of promoting the welfare of dolphins, promoting

the the higher intelligence of dolphins. So he really he really helped bring about a cultural shift in how we perceive this animal, that it's not just another dumb animal in the water, but it's something that we should we should value, that we should protect even and we wouldn't have we wouldn't have Flipper if it were not for John C. Lily. So actually, this is a good point.

I probably should have brought this up earlier. But there are two movies that you've probably seen that are very heavily based on John C. Lily's life, the first of which is Altered States. Uh, and we'll talk more about that later when we get into the isolation to banks. But has anybody seen the film The Day of the Dolphin with George C. Scott? No one, Scotts all right,

so this isn't you go find it. This is a movie where George C. Scott essentially plays John C. Lily and he teaches dolphins to talk and and to love and to love. Yeah, so like they call him fa he's their father and they say things like fall loves pa. Uh. It's great. Go watch it if you want to see George C. Scott just hanging out with dolphins. But the other thing that we wouldn't have without him. He didn't. He didn't influence this movie in terms of that it

was about him. But the creature from the Black Lagoons, right, Yeah, the guy who played the creature worked on Flipper and worked with John C. Lily while he was down in Florida, So yeah we can. We can thank him for the creature. And I would argue that if if anyone ever gets around to actually remaking the creature from the Black Lagoon, they should. They should take inspiration from John C. Lily story and from Altered States and use that to bring

us a proper creature film. Yeah, you get a creature from the lack Black Lagoon with LSD and isolation tanks and dolphins throwing some dolphins. I'm on board. Yeah, yeah, it'd be great Instead of like Tom Cruise running around, I want to just doing exposition for thirty minutes. Wait, so I have a question about y'all's predictions for Stranger Things. Do you think in upcoming seasons we're going to see Matthew Modine's character follow the same arc as John C.

Lily throughout his life, So will he coming back? He'll come back in future seasons Hawaiian shirts, Beard long ponytail gained a significant amount of weight doing you know LSD orgies and stuff. Yeah, I hope, so, I hope by season four he is is wearing the coonskin hat and and helping the kids out. So I didn't think about this, but I mean, you know, this is a ending was left open. Let's put it that way. Maybe he's from

a parallel universe, this other Matthew Modine. Oh my goodness, we could have multiple um doctor Brenners in one versions of Brenner and Lily together at once. I like it floating in a tank taking LSD. Thank So I want to shift now to explore a different element of stranger things, which is of course the government psychic research being conducted at Hawkins Laboratory, Hawkins National Lab. I think in the show that they say is being carried out by the

Department of Energy. Uh so I want I'm gonna put you in a scenario. See if you can go into this place with your mind. Imagine you are a Defense Department analyst in about the spring of nineteen seventy and so you're just gonna be washed head to toe in

cold war paranoia. You've heard these rumors about a secret electronic warfare device saimed at the American embassy in Moscow, And there are also these rumors about weird LSD mind control experiments going on over at c I A. You get the sense that we're in an age of unconventional war are fair, where these strange new technologies are going to change the balance of power across the globe and

you don't want to fall behind. Sounds like right now, Yeah, except I guess a little less focused on like social media, and you know it's Facebook for drones and more on like controlling people's minds and killing people with electronics with electromagnetic beams. Well, the thing is in an age before social media, Like let me, social media is kind of this weird and sorcery that connects all of these minds together.

And before you had that, you the only thing you had was the possibility, however distant of of psychic communication, right, I mean, why would we need to do psychic research now when you can just get in somebody's news feed? Yeah? Anyway, I mean sadly, I mean the research is it's remarkably cold alter someone's mind through I mean, not in a science fictional way, but in a very very scary real way that went to a scary place. Okay, now let's go back to the Cold War where it's fine. So

you're this analyst in nineteen seventy. One of your superiors calls you in for a meeting in a secured room. There is a projector screen and somebody puts up. Somebody gets a film going, and a title card announces that the following experiment took place at the Oktomski Military Institute in Leningrad on March tenth of this year. Then you see a forty something woman, big bun of dark hair.

She seated at a table, and next to her is a man identified as Ganadi Sergeyev, who is a military Soviet military physician, and seated uh so on the table in front of the woman. Somebody comes in and they set down a small jar containing a throbbing black lump. It's a frog's heart and it's still beating now. The film explains that the extracted amphibian heart has been placed in what's known as Ringer's solution. It's a solution of salts that can keep muscles pumping even after they've been

separated from circulation. Uh, and from their electrical stimuli in the body. It's kind of like how if you if you ever seen the trick where you salt frog's legs, they'll start to twitch um. And it's known that the Ringer's solution can keep a frog's heart beating, usually for about an hour. The heart is connected by wires to an electro cardiogram and e KG and so is the woman seated at the table, and then Dr Sergeyev tells

her to begin. So the woman puts her hands on the table and she glares at the beating frog heart, and her heart rate increases and her blood pressure increases. And the film also claims that quote heightened biological luminescence radiated from her eyes, which I can imagine that she was doing the like psychic powers thing, like holding her temples really heard and squinting, but you know, her eyes glowed,

that's what they say. I mean, it's hard to tell in black and white, right, But anyway, after about seven minutes of this just staring at this throbbing black lump, the frog's heart abruptly seizes and stops beating. Then she does it with a second frog heart when yeah, so they bringing another. Somebody's got an ice cream scoop back there, and they're just going to town on the table. I think a melon baller would be more appropriate. I think

you can really get him there with the Uh. Yeah, so she's I don't know what frogs did to her, but she's she's killing the hearts and I guess the frogs probably don't mind at this point. But next she turns her attention to what's identified as a skeptical doctor in the room, and he doesn't believe any of this, but she concentrates on raising his heart rate telekinetically, and this goes on for about five minutes before Dr Sergeyev, the attending physician he steps in, says the experiments becoming

too dangerous and he calls it to a halt. This sounds like scanners. It's going to scan everyone in this room. Yeah. Um. It also sounds like such an obvious trick. It's such an obvious performance. It seems a little over the top. Right, we're bringing so buddy who doesn't believe, will show him anyway. This woman didn't explode. Yeah, this woman really existed. Her name was Nil Coolaghina, also sometimes mistakenly known as Nina Coolaghina.

