Got science questions? Yeah, us too.

If you’ve raced through 3 Body Problem, the new series from Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss and True Blood writer Alexander Woo, chances are you want to know more about everything from Sophons and nanofibers to what actually constitutes a three-body problem. After all, even the show’s scientists are stumped when they witness their well-known theories unravel at the seams. 

But for physicists like 3 Body Problem’s Jin (Jess Hong) and real-life astrophysicist Dr. Becky Smethurst (who researches how supermassive black holes grow at the University of Oxford and explains how scientific phenomena work in viral videos), answering the universe’s questions is a problem they’re delighted to solve. In fact, it’s part of the fun. “I feel like scientists look at the term ‘problem’ more excitedly than anybody else does,” Smethurst tells Tudum. “Every scientist’s dream is to be told that they got it wrong before and here’s some new data that you can now work on that shows you something different where you can learn something new.”

The eight-episode series, based on writer Cixin Liu’s internationally celebrated Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, repeatedly defies human science standards and forces the characters to head back to the drawing board to figure out how to face humanity’s greatest threat. Taking us on a mind-boggling journey that spans continents and timelines, the story begins in ’60s China, when a young woman makes a fateful decision that reverberates across space and time into the present day. With humanity’s future in danger, a group of tight-knit scientists, dubbed the Oxford Five, must work against time to save the world from catastrophic consequences. 

Dr. Matt Kenzie, associate professor of physics at University of Cambridge and 3 Body Problem’s science advisor, sits down with Tudum to dive into the science behind the series. So if you can’t stop thinking about stars blinking and chaotic eras, keep reading for all the answers to your burning scientific questions. Education time!

What is a Cherenkov tank?

In Episode 1, the Oxford Five’s former college professor, Dr. Vera Ye (Vedette Lim), walks out onto a platform at the top of a large tank and plunges to her death in a shallow pool of water below. If you were wondering what that huge tank was, it’s called a particle detector (sometimes also known as a Cherenkov tank). It’s used to observe, measure, and identify particles, including, in this case, neutrinos, a common particle that comes largely from the sun. “Part of the reason that they’re kind of interesting is that we don’t really understand much about them, and we suspect that they could be giving us clues to other types of physics in the universe that we don’t yet understand,” Dr. Kenzie told Netflix.

When a neutrino interacts with the water molecules stored inside the tank, it sets off a series of photomultiplier tubes — the little circles that line the tank Vera jumps into. Because Vera’s experiment is shut down and the water is reduced to a shallow level, the fall ends up killing her.

What is a particle accelerator?

In the show, Jin is a genius in particle physics. She works as a senior researcher in the theoretical physics group at Imperial College London, carrying out a meta study that analyzes the results of particle accelerator experiments around the world. As Smethurst explains, particle accelerators use electromagnetic fields to propel tiny charged particles (the most basic building blocks of the universe that make up everything that we see around us) and accelerate them to huge speeds and energies — we’re talking close to the speed of light. Scientists can increase the speed to 300,000 kilometers per second so the particles have such incredible energies that when they collide together, they can re-create the energies involved in processes that happen in space, like the big bang or black holes. A particle detector (the tank Vera jumped into) is then used to measure the results of collisions created by a particle accelerator. These experiments teach us how the universe works.  

But in the series, Jin is at a loss when all the major accelerators start generating results that make no sense, bringing her work to a sudden halt. This also leads to Saul’s (Jovan Adepo) work in Vera’s being shut down. Particle accelerators shutting down worldwide would be “unprecedented” and “unthinkable,” says Smethurst. “If that happened, it would be like, ‘Oh, something in physics and the rules of the universe have changed. Is every single equation that we’ve ever written down now wrong?” Unlike in the series, that wouldn’t be a bad thing for scientists. “The thing that made me laugh in the show was the idea that that would be terrible and that funding would get cut,” says Smethurst. Instead, that thrilling problem-solving spirit would be activated. “It would be like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to figure this out! It would almost be really exciting for that to happen.”

