The Real Science Behind ‘Dark Matter’ Will Melt Your Gray Matter (2024)

Blake Crouch has a surprising response when the scientific basis for Dark Matter is called into question. The show and novel’s multi-universe plot is fueled by some admittedly fanciful and imaginative leaps, with an internal logic that could have been constructed by MC Escher. But Crouch insists the story may not be as outlandish as it first seems. “Obviously it’s speculative,” he says. “But there are real, concrete, scientific concepts being presented, and I always want those to feel true.”

Blake’s 2016 book, which the author himself has adapted into a new Apple TV+ series (out May 8) starring Joel Edgerton and Jennifer Connelly, focuses on a groundbreaking physicist who devises a way to open doors to alternate universes. The box he builds creates an endlessly repeating hallway in the human consciousness, which allows the visitor’s physical body to pass into a parallel world. Any given door can lead to apocalypse, utopia, or anything in between; each reality is shaped by the traveler’s intention, mood, and subconscious.

Before scoffing at this as woo-woo nonsense, consider these recent headlines from Scientific American: “Understanding Consciousness Is Key to Unlocking Secrets of the Universe” (December 1, 2023), “Is Consciousness Part of the Fabric of the Universe?” (September 25, 2023), and “Here’s Why We Might Live in a Multiverse” (March 6, 2024). Nobel laureate Roger Penrose has been theorizing for decades about connections between human consciousness, the winnowing of infinity down to the one reality we perceive, and the most enduring mysteries of quantum mechanics. “The physics that’s coming out now does support, more and more, that reality is a creation of our mind. Reality does not exist independently from observation, from awareness. Biocentric beings create reality,” Crouch says. “A lot of this stuff was far less en vogue when I was writing the book. It’s bananas. It’s so mind-melting when you really think about it.”

Mind-melting is Crouch’s specialty. His Wayward Pines trilogy of novels was adapted into the 2015–2016 Matt Dillon–Jason Patric series about a strange mountainside town that was impossible to leave. He began Dark Matter around the same time, when he had professional success, but personal doubts. “I mean, it was my midlife sort-of-crisis novel. It is a novel that asks, are you happy with your life? That was a question I was asking myself when I was writing it,” he says. “I was going through a pretty tumultuous moment. It’s my divorce book.”

The solution to such concerns usually can’t be found in a laboratory. But the possibility of simply swapping to a different reality, like changing a pair of clothes, seemed like a way to examine more everyday issues. Crouch became fixated on the possibilities of these speculative researchers.

“Check out Robert Lanza,” he says, referring to the biologist who is a proponent of the biocentrism theory that suggests consciousness manifests reality by reducing infinite possibilities down to one. To put that in Dark Matter terms, the door to the box opens, and the mind determines what’s on the other side. “It’s a little out there and some of it is hard to swallow, but I think a lot of it has the ring of truth to it,” Crouch says.

His science adviser on both the book and the series was Clifford V. Johnson, a professor of theoretical high-energy physics at the University of Southern California. “He helped us design some of the aspects of the box and know how to [explain it,] because the characters talk more about science in the show than they do in the book,” Crouch says. “It was really important to have someone help us not go astray there.”

The scientific theories that inspired Dark Matter are more than just “where there’s a will, there’s a way.” Instead, they suggest that the human mind is a kind of projector, which filters endless possibilities to determine the kind of image that emerges.

A piece of entertainment like Dark Matter won’t prove any of this one way or the other—but Jules Verne couldn’t have patented a modern submarine despite his prescient descriptions of the Nautilus in 1869’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. These real-life scientific speculations add heft to Dark Matter’s musings about “The Road Not Taken,” which have traditionally been left not to physicists but to the poets of the English department.

“It goes back to wondering about personal relationships or career things, all the big important headlines in our life,” Edgerton says. “I feel like almost everybody’s had that conversation, whether it’s regret or remorse or just the kind of curiosity about the other road you could have taken. For instance, the other day I had an incident where I was just like, ‘Wow, if I’d done this instead of that, I might’ve gotten quite hurt.’ Those decisions change the course of your fate.”

