Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel talks to Peter Harness, screenwriter for "Constellation", about the quantum rules of his fictional Universe.
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Hey Daniel, when did the latest run of the Large Hadron Collider start?
Ooh a few months ago? Ooh?
Does that mean we've shifted into another timeline in the multiverse.
What are you talking about?
Well, you know, people say that the large Hadron collider somehow caused something called the Mandela effect, which is this weird sensation that maybe we're in the wrong universe. Hmm.
I think I want to be in the timeline where nobody believes in the Mandela effect, because that's just silliness.
But isn't this an established the physics theory kind of the multiverse.
I'm just going to keep running the LC until we end up in the universe I want to be in.
Is there a universe you want to live in?
This one's pretty.
Good, So stop running the LAC then, because it could get worse.
All right, you convinced me?
Good? Pressent button, Press that big red button.
Hi.
I'm hoor Hammer, cartoonist and the author of Oliver's Great Big Universe.
Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at uc Erline, and I'm a big fan of this universe.
Yeah, I'm a huge fan of this universe, especially because it made me and everyone.
I know.
And despite that we're all fans of it as well.
I'm not a fan of the universes that didn't make me it obviously didn't know what it was doing.
What if blueberries in those universe taste twice as good? You still think that those universes are not worth knowing?
Well, you mean can we visit them?
Yeah? If we go visit those universes and they have amazing pastries we never even thought about before, But there's no jrahete cham. Are you gonna be like, nah, this isn't worth visiting.
Well, it's worth visiting, But I still like my universe. Could we import these amazing blueberries? I mean it sounds like a market opportunity if you ask me.
Yeah, that's a startup idea, right, there will multiverse pastries, Let's do it.
Yeah. I think we need a need like economics term for multi dimensional trade benefits. I think it's a whole new meaning to import export, multi import, multi export, quantum importing or quantum exporting very exactly.
Oh my goodness, finally a use for the word quantum that means something.
We're gonna be quantum rich. But anyways, welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of our Heart Radio in.
Which we explore the fundamental meaning of reality and the laws that govern it. We dig our way down to the bedrock of nature and try to figure out what the rules are for this universe, how they come together to make this amazing, creative, bonkers universe that features both blueberries, pastries and Jorge chams.
That's right. We try to explore this other universes, all the universes, and what it all means to maybe have different universes, and how we're ever going to find out what the true reality of nature is.
One way to explore the reality of nature is to do experiments and to test our universe and force it to reveal its laws. But another very important way is to think about the possible universes we might live in, to be creative, to imagine the ways that the universe might be. That's something that theoretical physicists do, but it's also something that science fiction authors do. They create whole new universes in their minds and think about what it means to live in those universes, what the consequences of that fictional science might be.
That's right. Science fiction has a long and interesting history of thinking about possibilities for technology science and what those changes and those possibilities might mean for the universe we live in and the way that we live in.
Because one reason why physics is so important and so influential is because it has great consequence. The things that we learned about the nature of reality tell us a lot about the meaning of our lives. If you discovered that we lived in a multiverse with infinite numbers of copies of you, would you feel more valuable less valuable? It certainly would change your perspective on the meaning of your life and the ways that you make your choices. Science fiction authors are often very clever at exploring the ways that understanding the universe affects the meaning of our lives.
Or I guess at least looking at current theories and then maybe exploring them, maybe before they're established or not, just kind of wondering what would that if this theory was true, what would that mean for our everyday lives.
And sometimes even coming up with new technologies that might be consequences of those theories that could change the daily pattern of our lives. So on the podcast, we're normally talking about actual physics of our actual universe, but we have a whole series of episodes exploring the science of fictional universes.
So the end of the program, we'll be exploring the science fiction universe of Constellation. Yeah, this is a new TV show right on Apple TV.
That's right. Constellation is on Apple TV and it's a science fiction show written by one of my favorite screenwriters, and it's a lot of fun.
Ooh, one of your favorite screenwriters. I didn't know you followed screenwriters.
Well, I watch a lot of TV, so I do. This guy's written detective mysteries that I've seen, and also wrote the adaptation for Jonathan Strange and Mister Norell, a famously fantastical book.
Oh yeah, my wife watched that show. Is that a good show? I guess you liked it if it's one of your favorite writers.