Her life was truly remarkable in some ways. Cool Agana was born in Leningrad in nine She enlisted in the Red Army along with the rest of her family when she was fourteen, and she served as a tank radio operator on the Eastern Front of World War Two and was awarded the Soviet Military merit metal. Can you just imagine, It's like when you were fourteen, were you ready to get in a tank and fight Nazis? It's like, it's Nazis. You know your fourteen get in the tank, let's go. Yes,

that is exactly how much held. No, No, I can't Did she drive the tank psychically? I don't think so. I think she operated the radio, But she did believe that she'd been psychic since childhood, so who knows if it played into her military career. But she only killed the hearts of German frogs. I don't know the answer

to that. Christian uh so anyway, Uh yeah, So she she's had this career and in the nineteen sixties, after the war's over, cool againa She makes a name for herself again when she shows up on Russian state TV performing these demonstrations of psycho kinesis. Where they'd like, have a big glass box it's all sealed off, and somebody put a salt shaker or something inside it, and she'd stare at it and then move it with her mind, or so they claimed. Uh, Now, everything I just described

to you cool Aghina, the frog Heart tape, that's all real. Uh, it's at some point the Defense Department really did have analysts investigate this psychic kill tape. The question is, of course, what's going on in the film. Uh, if you're this hypothetical analyst in nineteen seventy, what do you do? Obviously, if if you're like me and I think like us, generally you assume, well, this is probably some kind of hoax. I mean, I'm not personally very keen on the existence

of psychic powers. Either she's some kind of skilled illusionist hoaxing the Russians or the Russia and stage the whole thing as a hoax on us, trying to trick us into wasting money on parallel research. If that was the case, it worked, it worked. So yeah, if even if you are skeptical of what's going on, there are going to be people in the room with you who say, well, we can't be sure and we sure as hell can't allow us psychic assassin gap, So bring on the age

of psychic research. Actually, the funny thing is some amount of paranormal research had already been being funded by the government of the United States since at least going back to the nineteen fifties. There had been interested in it at CIA and UH and in a few places here and there. But it was in the early nineteen seventies

that the psychic research really got underway. Well, this, this is when we really got to the point where the government could throw just tons of cash down the well after it, right right, Yes, So yeah, rich country worried about weapons gaps, worried about falling behind in this technology race I described up at the beginning. Everybody's paranoid about the Russians getting an edge, so they're like, well, we might as well train some psychic spies and assassins and

see if it works. Do you think we have something like that going on now? But it's like a social media assassination gap. I don't want to. But the crazy thing about the psychic research is we know it continued until at least the nineteen nineties and maybe even later. That's pretty cool. Right, like some people in here we're alive then yeah. Anyway, So in Stranger Things, we've got this plot element of the character played by Millie Bobby Brown.

Of course eleven. She's the product of government psychic research. And if you want to know whether psychic powers are real, I can't answer that for you. If you're interested in my opinion, I'm extremely doubtful. But if you're interested in whether the US government really did psychic research projects like the kind we see in Stranger Things, the answer is pretty much absolutely yes. They did stuff like that, not so much with kidnapped children, and they did it with

consenting adults who claimed to be psychics. But all all the types of experiments we see are mirrored by real, real life research. So um, I want to talk briefly about a couple kinds of science psychic research that we're done by the government. Research on psychokinesis, which of course was being able to move things with your mind, and then research on remote viewing, which is seeing without the eyes.

And I should also mention a couple of books that, if you want to go deeper on this subject, were also important sources for me when I was working on this. If you just want to slim and hilarious investigation into a grab bag of government paranormal research. John Ronson's two thousand four book The Men Who Stare At Goats is excellent and full of really funny stuff. This is the one upon which the movie is based, right, yes, exactly. Uh, though there's a lot of stuff in the book. I

think that doesn't make it into the movie. For a more detailed history of US government psychic research programs, you can check out a book just published this year called Phenomena by the journalist Annie Jacobson. This book is great for all the interviews and historical documents she pulls together. Uh, though I do want to warn you that she takes

kind of a believers line on it. Like I think she is far too generous to the possible existence of psychic psychic phenomena and generally has the attitude that ESP is real and these experiments prove it. That's surprising given her her pedigree. Well, it's a good history either way. I mean, we all want to live in that world. But I mean, when it comes down to it, like, nobody has has taken James Randy up on his million dollar prize, right, and he gets kind of rough treatment

in this book. James Randy, if you're not familiar with him, is a stage magician, illusion illusionist who is a big antagonist of all these people who claim to be real psychics.

And he's like, for years he did this thing where he had lots of money set aside for anybody who could come demonstrate the reality of psychic powers or esp or telekinesis anything like that under controlled laboratory conditions, And a lot of times what people would say it was like, oh, oh wait a minute, if if there are skeptical scientists who don't believe in my powers present, they won't work. I wish I could use that superpower limitation. Can you

imagine saying that in a job interview? Or or what if like of all X men can only use their powers in the positive environment? Yeah right, so yeah, man, school would be rough and they all live in a school. Uh So. A lot of the government funded psychic research

of the kind like we see in Stranger Things. It took place at a think tank in northern California called the Stanford Research Institute or s r I, especially starting in nineteen seventy two and in nineteen seventy two, s r I was the second largest research institute working for the Defense Department. Number one, of course, was the Rand Corporation. I found out not actually named after Iron Rand kind of a disappointment. Is named after Danny Rand from Iron

Fist because everybody like that Netflix show. So did you say he actually has has a corporation? Yeah, this is we're talking about this earlier. Does anybody know if the guy who created iron Fist was just like a huge fan of Atlas Shrugged. We couldn't figure it out. We thought we maybe we'd ask around, Okay, anyways, without checking

that out for us anyway. So yeah, So the the sr I was doing all this research, and it had been it had been founded right after World War two, so it had been around for a while before it got deep into the psychic research. But this was a serious government think tank that did real research. They got budgets reaching up to like seventy million dollars a year. That's in like nineteen seventies dollars, So some real money

is going into this kind of stuff. And a major figure in this history, especially at s r I, is a guy named Harold how put Off. Now how put Off was an sr I reach researcher who had worked on laser physics, and he'd done these n s A supercomputer projects in the past, and the early nineteen seventies put Off really interested in research about psychic powers in plants. So there was this guy named Grover Cleveland Cleve Baxter. Grover Cleveland, Cleve Baxter, like Cleve. Did he rename himself

or did his parents? Just like? I think it was just his name. What I love about this name is that it sounds like one of the fake NFL player or is it college football player names from the Keen Pel Peel sketch, you know where they all have ridiculous names. Yeah, Cleve Grover Cleveland Cleve Baxter that I'm going to just start adding Cleve Baxter after minor Well, it makes me think of Clive Barker, right, so it's like Clive Barker, Clive Barker. Yeah. So this guy was essentially he wanted

to make psychic plants cineambites. Really not quite okay, so let me get there. Baxter was a former CIA employee who used to administer poly tests for the agency. He was not probably not a cool guy. He was the kind of guy who like hook up new agents to a polygraph and ask them questions like have you ever smoked the marijuana? Are you a homosexual? And stuff like that. In the nineteen fifties, um and so, one night, after hooking his lie detector machine up to a house plant,

he became convinced that plants could read our minds. Do you think he was just bored and just sort of going around the house and hooking up various things like the nightstand and to punch bowl, and then oh, let's try the fern. See what happens. It's impossible to know for sure, but I think it's the opposite. I think he was more like manic and trying to find any

kind of thing to do. And he just saw the lie detector machine, saw the house plant, put two and two together, and made and set a plant on fire to see if it would, you know, communicate with him psychically. Anyway, he did worse than set it on fire, right, Wait? What? No? No?