How does the countdown in Auggie’s eyes work?

In Episodes 1 and 2, nanotechnologist Auggie (Eiza González) is haunted by a cryptic flashing countdown that nobody else can see. “It’s not like a projection in your image line — it’s really happening in your eye,” Dr. Kenzie says.

One of Dr. Kenzie’s theories for how the countdown could be possible also includes a particle-detector tank. “There’s this really cool phenomenon called Cherenkov radiation, where in certain materials, particles can travel faster than light does in that material,” he says. “They then emit this radiation in a very specific cone, a bit like a sonic boom when a jet engine goes overhead — it’s the equivalent, but with light instead of sound. My theory for how these images appear on people’s retinas or in people’s vision in the show is that you could produce Cherenkov light in the liquid in someone’s eye to make an image kind of appear — or a countdown.”

If stars were to blink in the sky, what would the explanation be?

Although Auggie is the only one who can see the countdown in her eyes, she’s not alone in seeing the stars flicker in the sky at the end of Episode 1. In fact, everyone can see the stars blinking in code. Stars do twinkle in the sky because of atmospheric refraction, but turning off and on completely is a fictional phenomenon that can’t really be explained. “There is no real way of doing that apart from making some kind of mask of the sky,” says Dr. Kenzie.  

Smethurst had the same line of thought. After watching Episode 1, she reasoned that something must be shrouding the Earth in order to prevent the light getting in rather than anything happening to stars. “Because even if all the stars in the Milky Way sere shut down, they would still glow because they’re hot,” she says. “So you’d still be able to see them, they wouldn’t go dark.”

How does the 3 Body Problem VR headset work?

In Episode 3, Jin and Jack (John Bradley) don slick, reflective headsets that immerse them in the world of a VR game. They’re transported to different time periods — from the Shang Dynasty to Tudor-period England — where they must try and save a young avatar named Follower (Eve Ridley) and other people from her world.

Unlike existing VR headsets, the ones in 3 Body Problem put the players in a much more realistic immersive experience, where they can even feel themselves getting killed. “You can feel it, you can smell it, you can touch it, you can taste it,” Episode 3 director Andrew Stanton told Netflix. “The VR headset is an experience no one on Earth has ever had before,” Weiss added.

As Jin and Jack continue to play the game, they realize they’re trying to save Follower and her planet from a three-body problem (see below for explanation). Basically, an extraterrestrial species called the San-Ti has the same problem: Their planet is doomed, and its inhabitants are in the process of fleeing to Earth. They’ve been using the VR game to recruit humanity’s best scientists — including Jin — with the goal of winning them over to their cause. The game is so realistic and immersive because the San-Ti’s technology is far ahead of ours on Earth. 

Is it possible to create a gaming headset that can allow you to see, taste, and touch the world you’re transported to?

So would it be possible to build a headset of that caliber in our lifetime? Dr. Kenzie doesn’t think so. “It’s basically going to have to short-circuit your brain somehow,” he says. “It’s one thing to display an image and make sounds, but really giving the sensations of smell and touch and taste — it really feels like you’re in another place when you put this headset on and play the game.” 

Dr. Kenzie believes the headset would need to interfere with the neurological signals in our brain so we could feel sensations through it. “There are experiments where you can make people feel like they’re being touched or feel like they’re getting a sensation of some kind of taste,” he says. “But the headset [in the show] does it without any wiring. It somehow does this in a wireless or technological way that we do not know or understand.”

What are nanofibers? 

In the show, Auggie’s a trailblazer in nanofiber technology. She runs a company that designs self-assembling synthetic polymer nanofibers and hopes to use her latest innovation to solve world problems, like poverty and disease. But what are nanofibers and how do they work? Dr. Kenzie describes nanofiber technology as “any material with a width of nanometers” — in other words, one millionth of a millimeter in thickness. Nanofibers can be constructed out of graphene (a one-atom thick layer of carbon) and are often very strong. “They can be very flexible,” he adds. “They tend to be very good conductors of both heat and electricity.”

