SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
The fifth and final season of "Stranger Things" wrapped up this week. The hit Netflix show is set in the 1980s, about an Indiana town that gets caught up with a paranormal world and the various villains that come with it. It is a work of fiction, of course, but as NPR's Katia Riddle explains, the show borrows from some real scientific concepts, including wormholes.
KATIA RIDDLE, BYLINE: The wormhole comes up in this season when an earnest science teacher, played by Randy Havens, tries to get his class interested in the concept.
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RANDY HAVENS: (As Mr. Clarke) What's neat about wormholes?
RIDDLE: His star student, Erica, played by Priah Ferguson, is the only one to raise her hand.
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PRIAH FERGUSON: (As Erica Sinclair) Wormholes are neat because they allow matter to travel between galaxies or dimensions without crossing the space between.
HAVENS: (As Mr. Clarke) Yes, exactly right - again. And just think of all the places mankind could go - another galaxy, another time, even.
RIDDLE: Erica's classmates are too cool or too bored to care about wormholes. But in "Stranger Things," the nerds are the ones saving the world. A key breakthrough happens when another character, Dustin, played by Gaten Matarazzo, identifies a real wormhole.
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GATEN MATARAZZO: (As Dustin Henderson) It's a wormhole. A bridge between two points in time and space - between our world and another.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) And if the bridge collapses?
MATARAZZO: (As Dustin Henderson) It will take us with it.
RIDDLE: Wormholes are a staple in Hollywood and science fiction - a handy device for any kind of space or time travel. They make appearances in the writing of Carl Sagan, "Star Trek," and the 2014 film "Interstellar." Even though it wasn't at first called a wormhole, the concept was born decades before any of this out of Einstein's general theory of relativity. Sean Carroll is a professor of theoretical physics at Johns Hopkins University.
SEAN CARROLL: It's a hugely interesting and helpful toy model for physicists to play with.
RIDDLE: Think of the universe as a single swath of fabric, with space and time woven together. That's the core of Einstein's theory. In 1935, Einstein and his colleague, Nathan Rosen, found a mathematical solution that suggested spacetime could, in theory, form a kind of tunnel connecting two distant points. Later, physicists realized that such a tunnel - now called a wormhole - could act like a cosmic shortcut.
CARROLL: If you travel faster than the speed of light, then there's really no difference between traveling to the future and traveling to the past.
RIDDLE: Carroll says wormholes still have a lot of utility in today's scientific investigations.
CARROLL: You can use them to study quantum entanglement and its relationship to emergent spacetime and all these things.
RIDDLE: Scientists stress that there are a lot of practical reasons wormholes are not, to our knowledge, an actual thing. The theoretical versions are handy, not just for studying science, but for teaching it. Carsten Welsch is a professor of physics at University of Liverpool. He says the "Stranger Things" fever has taken hold, even there in the U.K. Welsch uses the series and concepts like wormholes to instruct his students.
CARSTEN WELSCH: It's a really good way to talk about science, which can be quite a challenge, especially with teenagers. The moment normally you mention physics or engineering, they run away.
RIDDLE: Welsch says he's grateful to the creators of "Stranger Things" for folding scientific concepts like wormholes into the show.
WELSCH: It's basically opening a dialogue about are there maybe other forces? Are there things that we do not understand in the universe?
RIDDLE: Wormholes may not currently be able to deliver us into other dimensions, but Welsch hopes they can help us deliver a new generation of scientific minds.
Katia Riddle, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF KYLE DIXON & MICHAEL STEIN'S "STRANGER THINGS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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