The book is absolutely astounding and incredible, really just a worker genius. But I thought it was going to be unadaptable. It's just so complicated and intricate. But he did a great job at the TV show. The TV show is a different thing than the book, but really well adapted.
Well. Now, this writer called Peter Harness now has a new show on Apple TV and it's titled That's Right.
And this one's solidly in the science fiction category, and there's a lot of quantum physics in it. Bose Einstein condensates, space travel, multiverse, all this kind of stuff.
WHOA, So, I guess what's the TV show about.
So it starts on the International Space Station. There's a bunch of astronauts up there and they're doing a science experiment. They're making a Bose Einstein condensate on the space station, which is what so Bose Einstein condensate is a weird state of matter. Remember that particles fall into two categories, fermions and bosons. Fermions, like electrons and other matter particles, have this rule that you can't have two of them in the same state. So if you try to cool down a bunch of electrons, for example, that won't actually all fall down to the lowest energy level. They'll each find their own place on the ladder, so the whole thing won't really cool down as much. But if you play with bosons like photons or some kind of atoms, they have no compunction against occupying the same energy level, so you can cool them down much much lower. And if you take a bunch of them and you cool them all down, then their wave functions overlap and they form this new state of matter called a Bose Einstein contensate, which is cool because it's sort of macroscopic. It's like big enough you can see it, and it has quantum properties, like it interferes with itself and all sorts of cool stuff. So it's like a macroscopic piece of matter that has quantum properties. It was first discovered in the nineties and now they've replicated it in lots of situations, including in real life on the space station.
Well, don't you need a lot of equipment for that, like giant machines or can you do this in your desktop or your spacetop.
I guess you don't need giant machines. It's not like the large Hadron collider. Mostly this is done with atomic physics, and so you need like an atom trap and you need magnets, maybe lasers. It's not enormous.
Okay. So then the scientists in the show did this in space, and then what happened?
So in the show, they do this in space and then weird stuff happens. There's an accident and they come back to Earth and discover that it's not really the Earth familiar with you know, some details are different, and people have different memories, and everybody thinks maybe they went crazy up there. And as you watch it, you discover that you're actually watching two stories in parallel, like two different elements of a multiverse that have come to interact when the scientists did that experiment in space.
WHOA. So the show is following this group of astronauts and when they come back, things are different, and it's because they're not in the same universe or are we going back and forth between the two universes.
Both some of them have switched over to another universe, and so now they don't like have the memory of the correct history anymore. They disagree with people like did we buy that red car? I thought our car was blue, this kind of stuff, And there is still some interaction between the universes, like the same person from two universes can now talk to each other under some circumstances. And so it's like these two universes have come into contact and changed both of them.
Wait, like the people in the two universes swap places.
In some cases, yes, not everybody, but in some cases, yeah.
Oh interesting, Now I guess as a quantum scientist. Daniel do you watch this and you're like, that's a lot of vs or or do you find it interesting?
I always find it interesting, and what I'm looking for is consistency. I treat each of these shows the way I treat our universe, like I assume it's following some rules, and I want to figure out what the rules are. It's like watching a murder mystery. You're gathering clues, You're trying to figure out what happened. And so when they do experiments and get weird results, I take that as the writers communicating to me some information about the way their universe works, and so I want to try to figure it out. I'm not insisting that the science in that universe obey the same rules as the science in our universe. Of course, it's called science fiction for a reason, and it's really fun for me to try to figure out what are the rules of that universe?
Okay, so then what are the rules in this universe? It sounds like maybe it's getting into the multiverse, and the quantum multiverse in particular.
Yeah, this leans a lot on things we're familiar with in quantum mechanics. You know, superposition, the idea that a particle can have the possibility of being in two places at once, that both possibilities can exist simultaneously before you look, and then only when a classical object interacts with it does universe have to pick one or the other. Like an electron can have a possibility to go left or right, and it's not that it does both, but that it maintains the possibility of having done both until you've measured it. The idea of entanglement that two particles with these possibilities can have their possibilities like tied together in complicated ways. Ideas of interference that these possibilities can cancel each other out. All this kind of stuff is used to pretty good effect in the show, But the fundamental concept they're dealing with is actually not a multiverse. It's something else. It's called a mirror verse, which is like a multiverse, but with only two universes in it.
But two is multi though, isn't it.