Is nanofiber technology real, and can it actually cut through human flesh?

Nanofiber technology does exist, although Dr. Kenzie says it’s curated and grown in labs under very specific conditions. “One of the difficulties is how you hold them in place — the scaffolding it’s called,” he adds. “You have to design molecules which hold these things whilst you’re trying to build them.” 

After being tested on a synthetic diamond cube in Episode 2, we see the real horrors of nanofiber technology when it’s used to slice through human bodies in Episode 5. Although the nanofiber technology that exists today is not as mass produced as Auggie’s — due to the cost of producing and containing it — Dr. Kenzie says it’s still strong enough to slice through almost anything.

What can nanofiber technology be used for?

According to Dr. Kenzie, the nanofiber technology being developed today can be used in several ways within the manufacturing and construction industries. “If you wanted a machine that could do some precision cutting, then maybe [nanofiber] would be good,” he says. “I know they’re also tested in the safety of the munitions world. If you need to bulletproof a room or bulletproof a vest, they’re incredibly light and they’re incredibly strong.” He also adds that nanofiber technology is viewed as a material of the future, which can be used for water filtration — just as we see Auggie use it in the season finale. 

Can the sun be used as a super-antenna to reflect and amplify radio waves from other planets to Earth?

In Episode 2, young Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng) makes the discovery that she can send messages to extraterrestrial entities by using the sun to reflect signals to other planets. “It could take us many years to get a reply, but imagine China leading the world in interstellar communication,” says Ye. 

Despite this seeming like a scientific breakthrough in the show, Dr. Kenzie says it remains a bit of a stretch. The sun is made of an electrically charged gas called plasma, and according to Dr. Kenzie, there are different layers of structure between these plasmas. “If you really got the conditions absolutely perfect, then maybe you could send in a signal, it reflects back off the first layer, but then it also propagates to the next layer and reflects back from that layer,” he says. “Now, if they happen to then interfere constructively, you get an amplification — the same way an amplifier works.” 

Do PhD cohorts tend to get as close as the Oxford Five do in the series?

Absolutely. Smethurst found the Oxford Five’s dynamic to be a “really accurate portrayal of just a group of mates who happened to have studied physics.” Like Jin and Auggie, Smethurst was also roommates with one of her PhD cohorts when they were at Oxford, and they still write academic research papers together now. “You do end up being a really close-knit bunch because you’re all going through the same life experience at the same time, and a PhD is so intense and so different to anything you’ve ever done before,” she says. Saul’s feeling of “imposter syndrome” also resonated, especially when it came to losing funding for something he’d committed to wholeheartedly. “I was like, ‘Oh, it’s too close to home!” she says. 

Before watching Episode 1 at the 3 Body Problem premiere, Smethurst had never seen herself or her female friends in STEM more accurately represented. She’d usually seen her ilk depicted as either “ponytail, glasses, big boobs, male gaze kind of thing” or like “they haven’t run a hairbrush through their hair, no makeup on, sloppily dressed, all they care about is science and nothing else” — and nothing in between. So it was a breath of fresh air for Smethurst to watch as “two women scientists just sat in a bar chatting about physics, and they’re just normal people.” She was so moved that she actually thanked Hong for “finally representing me and my colleagues like we actually are.” 

OK, so what exactly is the three-body problem?

In simple terms, a three-body problem exists when three celestial objects (planets, stars, or suns) with similar mass are in close proximity and therefore exerting force on each other. Normally when two objects exert force on each other, it’s easier to predict the objects’ rotation. “As soon as you have three bodies or more that are all exerting a force on each other at the same time that system breaks down,” explains Dr. Kenzie. “If you have three bodies or more, the orbit becomes chaotic.” Smethurst compares it to juggling: “Imagine how easy it is juggling with two balls. Adding in a third ball [is when] it gets so much harder.”

