True life may be stranger than fiction, at least where the Department of Energy is involved.
The Energy Department on Wednesday was initially quick to deny any similarities to its fictional counterpart in the hit Netflix series “Stranger Things,” in which a 1980s Indiana town gets besieged by a paranormal monster from a parallel universe. However, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz hinted on Chelsea Handler’s late-night Netflix talk show that some aspects of the series aren’t too far from reality.
“First of all, I have never seen [“Stranger Things”], but I’m aware of it,” Moniz told Handler and actors Don Cheadle and Joshua Jackson, who were discussing climate change. “Secondly, I believe this fictional D.O.E. laboratory was operating in the 1980s. You can draw whatever inference you wish from that. Third, I will note that actually we do work in parallel universes.”
Moniz described the various responsibilities the Energy Department has, ranging from the Iran nuclear agreement to basic science, which “includes trying to understand the basic particles of nature and the structure of the universe.”
“It turns out, theoretical physics addressing that looks at things like higher dimensions than three dimensions and parallel universes,” Moniz said. “But I would not get carried away with some of the other things that happens in ‘Stranger Things.'”
Moniz’s comments differ from the August Energy Department blog post by communications specialist Paul Lester, who wrote, “While the Energy Department doesn’t chart parallel universes, it does help power the exploration of new worlds.”
The fictional Energy Department in “Stranger Things” studies a darker parallel universe from which the monster escapes, and conducts experiments on children to induce powers of telepathy. Theories posit that the show’s storyline was inspired by secretive CIA experiments in the ’70s as well as the time-travel experiments of the Montauk Project in the ’90s.