Yeah, But I think the more common idea of a multiverse has an infinite number of universes in it, or at least an enormous number. The most typical idea of a multiverse is the one that exists in like the many world's theory of quantum mechanics that says that when an electron has a possibility to go left and to go right, that both things do happen, that the universe splits into two branches, and both of those universes then exist, and those are different elements of the quantum multiver.
Right, And then that's supposed to happen with every single particle that exists in the world. Like each time any of the bazillions electrons in the universe does something or pick a possibility, you split off a new universe.
Yeah, so every billisecond, all the ten to the ninety particles in the universe are creating new universes. So there's an enormous number, many more than just two is in this show. He's operating a much simpler sort of multiverse with just two universes in it, which he calls the mirror re verse.
But why only two? How did these two get created? Yeah, it's a good question, And as you'll hear in my interview, I asked him about that, and he didn't want to reveal it because he's got secrets he wants to reveal in season two. But that's like a night to saying I'll do this in my future.
Work, my second Nobel Prize. We'll explain all of that.
Yeah, exactly.
But there are some legit theories of the mirror verse out there. I'm not exactly sure what Peter Harness has in his brain, but there are scientists that talk about the.
Mirror verse really like why too well.
Our universe is weird in some ways. For example, our universe does not respect parody. Parody is like if you flip the universe so that everything looks the way it would in a mirror, you like, reflect it through the axis, then the laws of physics would operate a little bit differently. Our universe is sort of weirdly left handed, you've reflected it in a mirror, it would look a little bit different. We have a whole episode about parody violation in our universe. But there are some ways in which our universe has made one of two choices, and so you can imagine that there might be a mirror of our universe out there, in a mirror verse where the opposite is true, like the right handed version of our universe.
And this is just like one choice you can make. Aren't there like a bazillion of these choices.
Yeah, that's a good point. You know, there are other basic symmetries. Parody is one that's violated maximally, though, and so it's the one that seems most ripe for flipping, you know, like time in variant symmetry is also not respect in our universe, but is violated less dramatically than parody. But you're right, you could have another universe where that's flipped. There's also charge in variance, but that one's actually respected in our universe. But yeah, there are other ways you can imagine flipping the universe where it's made one choice or another, Like you could have another universe where what we call anti matter is the dominant kind of matter in the universe.
Right. I think what you're saying is, maybe, you know, there are certain rules in physics that maybe apply to there being two versions of us of a universe.
Mm hmm, yeah, exactly, and time is an especially powerful one. There was a theory that bounced around a few years ago that at the Big Bang, two universes were created, one flowing forwards in time and one flowing backwards in time.
Right, the Big Bang and then the Big Bomb?
Right, yeah, pass it over man and another hit it a big bomb.
That's how they came up with this theory, isn't it Yeah?
Exactly. And there were even those crazy events from the Anita experiment at the South Pole that we just talked about on the episode with Harry Cliff that received a lot of silly buzz in the press for NASA discovers a parallel universe right next hours, which was totally scientific misinformation. But there are those theories of another universe going backwards in time. In none of those cases, though, would you be able to interact with that universe? Like, in none of those cases, could you do an experiment which is then can interfere because the quantum mechanics of it is quite crisp. Like these universes when they branch, do you call them another universe because you cannot interact with it. That's sort of what it means, Like you have the big wave function from the multiverse and then it decoheres into separate wave functions. Those wave functions don't interfere with each other, can't interact with each other at all. That's sort of what we mean mean by another universe. So the idea that you could do an experiment, even a weird quantum one with Bose Einstein condensate in space that would somehow bring those universes together. That's science fiction. That's not something we see in our kind of science at all. That doesn't mean Peter Harness can't write it into the fiction of his universe, but it's not something that exists in our theories in any way.
So you're saying the whole show is just a bunch of bs. I mean, ask you, that's kind of what you just said, Daniel.
I think no, I'm saying it's fiction and he's allowed to create new rules for his universe. And as you'll hear in the interview, I asked him about this, whether he's operating by the rules in our universe or some speculative physics theories.
I'm guessing he just said, yes, I'm going to reveal the reason for that in the next season.
That's exactly what he said.
See, I can predict things in our universe as well.
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All right, well, here is Daniel's interview with screenwriter Peter Harness, creator of the new Apple TV show Constellation.
