THE NEW YORK TIMES: It’s based on real science but could Apple TV’s Dark Matter multiverse actually exist?

“I had the image of a box in a warehouse, with a door on it. And that was it.”

It was 2014, and Blake Crouch was brainstorming ideas for a new novel, having just published the final book in his mystery-thriller trilogy Wayward Pines.

He had spent nearly a decade circling quantum mechanics — a branch of physics typically used to describe the behaviour of very small particles — waiting for the right story to hitch it to.

“I get interested in a topic,” he said in a recent video interview. “That’s how it starts.”

In the resulting novel, Dark Matter (2016) — and in the Apple TV series Crouch subsequently created and runs — that box became the central device. Inside it, a person can be put into a state of quantum superposition: an idea rooted in real science, based on the non-intuitive concept that subatomic particles like electrons can, on some level, exist in two places at once.

The speculative leap? You can enter this seemingly indestructible box and exit into an alternate reality, one in which another version of you went down a different path — a notion rooted in the “many worlds” theory first proposed by physicist Hugh Everett.

“The best interactions between the pure science and the drama requires some compromise,” said the Apple TV show’s science consultant, Clifford V. Johnson, a physics professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The Box, he continued, “is a completely fictional device that I think helps connect those two worlds”.

How much does the science fiction in Dark Matter reflect science fact? With the second season’s release now streaming, viewers may again be prompted to wonder.

As a physicist by training, I’ve had some inklings of my own, but I wanted to learn more from the show’s makers — and from scientists outside the production.

As befits a show steeped in quantum physics, the answers were sometimes complicated. And season two, which takes the series off-book, presented a whole new set of scientific challenges not previously hashed out for the novel — to say nothing of having to present it all visually.

Crouch and his creative partner and wife, Jacquelyn Ben-Zekry, who produces and co-writes the series, found themselves in uncharted territory.

“We really were staring at a blank page coming out of season one,” Crouch said. “But we had the characters,” he added. “And we knew what our actors could do, and what we wanted to write toward.”

Crouch’s relationship with Johnson goes back to 2015, when he asked Johnson to look over parts of the Dark Matter novel. Crouch had written a few drafts, and he shared only “sciencey chunks of the book that had jargon”, he said. The partnership grew closer over time.

“He reads every script that we write,” Crouch said of Johnson’s role in the series.

Season one follows the book closely, telling the story of Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton), a college professor whose world-hopping doppelganger (also Edgerton) invents the Box and steals the original Jason’s life, stranding him in the multiverse.

By the end — spoilers follow — he is reunited with his wife, Daniela (Jennifer Connelly), and their son, Charlie (Oakes Fegley), all three about to step into a new world.

In dramatic terms, season one is fundamentally a story about love and choice. Daniela’s life implodes because of choices made by one Jason or another; nevertheless, Daniela continues to choose her family.

“A lot of the show is about people wishing for other paths we could take, and she’s someone who’s really committed to the path that she’s on in her marriage,” Connelly said of her character, adding: “She’s going to fight really hard to stay in it.”

As for the science, the scientists I interviewed agreed that the basic premise draws from sound theory. By putting an object in total isolation — which means sealing it off from all interference, including errant vibrations, stray light and cosmic rays — scientists can indeed preserve an object’s “quantum-ness”, as Johnson described it, and keep it in a state of superposition.

But the objects in those experiments are typically small molecules or atoms. Superposition is also used in quantum computers to manipulate information in ways classical computers can’t, but the scale is still microscopic.

Extrapolating to the size and complexity of humans represents “an idealised, human-scale version of something that is routinely explored in science labs”, Johnson said.

In other words: For now, it lies so outside the range of possibility as to be virtually impossible.

“As a practical matter, you cannot actually isolate a human being from their environment,” Sean Carroll, a physicist at Johns Hopkins and the Santa Fe Institute, wrote by email. Referring to infrared light, he continued, “Just by breathing and radiating IR light, any macroscopic organism creates their own environment.” (He added: “But I am very forgiving when it comes to TV show science!”)

In season two, Jason realises that understanding the Box is crucial to keeping his family safe. But that means disassembling and examining the Box itself — which in season one was a black box, as it were.

Fortunately for Crouch, Johnson had already been thinking about that. Task in hand, Johnson waded into “a lot of really, really fun contemporary science”, he said. To shut out all potential interference, for example, the Box has to adapt to changing conditions. Think noise-cancelling headphones, which generate counter-signals to neutralise incoming sound, but supercharged.

In an early season two episode, Jason dismantles the Box down to its studs — exposing layers of circuitry, coaxial cables and glowing panels. The details had to be convincing. For inspiration, members of the special effects and production design crews pulled images of the interiors of quantum computers and other cutting-edge tech, “like some of the stuff coming out of SpaceX, Blue Origin and NASA”, Ben-Zekry said.

But dismantling the Box raised another question: If the Box is nearly indestructible, how does Jason remove the exterior panels?

“That was a question that Matt Cavaliero in props was asking me every day for like a month,” Ben-Zekry said. “Patricio Farrell, our production designer, too.”

To puzzle it out, Ben-Zekry enlisted the help of the show’s sound engineer, Cormac Funge. The solution, at least in the world of Dark Matter, involved electromagnets and their faint, resonant hum.

No amount of design ingenuity, however, could make such a box function in the real world. For starters, any object with energy, like a human being, interacts gravitationally with whatever is around it. A massive box would add more matter for a person to interact with.

“If you want to isolate people from the universe so that they can maintain quantum superposition for longer, I think surrounding them with something really, really, really dense and heavy isn’t great,” said John Joseph Carrasco, a physics professor at Northwestern University.

Where season one was about navigating your way home, season two emphasises the bonds that tether us to one another. The creators leaned on another concept lifted from quantum mechanics, entanglement, which says that seemingly disconnected parts of a system can be connected, sometimes over great distances.

As with superposition, entanglement applies typically to very small objects. But the show extends it to the Boxes, the worlds and even the characters.

No evidence suggests such connections are possible. For Edgerton, who acknowledged that his grasp of the science was nothing like his character’s, that hardly seemed to matter. The show is science fiction: Its use of entanglement, he said, is a beautiful example of magic realism.

The idea “that two people that deeply love each other are somehow intertwined, enmeshed, no matter which universe you meet them in — I think that comes from a heart place rather than a scientific journal”, he said.

Dark Matter season two is out now on Apple TV