Come next? Okay, So so this other guy from SR how put off, So he got interested in this guy Cleave call me Cleave Baxter's research, and put Off proposed an experiment where he would grow an allergy culture and then split it in half and then separate the two cultures by five miles and then torture one of the algae cultures with lasers to see if the other one

would respond. This is the thing that blows my mind that he had lasers to do it with, Like he didn't just set it on fire, I don't know, punch the algae like. He was a laser researcher. He'd done lasers up and down, so he just had lasers laying around detecting machine. The lasers make it more science, I guess. Okay, I see because because his methodology section in the paper. Yeah, it ends. It lends a layer. Layer lends an air of credibility if you're doing defense research right well, you know,

and if the lasers were not involved, it is. It is a lot like, for instance, the power the powder of sympathy, which we covered on the podcast. The supposed idea that that you could you could put a magic powder on a blade that it wounded a dog and it would make the dog yelp halfway around the world and you could use this to uh navigate your sailing vessel.

This is a good thing to point out because a lot of this research that was actually done in these labs throughout the twentieth century sounds a lot like magical potions and occult beliefs from like the eighteenth and nineteenth century, except they've just sort of like put some science e sounding words in there, but the principles are the same. Uh.

And so here's your science e sounding words. Pudof was interested in whether a hypothetical particle in physics called a tach eon could explain psychic communication between plants and humans. Take eon is a hypothetical particle. Nobody's ever seen it before. But if it existed, what it would be is a particle that always moves faster than light. So no particle with mass in our universe can move up, can accelerate up to the speed of light. Attack eon would be

something that could never decelerate down to the speed of light. Uh. And so he thought, yeah, maybe that's involved in psychic phenomena anyway. Now this is where John Carpenter got the idea. I assumed to have tachians communicate with people's dreams in the past of darkness. What a great movie, the best movie ever to feature a jar of satan. Okay, so back to put Out put Off got in touch with Baxter, and through being in touch with Baxter, he got to know this guy who is an artist and a writer

and a self proclaimed psychic named Ingo Swan. And this where are these names coming from? These are real names, man. This guy sounds like like a villain in a Ghostbusters movie. Ingo. Yeah, like he made the tower that will bring forth the giant slore. Yeah. Yeah. He has like a book all about like the book of Ingo Swan. Well, this guy apparently did he would like dress himself in old like religious clothes. He found it second hand stores and stuff

like that. But I don't know, I kind of admire that part of him, and it's like, yeah, you just do you man well, And it sounds like you want to wear a priest outfit, go for it. He sounds like he was a showman too. And that's what we keep seeing time and time again with these examples. As you have you have scientists and some showman and uh, and the scientists don't realize that what they have as a showman exactly. So put Off in put Off in

excuse me, Swan, Ingo Swan. They have this meeting, and this meeting kicks off this wave of paranormal research at the s r I that will continue throughout the nineteen seventies. So Ingo Swan, he was this self proclaimed psychic. He said he had esp he said he could do psychokinesis, and put off In Collies claimed that Ingo Swan demonstrated all kinds of powers under test conditions that could not

have been faked. For example, they claimed that he was able to demonstrate unexplainable psychokinesis, such as when he used his mind to perturb a magnetometer inside a quark detector buried under the basement of a research facility on Stanford University campus. And this led put On, I mean it, that's incredible. If he could actually do that, if the story is true, Wow, that's your mind. Yeah, I mean yeah.

So in the show we see these these experiments where they're trying to get her to maybe kill a rabbit in a cage or crush a coke can, which she successfully does with the coke can. But yeah, this is something that you couldn't fake. It would be dealing with this thing deep underground, and the people at this experiment claimed that he did it. Now, as as I've implied before, I'm doubtful about the truth of these claims, but that's what they said. They said, Wow, he moved this thing

and there's no way he could have faked it. So this lad put off in a colleague named Russell targ Uh and a list of other sort of revolving collaborators to work for years with defense and intelligence grants to study psychic phenomena through the sr I. And then later there were all these derivative programs in in the following decades, like, for example, there was a remote viewing program run out

of the Army out of Fort Mead, Maryland. Now a lot of this research would end up focusing on the sp phenomenon known as remote viewing that we mentioned earlier. That's see stuff you wouldn't be able to see with your own eyes, and we see examples of this and stranger things exactly. That's exactly what they're trying to do. Yeah, like go to Russia and look at this guy and tell us what he's saying. Those were the kinds of

experiments people wanted to do. In general. The most common form through throughout the end of after the first year or so, if this was what came to be known as coordinate remote viewing experiments. So that would work like this psychic is given a set of map coordinates, then the psychic would say what they saw there at the map,

at the at the place on the map. You can see maybe a few ways that this could be a little bit flawed as an experimental design, right, like if somebody went to go get a map and look and see what was there and then do some reading about it. But there are some cases where the researchers again insisted like no, no, no, there's no way they could have done that. Uh, it's absolutely real. But I want to

give one example. So there was a remote viewer named Pat Price, who was kind of normal name here, right. He was famous for these amazingly detailed remote viewing results. Now, Price was born a Mormon, but he became a scientologist in the nineteen sixties and he claimed that it was in the Church of Scientology that his powers were brought forth. I guess he was having a session with the E meter and all that, and he gained the power to

see things at long distances by radioactive E meter. How he got recruited as a pretty good story, but often Swan met him in the parking lot of a farm where they were buying the office Christmas tree. Price sold them a Christmas tree, and then they recruited him for c I A Remote viewing experiments UH. In one case, he supposedly was able to use remote viewing to give intricate detailed descriptions of the inside of a restricted n

S A base called Sugar Grove in West Virginia. Price was also known for the remote viewing of details of the Soviet facility in Kazakhstan known as u r d F three for Unidentified Research and Development Facility three and UH Price he drew illustrations of this gantry gantry crane that were determined to be very similar to something that was actually photographed at the facility, and internal analysis concluded

that he couldn't have done this. And I'm going to caveat this in a second, but they say he couldn't have done this unless either he actually saw it through remote viewing or he was informed of what to draw by someone knowledgeable of u r d F three. Now, I think maybe there could have been other possibilities. But even if you only accept those two possibilities, you've got

to wonder about the second one. And many people in these research circles did start to wonder like, could his source of information be the disinformation arm of the KGB. Could some of these psychics giving us this information be feeding us disinformation running psy ops basically on our own programs. But they didn't They didn't consider like maybe that he was doing like a cold reading. Oh, I mean that

that's a whole other question. Cold reading, of course, is the technique of you know, looking for Q who is in the person you're talking to. It's a mentalism trick and also playing you're also playing off their expectations of your knowledge too. Yes, uh yeah, So so that's a way of using people's reactions to the things you're saying to give the impression that you're getting information that that

you couldn't possibly have. And really what you're doing is getting sort of hits and miss verification through their body language and their eyes and and little things they mentioned that they don't realize they've they've given up. Uh so, yeah, there are a lot of questions about what went on there, But I want to mention a couple other examples of government psychics who were doing this kind of stuff along the lines that we see eleven doing in the show.