All right, well, then, it's my great pleasure to welcome to the podcast Peter Harness and English playwright, screenwriter and actor. Thanks very much for joining us.
Thank you very much. I need to update Wikipedia. I haven't done any acting for a very long time, but it's nice. It's still it's nice. It still believes that I have more.
Once an actor, always an actor. So tell us a little bit about your back. How did you get into writing for television and science fiction writing starting from playwriting?
I think that I always wanted to write for TV really more than anything else, and if I did a little bit of play writing earlier in my career, I think it was a bit of a I can't really say means to an end, because both careers are pretty difficult to get into. But I think I kind of did it in the absence of writing for TV, because really, that's what I've always wanted to do. That's my first love, rather than film or the stage or anything like that. So it was, yes, I was always trying my best to get into TV from the get go.
And why is that? Why were you so excited about writing for television? What about that medium excited you?
I think that I grew up watching so much television. That's I hate to say it, but the majority of my childhood was spent watching TV, and I was a big fan of I was a doctor who obsessive when I was small. And there's something about that program and the kind of level of scrutiny that fans go into on it. It kind of brings you into an awareness of television's actually made by people, and that it has writers and producers and other people who make it. I found that fascinating, and I found the whole like the history of television fascinating, and I kind of started doing a PhD on an English TV dramatist called Dennis Potter, who wrote The Singing Detective and Pennies from Heaven and Blue Room, Membed Hills and things like that, and he was very well known in his day, and he was one of those people who just, you know, expanded the boundaries of what is what's possible with storytelling on the small screen. And I've always wanted to get into it and be able to tell those biggest stories over a longer period of time that you can't do in a movie or a play. It's really it's really luxury to have seven or eight hours to play with, or fifteen hours or something like that. You can essentially tell a whole, big, novelistic story and it can go anywhere and do anything. And I still find that incredibly exciting.
Well, you've done such a diversity of work, including original stuff like Constellation and also really challenging adaptations like Jonathan Strange and Mister and Aurel, which I watched and loved. Congratulations. Tell us about the various challenges of that adapting and existing complex work and inventing a whole new world yourself.
It's very nice that you mentioned Jonathan Stranger Mister Normal, because I think actually I've than Constellation. It's the thing that I'm most proud of I really, I wouldn't change a single second of that. I really love that show.
And I have to say, watching that, I was very skeptical because I thought, who is going to adapt this? Wow? This book is insane, So congrats. I was really impressed by it.
Well, I mean, it's a challenge to get hold of one of those unadaptable books. It is a challenge to adapt it. And I like that kind of challenge. I like that kind of mental puzzle. And it's an interesting process adapting a book. And it's different with every book actually, because some authors have strengths or weaknesses in certain areas and you have to be quite sensitive with them. I mean, I think, maybe this isn't the right way to do it. But whenever I adapted a book, I wanted I always wanted it to feel something like the experience of reading the book, you know, to preserve, not just cherry pick the ideas and the characters and some of the plot and just do a kind of radical throw out of everything and put all of my own ideas into it, perhaps naively and foolishly, Like I said, I always wanted to preserve, preserve the tone and the soul of the original book, and that varies obviously very much from books to book, and with something like jhonasan stranger miss and Noral, which has such a distinct voice and such a distinct sense of humor and world, and I'd love that book myself, and I really wanted, I really wanted to make it as magical and funny and exciting to watch as it was to read. The challenge usually is to just basically take the book to pieces and find out what all the component parts are, and what makes the characters tick, and which images and which scenes are important, and then and then I tend to kind of build a dramatic structure underneath it, if you see what I mean. A lot of novels don't really they're not really according to like a film or TV structure for storytelling. They've got their own pace, and they expect you to spend ten minutes with them on an evening or kind of a couple of hours with them on a train. So they're not they're not hooking you in in the same way, and so I always kind of get inside and make the architecture a little bit different, and then and then layer the bits of the story that we remember back on top of that. So it's quite it's quite a delicate and surgical procedure, but it's a lot of fun. And like I said, I was always interested in adapting books that maybe people had had a go at before and found difficult or found not not easy to tell in a movie or something. And I enjoyed that very much. But I kind of found myself doing more and more adaptations. And that's not surprising because most things are adaptations these days. But really, after Strange and NOL, I made myself a promise that I wasn't really going to seriously focus on anything else until I'd gotten an original idea over the line. That's why I got into writing, That's why I wanted to be a writer. I have stories that I want to tell, and it's easy to get sidetracked into not telling them. So I promised myself that, for good or for real, I I'd focus on trying to get an original thing over the line.
