'Stranger Things': ORNL nuclear physicist Kelly Chipps talks fiction vs. reality

Imagine a section of town walled off from the rest of the city. Every day as you go about your business, you see shipments going in. The shipments are large. Trucks carry lots of metal and things that look like machinery. Sometimes it's just hulking material, covered in tarpaulin.

Is it a factory? It can't be a factory...there's nothing coming out.

You start to theorize.

What's behind the gate?

Secret city, secret lab

"There's a long history in popular culture of associating secrecy with the diabolical or the paranormal, and secret labs certainly fall into that category," said Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientist Kelly Chipps.

She's a big fan of the show, "Stranger Things."

Enter the tropes: Mad science, government conspiracies, black sites and Apocalypse How. The assortment recurs in 20th-century horror and science fiction films. "Stranger Things" just brought it back with a Cold War-era twist.

"It's always something that happened in a secret laboratory that created the monster and then it goes on a rampage and it's always sort of a moral story about doing things you can't then control," she said.

In the show, a Department of Energy laboratory stole a telekinetic child born of the CIA's mid-century MK-ULTRA psychotropic experiments to employ her as a weapon against the Soviet Union. Before the child escaped, she accidentally opened a portal to another dimension called "The Upside-Down."

That the series black site is a Department of Energy lab is no flub in the writing. After all, during the Manhattan Project, the DOE held fast the nation's biggest secrets: the national labs, universities and sometimes entire cities tasked with developing the nation's first atomic bombs.

After World War II, the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense led the Nuclear Arms Race as the nation navigated the Cold War.

Critics have lauded the show's true-to-the-period setting. Scenes give subtle nods to pop culture at the time: the boys' "Ghostbuster" costumes, Nancy's unwaveringly patriotic father and (spoiler), Dustin and his junk-food based relationship -à la "Gremlins" - with a creature from the Upside-Down dimension.

Perhaps more importantly, the fictional Hawkins National Laboratory is convincing. Enshrouded in trees, the Cold War-style building is located near the fictional town of Hawkins, but just far enough to go unnoticed.

Sound familiar?

"It's believable as a setting," Chipps said. "I live in Oak Ridge and in a way it's isolated, but at the same time I drive ten minutes to get in here."

So, what are the rules?

Chipps is a Liane B. Russell Fellow fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She studies unstable and exotic nuclei, like those found in exploding stars.

While she's never opened up any portals to a hellish parallel dimension - that she knows of - the multiverse theory behind the show's plot has a scientific basis that pertains to her research, she said.

"Looking at quantum effects, if quantum mechanics doesn't behave the way we think it does, it would really kind of shake things up," she said.

Quantum mechanics are like the rules. The rules are how scientists understand the way things operate at the subatomic level. For instance, Chipps explained, decay has a certain lifetime, a fundamental constant based on how it is observed on earth.

"If that lifetime changes based on where you are in the universe, we don't know that anymore," Chipps said.

"The difficulty with some of these kinds of broader-angle science fields or directions of study is that with a lot of them there's nothing you can ever test to say it's true or not true," she said. "So, in a multiverse theory, you'd say the reason the decay has the value is because there is an infinite number of universes and all of those have an infinite number of values."

Right now, Chipps is working on a nuclear physics project to make high-resolution measurements of unstable nuclei found in stellar explosions.

She credits the strong nuclear physics community at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to its past as a world-leading nuclear physics laboratory, a result of its work during the Manhattan Project.

"Even though my work has no secrecy to it anymore, I am capitalizing on the amount of work that was done during that secret period, especially in nuclear physics, -to continue pushing forward nuclear physics,"

"It's an interesting thing for me because I have to contend with all of that secret history and yet what I myself am doing is not secret."

What does Stranger Things' do wrong?

But while Chipps can see how the DOE's posture in the early to mid-20th century may have influenced both her work and the hit mad-science fiction series, she found one detail completely unrealistic - and it wasn't a psychic child, the scientific jargon or even the spooky alternate dimension filled with ghoulish creatures.

It was the lab coats.

"It's one of the first things that I latched onto," she laughed. "There's a couple of scientists coming out of the laboratory late at night and they're wearing lab coats. That's not a thing! Lab coats are personal protective equipment you wear in the lab."