Have you ever seen the performer Uri Geller, who here is familiar with Uri Geller? Yeah, I think he didn't. He he's like a guy who would appear in Carson. He's the Israeli guy who's been spoons. So he claims to be a psychic, and he his biggest act in his career was he would get a spoon and he'd use psychokinesis, so he claimed to bend it. I don't know what spoons ever did him, why he hates spoons so much. She's been you know, thousands of spoons in

his career, and people seem to think this is really impressive. Uh. I think a lot of people who are only a little bit familiar with him don't realize that he he claims his powers are real. You know. He's like, yeah, I'm a real psychic. I'm not an illusionist. This is not an act. But so, Ri Geller was tested extensively by the s r I in the nineteen seventies with these experiments like What's in the Box where they'd have a box and they'd roll a die in the Yeah.

But here's the question. So Gwyneth Paltrow's head isn't there which side of it is facing up? Is it or left ear? Is it the bloody stump of the neck. And that's what he would have to get. Yeah, which side of the die is facing up? Another one would be like can you look inside sealed aluminum film canisters and say what's there? Is it ball bearings? Is it magnets?

And uh? And of course again we have these stories by the people conducting the experiments, like put Off and targ that he was able to get these result that are just impossible for him to have gotten by chance, impossible for him to have cheated. It's just too amazing. Um. Again, you know all the all the asterisks about skepticism there, and this is consistent throughout a lot of the literature.

Many of the people who worked on these recent research projects have remained adamant over the years that they were

able to prove psychic powers were real. On the government's time, and even some internal reviews on the value of these programs seemed kind of optimistic, like to quote from one report for the CIA put together in nineteen seventy five, but the physicist J. A. Ball, who independently reviewed all the data, quote a large body of reliable experimental evidence points to the inescapable conclusion that extrasensory perception does exist as a real phenomenon, albeit characterized by rarity and lack

of reliability. Just kind of that last part kind of undercuts everything, doesn't it. Yeah, Because I mean, if it's because if we were to take that on face value, and I mean, on one hand, yes, it's amazing if psychic phenomenal were real, but then if it were not dependable at all, I could be utterly useless for the government. You can't send in a psychic assassin and it's like, oh, there's like a ten percent chance he'll be able to

blow somebody's head up with his mind. Uh, and then nine chance that he's just arrested and you know, executed on the spot, or even worse. I mean, how about you're doing the remote viewing, right, You're the person who's giving somebody the inside details of some Soviet research facility, and what you're trying to sell is, well, my my results are amazingly accurate about one out of a hundred times. Yeah.

And then and then it's not necessarily a situation where they would be It's like, oh, I know, I don't see anything. Sorry, it's you. You're They would be giving you false information, perhaps just made up information. Uh, it would be just completely unreliable for any government purposes. Yeah. So another problem with all this research, I think is that, based on my reading, it seems that while we keep getting all these people involved in this research who say, yeah,

the phenomenon is real, psychics are real. We've shown it over and over again in these tests, this research and all of its administrative levels just seems crammed with people who, in uh, the parapsychologist Gertrudge Schmider Schmidler's terminology are sheep, meaning people who are committed in advance to the belief that psychic phenomena are real, as opposed to her term goats for people who believe in advance that it is not real. Uh. You know, as as I've said before,

I think I'm kind of a goat. But if you have a whole lot of people who believe very strongly in a thing working on experiments to prove that thing, you're probably not going to get a lot of objectivity in your methodology. And so this is a criticism that's been leveled against this research for a long time. I want to give a couple of examples real quick, um

of the kind of sheep thing going on. So a major figure in the remote viewing research conducted out of Fort Mead in Maryland was was like, they would give people these coordinates or these places to view and it might be a place of strategic importance. Right, So here's a Soviet So there's even one story that these psychic spies out of Fort Mead we're supposed to see what

was happening inside Tehran during the Iranian hostage crisis. Now you can you can easily imagine though the situation there is, you know, we're trying to figure out how to how to handle the situation, and then someone says, well, do you want our psychics to take a crack at it? And why not? Yeah, we're paying for them. We might as well see what they got. And maybe they got nothing, but out I don't know if I believe it's true. I think I heard that Jimmy Carter was aware that

this had taken place, but yeah, uh yeah. Anyway, So at Fort Mead, one of the major figures involved in the remote viewing projects there was this guy named Ed Dames. Have you ever heard of him before. He shows up sometimes on uh, what's that show art Bell Coast to

Coast where they talk about UFOs and stuff. Uh. So he was a guy who who worked on this project for the Defense Department, and he was intensely interested not just in the strategic targets, but in having his remote viewing agents spy on stuff like the alien basis of the Galactic Federation scattered throughout the Solar system, which are the forward advanced posts of these aliens that are going

to colonize our our solar system. Okay, sounds reasonable. Yeah, this is what happens when you when you build a team of government psychics, right, I mean right, you end up spying on the galactic impio. Yeah. And so there were some people, you know, in various ranks who were a little bit doubtful about whether that was a useful

research project. Uh in uh. In the Sorry and John Ronson's The Men Who Sarah goatst Ronson claims that one of Dame's personal remote viewing projects was using ESP to determine the true nature of the Lockness Monster, which he eventually determined was the ghost of a dinosaur. Yes like that? Yeah, that's better than any of the other ones I've heard, which is sadder that it's the ghost of a dinosaur, that it's the last living dinosaur and it's all alone.

The last living dinosaur would have been would be far sadder because it would be just like a dead and hang out with its other dead ancestors. At least a ghost, you can imagine, has delight in haunting people. Has there ever been a ghost dinosaur movie. Oh, there's been a there's a ghost shark movie, and we need to get

on that copyright that okay. One final anecdote also from Ronson's The Men who Stare at Goats, and this is I think exemplary of the kind of thing that may have been going on to give people who are working on these psychic experiments the impression that they were turning up real phenomenon. Ronson interviews this guy who worked at

the Fort Meade project named Lynn Buchanan and uh. He also interviews another remote viewer named Joseph mc mcmonagle, and Buchanan tells Ronson the story about mcmonagle's amazing psychic powers.