Cancelation is definitely a very original story, and so we want to talk about that. But first we want to orient ourselves sort of where you stand in the science fiction universe. So we have a few questions. We ask all of our science fiction authors. So the first one is do you think that Star Trek transporters kill you and clone you or actually transport your atoms somewhere else? That is, are they teleporters or actually murder machines?
I think I think that's such a depressing thought. I'm always much more on the Doctor Who's side than the Star Trek side, so I always feel a little bit kind of adulterous thinking about the Star Trek. But they use that technology in a Peter Cavaldi episode, and Stephen actually made a kind of play of that that he'd been broken down into atoms and essentially killed and recreated. And I just think that's such a disturbing and horrible thought. But I think that that kind of has to be how it works, right, that has to be how it works. But it's just it's just the most hideous thing that I've ever that I've ever thought about. It looks it looks so beautiful and graceful, but yeah, they're just being butchered.
No.
I think, horrible as it is to think that, I think that that that is what happened.
So as difficult as that is to embrace what technology in science fiction, would you most like to see become reality, which as a scientist to actually be working on.
It's hard to think of anything that I'd like to see become a reality because usually the potential uses of it or are also disturbing. I don't know. I'm a bit of a loud eye. Really, I'm a kind of anti technology. It's not a great place to be in if you're writing science fiction. I'm more horrified by the potential frontiers of science that I am than I am excited by them. Necessary I can't actually think of something. I mean, i'd I'd love to see time travel happening. I'd love to see interstellar space travel. Actually, in terms of constellation, it would be very interesting to get to the end of quantum physics, or get even half an inch further along the line, because the suggestions that it makes about the universe are so are so tantalizing and interesting. But I just generally think we're probably it's very hard for us to cope with the technology that we've got. It would be great if we could invent a machine which would just put some of it back in the box and then ration it out again a little bit more, a little bit more slowly, so we could actually cope with it without driving ourselves mad as a species.
Well, maybe we should see science fiction as warnings rather than inspiration. Then our last general question is, what's your personal answer to the Fermi paradox? If the galaxy is so old and there's so many habitable planets, why haven't any aliens visited us yet?
It's another depressing answer, and I'm obviously not the first one to come up with it. It's because civilizations tend to wipe themselves out before they manage to achieve that. And also it might actually be impossible crossing such vast levels of space might be something which just stumps any science. Yeah, and I'm not entirely sure that aliens haven't visited as visited as either, So yeah, I think it's it's probably that they can't start fighting each other for long enough to concentrate on getting off the planet.
So then let's turn to Constellation. The show, which is a lot of fun, features a lot of themes of quantum mechanics, this superposition, multiverse, entanglement, et cetera. Tell me what drew of these themes. What excited you about these themes from a storytelling point of view?
Well, I didn't start out by wanting to write something about quantum physics. I started out really from the idea of astronauts returning to Earth and feeling that something was was a miss. And also this little ghost story of of a little girl lost in the forest and hiding in a cupboard in an old, abandoned cabin. And that was what really just came out when I when when I sat down to write the pilot, and so the whole development of the show was working out how those two things fitted together, and how and how that mother got back to that child and had what had happened up there, and what was causing the things that she was going through back on Earth. And I think the quantum physics ideas just started to slot in and started to give it some degree of organization. And I'm very interested in the frontiers of science and that quote Biarthursy Clark about any science sufficiently advanced being indistinguishable from magic. I find it very interesting to see science at the at the edge of itself and how many things remain mysterious and unexplained. And one of the things that the people who work with quantum physics keep on saying about it is that it's that if you think you understand it, you don't understand it. I mean, Einstein called it spooky action at a distance, didn't they, And there is something tantalizingly spooky about it. And I like thinking about how you might explain you might explain things like ghosts or fairies or or historical UFO encounters in terms of science, and how they collide, and whether there's actually any difference between them, or whether whether we're just describing the same thing in different terms. If you see what I mean, it's very interesting to play around with where science interacts with mythology or madness or consciousness or other things that we don't really understand about the human condition. And I wanted, I wanted to write something which which took you through those steps and also had the feeling of each of those each of those things.