He declines to describe the potential accident. If the mind shapes reality, maybe it’s better not to manifest such things.

Edgerton stars in the series as multiple versions of Jason Dessen, who in Dark Matter’s prime world is a middle-aged father, happily married to Connelly’s Daniela, with a teenage son (Oakes Fegley, the school bully from Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans) but a lot of regrets about his stagnated career. In another life, he might have been a brilliant scientist. In this one, he teaches intro to physics to bored undergrads.

The genius he hoped to be actually exists, and uses his lifetime of research to crack the secrets of the quantum mechanics principle of superposition, which posits that a thing can exist in endless multiple states until it is observed. The immense black box he creates is the gateway to observing—and visiting—multiple realities. How does it work? “Let’s say that it is possible,” Edgerton says. “We’ll throw a bit of word soup at you of science [terms]. The creative’s job is to give a plausible enough explanation for that. The audience’s job is just to agree to agree to it.”

You’ve heard of Schrödinger’s Cat? The box in Dark Matter is the same deal, except opening its door doesn’t just show if the cat’s alive or not. It reveals a whole other possible world, defined by the perception of the one who opens the door. “That’s where my mind started to get turned in knots,” Edgerton says.

Since Genius Jason also harbored regrets—about the love he never pursued, and the family he never had—he steps into a new reality and discovers the happy but humble life of the story’s hero (who is designated Jason1 in the script). Jason2 becomes the villain of the story when he decides to kidnap this doppelgänger, vanquish him into the box, and claim the alternate life for himself.

“Something we talked about a lot was, ‘Did he build the box to go do this?’ I don’t think so,” Crouch says. “I think he built the box as a thought experiment that became an actual endeavor. As he was pouring himself into 10 years of building this thing, he can’t help but see the sacrifices [he made]. I mean, I felt the sacrifices here in Chicago for over a year of filming this show. It was literally the greatest creative experience of my life, but you make sacrifices to do the things that you want to do. And I think Jason2 was in that similar place. I always imagined he went into the box and surfed around for a while, and then he saw that family one night. In a moment when he was having those regrets—sort of the other side of Jason1’s regrets—he decided to do something crazy.”

Dark Matter is the story of Jason1’s quest through multiple worlds to reunite with his wife and son—something the interloper, Jason2, is determined to prevent. Along the way he encounters many variations on himself, Daniela, their son—and even their twin boy who died in infancy. Some alternate Jasons are horrifying; others are inspiring. But the life that once was his is all he seeks.

Meanwhile, his wife gradually realizes that her husband is not her husband as the subtle clues pile up—his way of dressing, his renewed passion, his temper. “I don’t think it’s a show about contentment and settling,” Connelly says. “It’s about finding. At the center of it, you have this family, and you have this couple who kind of lose each other at some point in their marriage. They have to find each other again.”

She notes that this is a real-life phenomenon, not a sci-fi one: People change, sometimes irreconcilably, especially after a long time together. “There isn’t only one version of happiness that’s true,” Connelly says. “There are so many versions that we could choose in our lives. So I think there’s something kind of beautiful in this couple that reaffirms that, and [they choose] each other.”

As they venture into the box in search of Jason2, they struggle to understand the mechanics of it. Once inside, the box becomes an infinite corridor of doorways. Sometimes they open into a world that’s just slightly different—the sign over his favorite bar is a different color. Sometimes the universe is a burned-out hellscape, trapped in an ice age, or it’s a seemingly futuristic wonderland—even though the box is not capable of time travel. Its door always opens to the present, whatever world is on the other side.

“I think everybody was sort of turning themselves into mental pretzels trying to understand,” Edgerton says. “Hats off to Blake for this premise. Even though it’s moving laterally and not forward and backward in time, it still throws up so many possibilities. As a creator of this world, you have to imagine all the scenarios and go in every possible story direction. To be elastic in that way on a conceptual basis is a tricky challenge. I’m sure Blake was trying to fracture his brain, as the character does, in so many different ways to make sure that he was exploring every infinite possibility.”

“My brain,” the actor adds, “doesn’t bend that well.”

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