One time there was a locked door at the facility and at Fort Meade and mcmonagle used his psychic powers to remote view what the key to the door looked like, and then he made a sketch of the key from that psychic vision, and then took it to a locksmith and had the locksmith make a copy of the key from the drawing, and the key worked and he was

able to open the door. If true, that would be amazing, right, But in his interview with Ronson, mcmonagle admits that what had actually done, what it actually happened there, was that he had picked the lock, and he didn't want to deflate morale among the other psychic spies, so he didn't tell them that. He just let them believe that it had been this psychic adventure and they have to be

in a positive environment. But it's it's a it's a classic magician's trick here, right, I mean, it's it's you can't see what I'm doing at this hand because all the stuff this one's doing, this one's busy running to the locksmith, this one's picking the lock. Yeah. Uh So, in in final explanation, I mean, there are a lot of things that could have been going on in these experiments that people claimed. We're giving these amazingly accurate results

and proving the truth of psychic powers. In some cases you have to assume there may have been fraud or trickery. It may have been disinformation at some level. It may have been intern old psy ops campaigns. There may have been hoaxers. I mean, plenty of skeptics alleged that the psychics, like Uri Geller, we're just doing slight of hand tricks

and tricking the scientists. But also I think among the researchers themselves, there is probably a strong tendency towards what's known as cherry picking um, meaning that maybe sometimes the remote viewers did have some truly amazingly accurate descriptions of stuff they wouldn't be able to see. But what if these amazingly accurate hits were like four or five sessions out of thousands, So you think that's what Matthew Modine's

up to and stranger things. He's just like like he every for a thousand days, he makes a leve and try to crush it. They just cut a lot of the scenes out. Well, that's that's the director's cut. That's one way remote viewing is different than psychogenesis. So if you make somebody try to crush a coat can with their mind without touching it a thousand times and they

can only do it once. I'm still impressed. Like, if you can rule out some kind of intervention, like that's the kind of thing that would would would would have won the James Randy Prize. Could if you could without any without touching it, just crushed that can with your brain right with proper controls in place, and you can do that. There, boom, you've got the prize. Psychic phenomena are real. I'm still impressed. Even though you could only

do it once. With remote viewing, you know, you could say, I've got a picture here that you can't see, describe it for me. If you do this hundreds of times and a few times you come up with a pretty accurate description, I'm not impressed. That's just I mean, you could do that randomly. You're just monkeys and a typewriter. Yeah,

they're bound to pound it out eventually anyway. So one difference between this type of government psychic research and the stuff we see in Stranger Things is that I never came across any examples. There may have been some some out there, because there's still some classified stuff. But I never came across any examples of psychics using an isolation tank to enhance their powers, which is one of my favorite set pieces on the show. That might be why

they didn't have a positive environment all the time. You need an isolation tank to feel good about yourself. Well, it's interesting you say that, because, um, well let's just start with isolation tanks. Who here has has floated? Who raised your hand? If you have floated, if you've been in an isolation tank, should host the show. He's like, alright, so keep your hands up, all right, Now, keep your hand in the air. If you've been in one more

than once, All right, Okay, did you hallucinate? Okay, so Robert has floated and I have floated, but only once. I would love to try it. I tried it once at home in the washing machine and no good. Well we all float down. I'll float with you someday. Well. I think that the show does a pretty great job of explaining how it works. I mean, it's it's it's soft, it's boy, and so you're you're floating in the in

the water. Um, it's uh. If you've done it before, you know that the first time you float a lot of it is about just getting used to the fact that you're in this body temperature, you know, a high salt mixture, and it's it's like stinging every sensitive part of your body, like cuts and scrapes you didn't realize you had are crying out to you. No God, I mean that seems like with all the other deprivation, that would have the possibility of reducing your entire consciousness to

a hangnail. Yeah. Yeah, because it does play with your consciousness. I mean that's why people climb into them, and that's why John C. Lily was I mean, that's why he invented it. That's why they were researching this at NIM. Now we should we should clarify the the isolation tanks that you see in altered states or in stranger things are usually different than what you would just go to it like a commercial place. So the ones that we've floated in at least or horizontal and you're kind of

laying on your back so you can't smell. Yeah, I sort of see, Yeah, you definitely smell. Because that was like that distracted me from most of my first float, was my only float was that was that. Wow, it really smells salting in here. And I don't know why I was getting into double float. That's what that The thing they always say you need to float more than one is because that first float is just about getting used to bring and make it, will record it, Yeah

we should but uh yeah. The now, the tanks that Lily was using at at NIM, they they were kind of uh, kind of like they were very and then they had a nightmare of quality to them. I guess you'd say that the individuals were dressed in something that kind of look like a gimp costume with these like

big blackout goggles. Uh yeah, kind of like a really scary mask and uh and they were They found that it had a pretty severe effect on the subjects because you're essentially locking someone away with the inward facing mind and it doesn't take much of that to um to start playing with your your sensations and playing with your thought process. I mean, it's the it's the reason that

solitary confinement it's such a hellacious thing to inflict on somebody. Yeah, I mean I think that's widely considered a form of torture now, Yeah, and this is basically what they wanted though, Yeah, because they were researching quote a psychological stability of human beings that are sustained isolation and reduced sensory implicity. Little did they know, like forty years later people would pay money to do this. Well, I mean this, this is

an area that parallels that. That duality with Lily of establishment really counterculturally. Establishment really was all about, let's get this thing and we're gonna take potential spies, will lock them away in there, and when they lose their mind, they'll tell us everything. And then counterculture Lily was like, no, you need to lose your mind in here on LSD

maybe and then potentially talk to alien dolphins. Man. That Lily mentality of like the self experimentation is something I have this big conflict about because on one hand, it's like I like admire it, you know, I'm like, somebody wants to experiment on themselves. I'm like, that's confidence, that's courage. At the same time, that's usually not good science, right, because it's hard to be objective when you're experimenting on yourself.

It tends to who suggest an impatience that is generally not compatible with scientific ricor right or trying to get around ethical boundaries that would exist if you were experimenting on others. Yeah, okay, so we can say Matthew Modine as far as we know so far. And I refused to refer to him by whatever. His character's name is Matthew Modine, R printer whatever. Matthew Modine is a patient doctor because he hasn't experimented on himself yet in this show.

It's true, they're probably saving that first. Um. Yeah, there's really really got into it. He he when he floated himself in this nightmarish contraption. Uh, he saw limitless possibility here. Uh, in a way to just like to get in touch with like the the the unaffected mind, like the mind without any of the the weights of sensation and uh and he ended up writing about it pretty much for

the rest of his life. His his writings are really interesting if you ever give him a try, because the he kind of waffles back and forth between being like academic writing and being like stream of consciousness writing. But in a way he wrote while he was high and then I may also it's really hard to write. But I have a quick quote from him though. This is from Lily Tanks for the Memories Flotation Tank talks from

the memories. Yeah, he had. He wore that coonskin cap, remember, and his favorite what were one of his favorite names for the tank itself was the womb to tomb wet box. So um, wow, we should we should all start incorporating track to our our daily conversation. Did Dad jokes from the plane? Yeah, but here's the quote he said, at the highest level of satory from which people return, the point of consciousness becomes a surface or a solid which

extends throughout the whole known universe. This used to be called fusion with the universal mon end or God in more modern terms. Yeah, you have done a mathematical transformation in which your center of consciousness has ceased to be a traveling point and has become a surface or solid of consciousness. It was in this state that I experienced myself as melded and intertwined with hundreds of billions of other beings in a thin sheet of consciousness that was

distributed around the galaxy a membrane. So it's fascinating about this to me. Where you give like a quick like uh foreshadowing, uh, is because my section is all about parallel universes, and he's essentially memorizing the language of parallel universes of the multiverse to describe this. Yeah, so um, that quote kind of sums up just how high minded and essentially mystical and magical, uh literally got with the