Well, the show feels almost like it's written in the style of a thriller or a mystery, but you know, in a science fiction sort of universe or in context. And I know it's often said that you can't write a mystery in the science fiction universe because for a mystery, the reader has to know what the rules are, and in science fiction, the rules can be almost anything. And you've written mystery and detective shows yourself, so for you, how important is it for for the viewer that your universe follows a coherent and consistent set of rules, even if those rules you know are not the same as the rule of our actual universe.
I think writing something like this it's very important. I think that it's it's it's no good if you if you can just switch things out at the last minute and and say and now she can grow another head, or it's all about time travel. I think it's I think it's very important because obviously part of part of the interest for some members of the audience is figuring out those rules, and part of the fun of making it is dropping hints to that and trying to try to ration the ration the information, or allow people a little bit more information here and there and let them let them work out what's happening. But within that, I think you've got to be very the audience has to feel confident that there are rules. I think you've got to present it with enough confidence to say, Okay, you know, maybe you don't know what's happening yet, but that's all right, because none of our characters do either, and they're figuring it out alongside you, and you'll probably actually get there a little bit ahead of them. So it's fine. It's fine if you don't know everything at the beginning, because you know, trust me, we're not making it up. As we go along, things will start to fall into place. I think it's very important to do that, and I think it's I think it's also very important within that to give to have characters which are living and breathing and real characters and real situations. So even if the law of the series or the background of the series isn't in focus, you have clear emotional investment in the characters. You know what they're going through. And with Constellation, I really tried in each of those situations that Joe or Alice or Henry and Bud find themselves, I wanted to kind of present them like everybody knows what it's like to go through a breakup, or most people have an indication of what it's like to live with someone who's suffering from mental illness. Everybody knows what it's like to have a difficult relationship with a parent or a child, And so I tried to get a bit through those things and give the emotional, the emotional journey of the emotional backbone of it a real strength, so so it would carry all the weirdness along with it and be and be understandable of itself.
Well, I'm definitely the slice of the audience that likes to figure out what are the rules of this universe that I'm watching. To me, that's the fun of science fiction. It's like a big detective mystery. It's like, what are the clues? How does this world work? I'm trying to piece it together. And that's a parallel to what we actually do in reality. Like that's what science is. We're all trying to solve the mystery of the universe and we're getting a bunch of clues and trying to figure out how it all makes sense. And I completely agree with you with to trust the writer that it does make sense, that there is some sense. And here in our actual universe, I'm hoping that there really is some sense behind everything. And we do wonder sometimes if there is a coherent explanation, if they're just making things up. So tell us in your universe, the universe of Constellation takes place in in your mind, is it following the same rules of physics as our universe, or have you sort of departed from it and created your own laws that that that universe follows.
Yes, I would say, yes, yes it is, but those the laws of physics that it's that it's following are perhaps interpreted in a slightly kind of artistic way. They're not necessarily kind of literally interpreted. I think the various quantum elements are probably slightly I just I just found analogies kind of from life or illustrated them in a way which is not kind of replicatable in an experiment. But I'm kind of obviously not a scientist, but from what I've read and researched and understood, here's to certain theories about how physics might work. And whether they're provable or proved or possible in the way that I present them, I don't know, but it's all, to my mind possible, and to the kind of scientists that I've spoken to, it's it's possible. Perhaps it's not likely, but it's there's a world in which it's possible.
I'd love if you could go into more detail about your process here. You mentioned that you've spoken to scientists you've done some research. What is it like when you're writing on a topic that, as you say, you're not an expert in and you want to get right. Do you call it a bunch of old friends? Do you? Is there some like bank of scientists you can refer to? You just do a bunch of reading yourself some combination.
