They decided it was real, and he got the ball rolling. There was enough meaty material there for him to put together a lively 325-page book on the subject. “Virtually every episode has some bigger idea about science, and sometimes it’s a big whopping idea,” he said.

“Rick and Morty,” with characters who travel between dimensions and around the galaxy using ultra-high-tech science for various shenanigans, was perfect fodder. The show is wildly popular — an episode in which Rick was fixated on an old McDonald’s dipping sauce actually inspired the chain to bring that sauce back for a special event — and it often uses heady scientific principles in its stories. Parallel universes are a recurring theme, along with such subjects as divergent timelines, hacking someone’s memory like a computer, growing or shrinking the human body, transferring consciousnesses, creating microscopic universes, and much more.

“As a series, it really, really stays close to science,” Brady said. “It doesn’t just hide the science, or put the science into a blender. You can tell there was care that was put into it. ... sometimes. Sometimes, they’d just put the word ‘quantum’ onto something to make it sound sciencey.