isolation tank. Um, And we don't We're not gonna really go into the dolphin research, but uh, that becomes a whole area where he definitely kind of becomes a scientific pariah, certainly within dolphin research for are the rest of his career. So I'm curious what does rigorous research say about the real life effects of of using these isolation tanks. Well, we do have a fair amount of research to go on here and a lot of just personal antigoes from

people who have floated a lot. Uh. Floaters often report hallucinations, out of body sensations, increased introspection because ultimately, you're you're locked in there, and you when you're not locked in there, but I mean you you're you feel doing you're right. If you're not locked in there, you do you feel as if the limits of your body are kind of harder to define because of the body tempature water you're floating in. Floaters, like sleepers, tend to experience decreased alpha

waves and increased data waves in the brain. So this is the stuff of dreams, except you're still awake. Yes, uh yeah, you shouldn't fall asleep in There also sensory deprivation, even of a single sort, so just site or sound, etcetera, can produce hallucination. A voice or rumble heard in total silence, the light seen in total darkness, that sort of thing. Yeah, we've talked about this before with like the creepiness people

report when they go in an antichoa chamber. This is like a room with acoustic properties, so that sound is really muffled, you know, nothing echoes. Everything's very very quiet. People feel like they're going crazy, and they're like they start to imagine they're hearing their own brain work and stuff.

It troubles you. Yeah, And in fact, a two thousand and nine study publishing the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease found that a near fifteen minutes of near total sensory deprivation was enough to trigger vivid hallucinations in many tests. Subjects now were those people who already had some kind of condition that would make them prone to hallucinations, but they were just normal people. I think these were just normal, you know, run of the mill, average, averagely you know,

brought into the study people, but they were all psychic. No, not before the experiment. Yeah. Another two thousand and nine paper, this one from psychopharmacology, explore the possibility that sensory deprivation induces psychotic symptoms non pharmacologically, and the idea here is that sensory depth disturbs air dependent updating of one's worldview and leads to problems with top down perceptive constraints, resulting

in hallucination. However, I do want to point out that this particular study, they used a sensory deprivation tank with a panic button, So they told people, are you're gonna get into this and you might start feeling it might just get too much for You're gonna feel kind of freaky, but you can panic and hit that panic button, whereas other studies have just had the scientists say, hey, when you've had enough, to tap on the lid and we'll

let you out. So this is like if you went to yoga and they said here's a panic button just in case, Like you're probably not going to have that great a class. Yeah, It's like if you were going to yoga and you your your mom was talking to you before and said, now, hold on, I've heard that some people really hurt their neck doing that, or you know, or oh, I know a friend who hurt their risk doing yoga. Yeah, you're gonna go, and you're gonna be

terrified that you're going to paralyze yourself on the mat. Yeah, like you're trying to figure out if your kid's gonna have nightmares for some reason. They're going to bed and you say, now, don't think about machete mimes. Don't just don't think about machete mimes and it will be fine. I mean, this is why priming is so important, uh, to you know, ancient traditions involving the use of psychedelic substances.

It's important for modern practitioners who take a you know, a serious uh approach to the use of psychedelic substances, and and even even like meditative even yoga. It's it's

about priming the individual for what's going to occur. And speaking of which, there's a nine seven study that I came across on prayer and mystic experience, and they found that when placed in an isolation tank, people with differing religious orientation sas related differing specific religious imagery, which is no surprise, but not in non religious imagery and other phenomenal experiences. So there's like more similarity among stuff not

related to your particular beliefs. Yeah. Yeah, And I think this is interesting too in light of those of negative positive experiences in priming that we're talking about here. Uh, and even the aims of John C. Lily or fictional Dr Brenner even. I also think it's fascinating to think of isolation actulation chambers used as laboratory stand ins for prayer, because what is prayer but an attempt to communicate with

an extra dimensional entity? And uh, and that's exactly what Dr Brenner is trying to do with eleven on on the show Stranger Things. Well, yes, it makes you think about how a lot of religious rituals are actually, you know, all throughout history, are used to bring about some form of an altered state of consciousness. I mean, you can think about even an act as simple as the repetitive activity of prayers, like the repetitive words you say in

a prayer. If you've never tried this, just say the same sentence or the same word five hundred times in a row, you will probably achieve some kind of mildly altered state of consciousness, mainly because it starts to disrupt the part of your brain that automatically processes linguistic content. If you've ever like tried to not hear what a word means when somebody's saying words you, you can't do this on purpose. You can't help but hear what the

words mean. But if you say the same word to yourself hundreds of times, you start to lose the connection between the sounds of the mouth and the meanings. And the beautiful thing about this is you do not need l s D or a swimming pool full assault, just repetition the way of the world. All right, Well, here's a question for you, Christian. Say you get into your flotation tank or your children swimming pool full of soli and you reach out to an extra dimensional entity. Where

is that entity? Like, scientifically, where is the the you are here arrow for that being? Right? So, what we have to clarify here is the difference between you're talking about alternate dimensions or extra dimensions versus parallel universes and stranger things. Seems to be unclear on what's going on there? Right, Well, basically I guess what's going on with stranger things, and obviously is that this is this is a fairy realm.

This is um this is a typical trope of a various you know, dimensional travel, uh, science fiction or fantasy. The upside down is is it's like they're the realm of shadows. As they draw that comparison, what is it in Zelda, It's like the Dark World or something? Man, Yeah, I mean it's a version of this world with slight. You know, it's dark and it's toxic and it's slight the altered Well, okay, so there's science fiction fans probably all in this room that are familiar with the idea

of parallel universes or alternate dimensions. They've been in our fiction, our pop culture and comic books and TV and movement movies for decades now, right, what's your favorite fictional parallel universe of Mine's Crisis on Infinite Earths from TC comics. I like, because there's an infinite amount of them. I have to go with the Realm of the Goblin King

and Labyrinth. Oh that's so good. I have to go with the Super Mario Brothers movie where they go to the other parallel dimension where Dennis Hopper is King Coopa. So but with all of those, it actually turns out that there is some basis in scientific theory for a multiverse. And I'm going to present you with three possibilities here and we can try to crack the nut of what's

going on here in Stranger Things. So so, right after Stranger Things came out, Popular Science interviewed this theoretical physicist named Brian Green. Oh yeah, he's he's from New York City. Yeah, and they asked him about Stranger Things. And the first distinction he made is what I was just talking about. He's like, whoa, there's a difference between alternate dimensions and parallel universes. Don't don't just use those interchangeably. We kind of do in pop fiction. But but he wanted to

clarify that different. So here's the difference. An alternate dimension implies you've got one universe, right, and that universe has more dimensions to it than what we can perceive, so beyond the three dimensions of space and the one dimension

of time. So yeah, it's like, if you imagine that we are squares or triangles, and suddenly we encounter a cube or a sphere or something we just like, wouldn't be able to perceive this extra dimension of it exactly, Yeah, you wouldn't even be able to see it or cure any of your senses. Right. Whereas a parallel universe implies the whole multiversal proposal. This is that there are multiple universes, but each one of these universes has three dimensions of

space and one dimension of time to them. Why should we trust this Green guy, Well, he's kind of a big deal in science. But remember the scene in Stranger Things when the teacher is using the analogy where he's talking about the tightrope walker on the tight rope and how there's a flea underneath it. That analogy originally comes from Green's book, which is called The Fabric of the Cosmos.