It's a bit of a combination. I read up on it as much as I could, and we had a very really brilliant scientific advisor called Michael Brooks who used to I believe he used to edit New Scientist, and he writes a lot about the quantum muni verse and research into the quantum universe. And he was very helpful looking at how the plot was taking shape and suggesting ways in which it could more closely mirror the research or certain theories or certain branches of it, And that was really helpful. He was very good about suggesting the actual physical circumstances in which you know, a consciousness might porously go somewhere else, and chemically what that might look like in terms of how the brain is working. I mean, I asked him quite a lot about consciousness because I think, as well as all the quantum stuff, I think that it's really about It's really about how the human consciousness works and how we process reality, and to what extent consciousness is a thing that can bleed between different places and so and so we have rules for all of that, those things that Henry writes on the board in episode for hinting at it, but there's He was just very useful at filling in gaps where I maybe was just wondering how could this work? If this was a thing, how might it work? And he was very responsive and helpful and saying, well, it could work like this, And I'd say, does that sound likely to you? And it sounds as likely as anything else. What do I know? He was great And for the space stuff, I mean, we were very keen that everything that could be made authentic about it was felt very authentic, Like the design of the ISS is extremely authentic, and the space procedure and the space is as authentic as we could we could make it. We had Scott Kelly, who spent a year in space and is also an identical twin whose brother also spent a year in space, and he was extremely helpful. We had a couple of consultants from ISA and I did a lot of research about it. You buy yourself a luxury to invent these weird and crazy happenings by telling a story which otherwise seems very plausible and very authentic.
Well, congrats, I'm doing so much research. I respect that. So I asked our listeners if they had questions for you about the show, and many of them are watching it and enjoying it, and some of their questions were about the multiverse. It struck them that it seems like in the story there are basically two universes interacting, and they were wondering why these two and why you decided to have two universes interacting rather than like many many universes you know, of the potentially infinite in the multiverse.
I'm not going to tell you everything that I could, because I want to give us some ground to cover in the event that we get to continue telling the story. It's a mirror verse rather than a multiverse, I think. And there's also a kind of physics related reason for that too that I'm not going to kind of say much about for now, But I think if you get if you get into a multiverse situation where suddenly everything is possible and you're suddenly branching off into bubble universes at every decision point. That's a different kind of story, and that is a world in which theoretically everything is possible, and I wanted it to feel rather more closed and consequential than that. You know, there are two realities. They're extremely closely mirrored for reasons, but there are only kind of two versions of our characters who may who may or may not meet and meet in the middle somewhere. And I think that that that somehow seems a bit more dangerous to me and a bit more important than a multiverse where some where, you know, someone can die and it doesn't matter very much because there's another version of them there, and someone can choose to wear a pink hat one day, and someone can have, you know, several noses and eighty five sisters in one different universe and eighty four sisters and the other. It just it just suddenly becomes kind of weird and baffling. And I wanted to make something about a very tight particular constellation of people. And I think the mirroring and having another one of you, that's something that we can understand, and that's a notion that we have in us. We have you know, we've got mirrors all around us, we've got reflective surfaces. I think that that's a much more to me. That's a more interesting proposition really than a multiverse, which is which is also fascinating. But I wouldn't know how to begin to organize the rules of telling that story. And you know, you get into a kind of everything everywhere, all at one situation, which is utterly exhilarating, but I'd soon I'd soon feel totally out of control of that, you know. So it's a mirror verse, and there's obviously some sort of meeting point in the middle, some sort of liberal space or some you know, superpositional space where things are not quite decided in the in the middle, and that just seemed to be eventually the right way to tell the story. I'm sure. I'm sure I did tinker around with them, maybe being other versions, other realities, but it would have just it would have driven me even more insane than writing it with two realities already drove me. So I didn't do that well.
This idea of a liminal space, the connection between the two universes, I thought was really fascinating as you're writing it What are the sort of rules for how the two universes can overlap, because sometimes they seem separate, like two characters can't hear each other, and sometimes they do seem connected. They can hear each other. Other times it's through a tape recording. I don't want to ask you to reveal too many secrets, but so what are the rules you have in your mind for how these two universes interact?
What can I say? I don't I don't want to seem KOI about it. I'm a bit allergic to shutting everything down in terms of spoilers, but I know if but I know, if we carry on telling the story, there's a lot of this to reveal, and I don't want to want to spoil it. I don't want to spoil it in advance for anybody, because I know how how much people enjoy figuring it out. Yeah, there are there are rules to it. And perhaps it's got something to do with the cow, and perhaps it's got something to do with being in space, and perhaps it has something to do with a particular emotional state or brain chemistry or something like that. That's very vague, but it's kind of in that area.
It's vague but intriguing. Thank you very much. So then my last question for you is do you have a full idea of the whole story before you sit down and write. You outline the entire plot and then you sit down to write it or you sort of discovering it on the page as you write it. And is that also true for like seasons two and three? Do you already have those worked out that?
