In the last season of Stranger Things an interesting thing happens: the series stops, at least in part, to play only with the fantasy and tries to put order in his own mythology. The Upside down it is no longer just a dark parallel dimension as we imagined in the first seasons, but something more precise, more structured. And this is where a concept as fascinating as it is complicated comes into play: the wormhole. At a certain point one of the characters – the great one Dustin Hendersonthe one who represents scientific curiosity in the series – reaches a key conclusion: the Upside Down is not a parallel universe in the classical sense. It is not a world “next to” ours that exists on its own. It’s quite a pontea sort of shortcut that connects two different realities. And this is exactly how, in theoretical physics, wormholes are imagined. In scientific reality, these objects arise from one of the most important theories of the twentieth century: the general relativity. In 1935 a very particular mathematical solution emerged: a “bridge” in the space-time capable of connecting two very distant regions of the Universe. Not a tunnel dug in space, but a real one folding of space-timeoften represented as one hourglasswith two entrances – a black hole at the entrance and a “white hole” at the exit – and a central throat.
The idea is this: if space-time can curve, then in principle it could also “fold” back on itself. And instead of traveling a huge distance, you could cross a much shorter distance by going across the bridge.
You’re not going faster than light. You’re simply taking a shortcut.
And this is where Stranger Things makes an interesting narrative choice: the Upside Down is not the final destination, but the tunnel itself. The passage. The connection structure. On the other side, in fact, there is another real dimension – called Abyss – from which creatures such as demogorgons and the same come from Vecna. The Sottosopra, therefore, is not “another world”: it is the means that connects them to ours.
However, there is a huge problem, both in the series and in real physics: wormholes don’t stand on their own. According to the equations, a wormhole would be extremely unstable. The curvature of space-time in its “throat” is so extreme that the severity would tend to do so collapse on himself in a split second, crushing anything that tries to pass through it. To keep it open you would need something very particular, something that does the opposite of gravity. And this is where la comes in exotic matteralso explicitly mentioned in the series.
This is not magic, but a theoretical hypothesis: a form of matter with negative energycapable of exerting outward pressure, a sort of “repulsive gravity” that would prevent the tunnel from closing. The problem is that, at least for now, we don’t know if such a thing really exists. We have never observed it, we don’t know how to produce it and it is not certain that the Universe really allows similar conditions on a large scale. They also exist theoretical models who try to imagine stable wormholes without exotic matter, but we are still in the field of mathematical conjectures.
So, what’s “real” about Stranger Things wormholes? The basic idea – a space-time bridge, a cosmic shortcut, a structure that is not a world but a connection – it is scientifically plausible on a theoretical level. Everything else, from stability to the possibility of crossing them, remains science fiction for now. And this is where Stranger Things hits the mark: it doesn’t tell “real science”, but prende ideas that science considers serious enough to study and turns them into pop mythology.
And when a series can get millions of people talking about relativity, space-time, and negative energy without using a single formula, it’s doing something amazing!
Stranger Things’ Upside Down Wall Explained
That gigantic, gelatinous, slimy, unpleasant wall that the characters encounter in the Upside Down is not an obstacle placed there by chance; and there is no Vecna behind it. That wall represents the wallsof the “hourglass”, of the bridge that unites the two worlds, seen from the inside. In fact, when the characters find themselves in the Upside Down, they find themselves inside the wormhole bridge. And like every tunnel, this one also has boundaries. Everything surrounding the Upside Down is bounded by that wall and held together by the sphere of energy.
The Upside Down is not an infinite space, but a place closedcontained, kept open, as mentioned earlier, by what the series calls exotic matter: the element that prevents the tunnel from collapsing on itself and which makes the very existence of the bridge possible.
Who conceived of wormholes in “real” science?
From a scientific point of view, wormholes began as a purely theoretical idea. In 1935, Albert Einstein e Nathan Rosen showed that the equations of General Relativity admit particular solutions in which two distant regions of space-time can be connected by a “bridge”: what we today call ponti on Einstein–Rosen.
At the time there was still no talk of time travel or crossings: it was a mathematical result, not a “fantasy-engineering” hypothesis. The term wormhole, however, came later. It was the physique John Archibald Wheeler to coin it in 1957to intuitively describe these space-time tunnels: as if space were one mela and a don’t give dug a shortcut from one side to the other (taking less distance). And, wanting to be even more precise, an embryonic idea of similar structures already appears in 1916when the physical Ludwig Flamm he identified a first solution of Einstein’s equations that conceptually anticipated the geometry of wormholes, although without attributing to it the meaning that it would assume in subsequent years.
As in most science fiction films and works, also for Stranger Things science is the muse.
Related News :