So this guy that they basically researched him to figure out how to write this stuff about the upside down on the TV show, and in fact, Green himself says, whoever is writing this show is well versed in some of the popular descriptions of these ideas. Whether it's mine or not, it doesn't really matter. When he added, also, if there's a monster. Its head should open like a flower. His other book. If you've never seen a picture of the physicist Brian Green, he's a favorite virus on the show.

He comes up a lot. You should look him up because I think he looks a lot like David DUCHOVNYA total tangent. Sorry, so all right, so let's stick with the three major theories though, and in Green out nzse. But some other people do as well. So the very first academic proposal of parallel universes came in nineteen fifty four by this guy named Hugh Everett the Third. And Hugh came up with what we now call many worlds theory. And he did this while he was a doctoral student,

so he hadn't even graduated yet. And he's like, hey, this is my dissertation. There's parallel universes, and just like drops a big book and he says, look, they're they're related to ours, are branching off others branch off of them, YadA YadA. So to better understand this, though, I'm sorry everybody, We're gonna have to talk about some quantum physics for a little bit. It's it's a little painful, but I'm gonna try to boil it down and make it as easy for all of us as possible, because it does

hurt my head a little bit. Come on positive thinking. It's not painful. It's everybody think positively in my psychic powers related to quantum physics. I do. But there is a famous quote about quantum physics where if it if it does not make your head hurt a little bit, you're you're not engaging with it properly, right, he said Richard I am and the famous physicist who said that if you think you understand quantum physics, you don't understand.

I'm afraid I'm misquoting. I don't think so. So everytt was inspired by two scientists that were quantum physicists, and they were Werner Heisenberg and Neil's Bore. And Heisenberg suggested that if you just observe quantum matter, that we're affecting its behavior just looking at it. And he said subsequently, we can never be sure of what its attributes are. This is called the Heisenberg on certainty principle. So here here's an examswer. Here's an example. I cribbed from our

colleague Josh Clark from stuff you should know. He has this great analogy and he says, imagine you're looking at Joe, specifically Joe, uh, and Joe is a human being who's solid. Okay, Now everybody look away from Joe, and then when you look back, all of a sudden, Joe is made out

of gas. That hope it's right on gas. So that is essentially the idea behind the Heisenberg on certainty principle that, like the the attributes of the physical form change every time you stop looking at it and look at it again, right, And it's suggesting essentially that. And this is where Borer comes in. He's this Danish Danish physicist and he says, well, actually it doesn't exist in one state or the other.

It exists in all states simultaneously. But like Heisenberg, he says, it's it's got to stay in one form as long as we're looking at it. So this is you've probably heard of. This is the Copenhagen interpretation. This is the idea that you know, a quantum event is both A and B at the same time until it interacts with something that forces it to collapse into one or the other. So ever comes along. He's working on his dissertation, and he argues, Okay, I agree with Bor on everything except

for one respect. He says, measuring UH and observing quantum objects don't actually force it into a comprehensible state. What it does is it splits it into an entire other universe. And he says, this literally duplicates the universe every time you observe quantum matter, and then that subsequently splits every other time any action is taken or not taken related

to it. So this is like the infamous stuff that you see in in you know, pop science, popular fiction, where there's a there's an altered universe where I'm a bank robber and not a podcast host, right, because I just didn't decide to rob that bank, And under many worlds there probably would be such a universe because there's an infinite number of quantum events to split the universe and infinite number of times. It's it's like the Library

of Battle. It's the idea that it's a library that contains not only all books, but all possible books, right, right, So this is usually called daughter universe theory. Okay, now let's put it in stranger things terms. So let's say eleven is our quantum object. When you look at her once she appears to be a little girl, you turn away, you look again, maybe she looks like the demogorgon. That's

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. The new Bore was suggesting that a quantum eleven is both the little girl and the demogorgon at the same time, and all other other possible forms, like there's one where she's played by Carrie Fisher and she's she's that form simultaneously with the you know, infinite other ones. And then Everett comes along and he says, but wait, every time eleven is measured or looked at, say by Matthew Modine, then it causes a split in

the universe, and this creates a daughter universe. And so subsequently there's just all these parallel universes that are based on the observation of the quantum eleven. Now it's crazy as this sounds, a lot of physicists actually do hold to the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. It's something that's popular. I know, recently on the show we talked about the Caltech physicist Sean Carroll. I know he favors

the many worlds interpretations. So it is taken seriously by real physicist, and it's a good way of thinking that there's a lot of other universes is out there, but could you get between them? Yeah? Yeah, how does this? How does this? How do we get from here to demagorg Yeah? Many worlds doesn't really get into that as far as I could tell. But that's one possible explanation I guess for what the upside down is. Right. Another

possibility is string theory. We've all probably heard this thrown around. It's related to Albert Einstein's theory of everything. It proposes that there's an even smaller level than quantum, uh, the quantum level, there's the sub quantum level. This is like an ant man where he shrinks down like so small that it just turns into the psychedelic nightmare, so small that the c g I budget for the entire film

just implodes upon its approaches Infini. So the argument here is that all the essential building blocks of all matter and all physical forces exist on the sub quantum level. And here there are these things that are referred to as rubber bands basically that are strings, and they make up quantum particles. And then that makes up everything else, like everything in this room, every every force of nature is all made up of these strings. Well, it is

the theory of everything exactly. That is exactly what it is. It is entirely theoretical, so there's no I should be clear about this. There is no evidence that this is true. Some scientists feel like this discredits it entirely, but it's worth bringing it up because string theory also ends up

leading us into a theory of parallel universes. So this theory says, okay, they parallel universes exists like bubbles next to each other, and when they come in contact with one another, it's because gravity flows in and out of these bubbles back and forth to each other. But every time these universes interact, a big bang occurs, just like the one that created our universe. So every time they

touch it creates another universe. But what we don't know is what happens when these you know, to to these actual bubbles themselves, like do do they explode? Is it really bad or is it totally benign? Well, this is it's worth of keeping in mind. Like and when it creates another universe, it's not it's not like a uh of a total fantasy universe where it's like, oh, here's the universe where everyone is a Nazi. Here's the universe where everyone has um you know, the sheep's head or

something that sounds like a great universe. This is more like, here is a a new big bang in a new contained universe, and who knows what it it results in. It's very much like the Library of Babel where many of the books I mean, I guess the majority of the books in the Library of Babel are illegible, right, almost every single one. It's it's only the minority that

makes sense. Yeah. So Brian Green, remember him. He actually argues that the recent discovery of gravitational waves make this slightly testable, so it might actually have some evidence in the next couple of years. Uh. You might have noticed this. This week the scientists who discovered gravitational waves won the Nobel Prize. So that's probably why it's a big I mean, there's lots of recent points, but that's one of them. Maybe we'll find parallel universes. Uh. So they're hoping that

they can test string theory with that. And then the idea here is essentially that as the universe expands, each one of these strings is getting stretched out, and as they're stretching, it produces a crack. And it's not an audible crack. It's a crack that exists through gravitational waves. So the researchers are hoping that now that they've discovered gravitational waves, they can test them and subsequently maybe fine

strings and or sub quantum reality. That's fascinating. I mean, we've talked about string theory on the show before and never never come across a good way to test it today. It's always sort of one of those things where they say, maybe on the very on the next high energy particle collider, we'll get too high enough energies that we can test.