I completely don't do it like that. I wish I did. It would be a lot more efficient, I think, But I tend to. I tend to work things out on the page, and I tend to I tend to write a lot of different material and then look at it because it all, it all kind of comes from the same place. If you're dreaming up a project, it all your brain is very clever and good at working things out subconsciously and generating these things without you having to instruct it too much. So I tend to write quite a big bunch of stuff and then work out how it all fits together, and how the stories fit together, and how the characters, how are the characters journeys and personalities merge and give it forward momentum, And I don't know, I don't know whether that's the most efficient way of doing it, but I know that I know that if you're outlining something properly, outlining it is almost as difficult as writing it. It's a peril of the job that you do have to do outlines and things. But I'm not that great at sticking to them all the time because you just find that if you're writing an outline of thing something, you're kind writing in shorthand often because you're not seeing how ideally. If you're writing scenes, kind of characters just lead you off in a in a different direction, or they lead you somewhere a bit surprising, and you think, oh, well, I actually kind of can't tell that scene next because because the characters, you know, decided against that and we and we have to go somewhere else. And I'm a big believer in going down rabbit holes and exploring blind alleys, because you'll always you'll always find something of interest down there, and even if it's just a line or a thought, or even if or if it's just the knowledge that the path that you that you didn't take, you were right not to take. So it is a big period of exploration for me. Having said that, I've been living with this world and these characters for such a long time that I do have. I've got a good broad idea of where it'll goes. I've got i've got a good idea of their history and their backstory and the stories that they can tell. And I've got i've got an end destination. So so really i've kind of I've got the broad brushstrokes of it and many specific happenings and events along the way. But I couldn't tell you what's going to happen at the end of episode three in season four, because I mean, I've got to leave myself somewhere to go as well. You know, if you know exactly what you're going to write, then then you can't surprise yourself, and it stops being so interesting to sit down and do it if you just feel your inking it in.
As I say, well, congratulations on season one. It was a lot of fun to watch. What are you working on right now? Is it Constellation season two or do you have some other project cooking?
Well, well, I am I can't answer that.
Undisclosed projects projects, Yeah, no, but I'm busy.
I'm fairly busy just now. I wish I was having a holiday, but I'm not, yes, so I'm keeping myself busy.
All right, wonderful. Well, congratulations again and thanks very much for talking to us.
Thank you so much.
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All right, pretty interesting interview. I noticed you were sort of fan boying a little bit.
Yeah. I really respect what this guy has done. I like his writing. I like what he's done with his career. You know, he's taken chances. I think it's just awesome. I love getting to talk to people in other paths in life and hearing about their experience and the risks they took, and what it's like to be there. Because you know, we only choose one path in our life, and so it's sort of fascinating to imagine other paths in your own life. And one way to do that is to talk to people who have taken those paths.
The mirror verse of your life. Yeah, did you ever think at some point of being a TV writer? Sounds like maybe you did.
I have written for television, dude, so have you?
We have a TV show together, I mean like science fiction, physics stuff.
That's right. We don't have any science fiction in our show. Yeah. I would love to write science fiction. I'm not sure about for television, but I read a lot of science fiction. I think about science fiction just like I think about science. It's a lot of fun. Maybe one day.
So what else did you do You feel you learned from Peter Harness about the process of writing for science fiction for TV.
Yeah. I was really curious what his process was, and he took it pretty seriously. You know, he's not a physicist, of course, but he reached out to some scientists. He did a bunch of reading. He tried to write something which was respectful of the ideas of science, but also he took some liberties, you know, in order to tell a story, and so I respect what he did.
Cool. Did you give him your business card? Are you like.
Calling let's collab man?
Yeah?
Is that how they say it these days?
Let's find ourselves in a universe where we worked together.
That's right. I want to interfere with your next project. I want to entangle myself now.
That career sound like something you would one in your in your life. There.
I want to superimpose myself on your writing process.
That's right. I am super imposing myself onto your contact list. Yeah.
I think he wants to keep my spooky action at a distance.
Actually, yeah, he wants no entanglement exactly.
I respect that. I respect that. No, it was very nice of him to take some time to talk to me. I really enjoyed it.
Yeah, thank you very much, Peter Harness, and please check out his new show Constellation, available on Apple TV. Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, See you next time.
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