But I hadn't heard of this. So in terms of stranger things, okay, if we're using string theory here, maybe uh, the upside down is one of these bubbles, and then the stranger things like real world is another bubble and they touched, and then that means that while they could pass back and forth between one another, they would have created another being bad big bang, So we might see

a third universe. Okay, that's a possibility, and the and this and the upside down is just a universe that happened to turn out just like ours, except a little ikey looking. Sure. Okay, Now, the final theory is called eternal inflation. I love that name, and it argues that if you could zoom back and look at all of spacetime simultaneously, you'd find that some areas of space stop inflating the way that the Big Bang did, and that others continue at like a rapid pace. So some some

parts are inflating, some aren't. They're all at different rates. And guess what. They use the bubble metaphor too. They couldn't come up with their own thing, so they've got this bubble metaphor. Our universe is a bubble. It's in a network of other bubbles. But the big difference here is that the universes in these potentially have different laws

of physics than ours do. So this is a combination idea of parallel universes with alternate dimensions, which makes it a little more complicated, but it's essentially asking, like, what's going to happen if these bubbles collide? Right now? Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel came along in and he added a limitation, or maybe a complexity to this theory that I think makes it more fun. He says, well, here's the thing. Spacetime could go on forever in theory, but our universe.

We know our universe is measurable and that it's under fourteen billion years old, so it's not infinite. Therefore, it's subsequently has to have a limit to the number of ways that particles can arrange themselves in the universe. So again, this is all these different possibilities that lead to physics,

but not an infinite amount of them. Okay, there's another theory though, that's kind of buried inside of eternal inflation theory, and it's called brains universe theory, and brains is suppelled b A B A Barnes B R A N E. S. This is what you're referring to when I read the Lily quote. What he's talking about membrane membranes exact late. Yeah, So he's using language it's you know, steeped in this stuff. It imagines this though, that these universes are all intersecting

and overlapping. But instead of using the bubble metaphor they say in brains theory, they say, well, it's like bread, it's like a bunch of slices of bread and they're all stacked on top of each other. Uh. And they call these brains, and each one of these brains has

three dimensions. But if you refine the idea, and maybe there's some more complex versions of these brains, some have three dimensions, maybe some of them have seventeen dimensions, and when they overlap, what we would experience is in three dimensions because we are our bodies are physically only able

to perceive that many dimensions plus time. So maybe what's going on in Stranger Things is actually these two universes have overlapped, and what they're experiencing in the upside down is sort of like the in the middle of like a ven diagram, right that will that would I like this theory because this would explain why there's a swimming pool, why they see like it just a shadow version of

their own world. It's just like slightly different because they're not able to perceive all of these other dimensions of reality that are occurring around them. So here's where it gets exciting, because this theory has a lot of evidence that seems to make it look like it's possible. Uh. In two thousand five, a paper was published in Physical Review Letters that said, oh, we just found this big cold spot in space, and we detected it with NASA's

w M a P satellite. Then in two thousand eight, two more studies were conducted to try to detect this as well, and they did this by looking at cosmic microwaves. And the reason why is because cosmic microwaves are left over from the Big Bang, and if cooled down to about two point seven Kelvin's is it's like a thing

that we know, we can kind of measure it. Sometimes throughout the universe it's a little hotter, sometimes they're a little cooler, and that corresponds to fluctuations in the density of the early universe as it was growing after the Big Bang and clumping like thing mass was clumping together and forming gap galaxies. Okay, so they thought, may thine, this cold spot that we've just found, this could be where another universe has overlapped with ours while ours was

inflating during the Big Bang. Then in the cold spot was detected again by the European Space Agency's Plank mission, and then more recently it was detected yet again by the Very Large Array Radio Telescope and they found that the cold spot and get ready for this. It's this giant void that is one billion light years across. It is huge. It is largely empty of of everything we understand to be in space. There's no galaxies, there's no

dark matter as far as they can tell. So maybe this is evidence of a bubble collision or I guess a bread collision. These these universes have have come together, and that's the vandire craun Man. Do you think they could call it the bread zone? That that great? Yeah? So okay, here's the Stranger Things like attempt at explaining this. So maybe the Stranger Things universe and the upside Down.

They're part of all of space and time that's around us, right, but they inflated at different rates and you can either think of them as bubbles or bread whatever works for you. Subsequently, the upside Down could have different laws of physics than

we do. However, based on what we've seen in the show, the laws of things that have to be fairly aligned with ours, and not just because we don't see people defying the laws of physics, but like the universe of the upside Down is held together because we or would not a writer and hell Boy can only experience the upside down three three dimensions and then the fourth dimension of time. So maybe what we've seen in this show, the idea of the upside down is actually not another universe,

but it's where two universes are overlapping. Huh. Well, that that opens up all sorts of storytelling possibilities for future seasons. Totally. If when you're in the upside down you can defy the your expectations of physics. Uh, if you just believe in yourself so positive vibes. Man hypothetical question if there could be other universes with different laws of physics than our own maybe maybe not, and if we could go to them? Uh, that seems very unlikely. But let's just

say we did. You went to another universe at different laws of physics, would that universe immediately kill you? Yeah? Because if if I depend on and I do depend on the laws of the physics of this universe to hold my body together, right, I mean, how am I gonna go into a universe that has a maybe a drastically different structure. Yeah, Like, say you go to a universe with your body made of atoms and suddenly one

of the four fundamental forces. The nuclear force is weaker, and so the atoms in your body are just not quite as keen to hold together. That seems like maybe that wouldn't be great. Yeah, but this is so again this points to the idea that they're overlapping, so that you've still got the forces of our universe overlapping with all of their forces. But hey, it's a television show. Yeah. Uh, maybe that's another episode though. Yeah. Alright, guys, there you

have it. We have We've rolled through some science, uh, a little culture, a little history, some pseudoscience, all all of which seems to flow out of stranger things. And uh so then hopefully this helps enrich your appreciation of a show you already dig and maybe prepares you for some of the twist and turns in the upcoming season, which what airs at the end of this month. Yeah, yeah,

thanks so much for joining us tonight. Y'all got a lot of fun and uh, once more, everything on the table has to go, so don't don't be shy about grabbing some T shirts and some buttons. Thanks everybody for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot Com