In the show, the San-Ti’s planet has a three-sun solar system, which means that it fluctuates between stable and chaotic eras: When the planet revolves around one sun, it’s a stable era. When another sun snatches the planet away, it wanders in the gravitational field between the three suns, causing a chaotic era. In a chaotic era, the living conditions can become too extreme (cold or hot) for life to exist. Hence the San-Ti’s mass exodus from their planet. “There’s no known solutions to the three-body problem,” adds Dr. Kenzie.

Can human bodies actually be dehydrated while preserving life?

In the VR game, the inhabitants of the planet dehydrate their bodies in order to survive the tumultuous times. Once there’s a stable era, they then rehydrate and come back to life.

But how possible is it to shrivel up your entire body for a long period of time? Not very, according to Dr. Kenzie. “You can freeze human bodies for a bit and then restart them,” he says. “They have these amazing medical procedures where your core temperature is lowered and then your blood is moved out into these bypass machines, and it allows them to do heart surgeries and brain surgeries.” But to dehydrate one’s body without being plugged into any machines is purely science fiction. 

“But I think this is one of the most genius things about the show and about how this other world is portrayed,” he adds. “By portraying it to us through this video game, there’s artistic freedom to allow for certain interpretations to not be exact.”

What’s a Sophon?

A Sophon is a proton that the San-Ti have turned into a sentient supercomputer that can unfold itself and has artificial intelligence built into its system. “It can make its own decisions, but it also has some other fairly magical features, which is that it can act autonomously and move itself around,” explains Dr. Kenzie. In the series, the San-Ti develop Sophons to allow them to spy on humans and sabotage their scientific research. Because they can see and hear everything, it’s easy for them to know what humans are plotting and to interfere with technology — like when they send the cryptic message “You are bugs” all around the world. Dr. Kenzie says that the Sophons are responsible for the “havoc and illusions” like those Auggie experiences, for “screwing up our science data,” and for “listening in on conversations and communicating back to the San-Ti.”

Could Sophons exist in today’s world?

“In our three-dimensional space world and our one dimension of time, no, they couldn’t, basically,” says Dr. Kenzie. “It’s impossible to violate [those dimensions].”  In order for a Sophon to exist, it would need to be able to extract energy from its environment and store it. Dr. Kenzie also adds that Sophons would need to know about hidden dimensions that aren’t visible to humans in order to program themselves. 

Despite being powerful enough to derail science, Sophons do have their own limitations. “They can’t be everywhere all at once, all the time,” says Dr. Kenzie. And while they listen in on human conversations, they struggle to grasp the concept of deception.

What is a Wallfacer?

Because Sophons can’t really distinguish a truth from a lie, the world leaders in 3 Body Problem come up with a way to keep their strategies from the San-Ti by appointing Wallfacers: individuals who are selected to devise a plan to fight the San-Ti all within their own minds. Whatever decisions they make are absolute and need no justification or explanation. They’re called Wallfacers after the ancient Buddhist name for meditators.

Wallfacers are able to fight the San-Ti’s Sophons by essentially keeping their plans a secret. “Sophons can hear and see what we’re doing, and they can understand what we’re planning, but they’re not mind readers,” Dr. Kenzie explains. “They can’t get into our mind, they can’t uncover your thoughts. And they’re particularly bad at interpreting metaphor and analogies and straight-up deception.”

Can a human brain be preserved and sent into space?

In 3 Body Problem, Will’s (Alex Sharp) brain is taken out of his body, put on ice, and sent into space as part of Project Staircase (which involves using nuclear explosions and a radiation sail to propel a probe at 1.12% light speed). 

Dr. Kenzie explains that the process of freezing a brain is possible — although not super logical. “It’s cryogenically frozen and put in a box so that it won’t rot,” he says. “But then it’s just sent into space, and space is very cold anyway, so it probably preserves the brain biologically, in some sense of the word.”

But retrieving (and thawing) the brain would be a very different story. “I don’t think we would be able to do anything with it with our current technology,” says Dr. Kenzie. “We can’t then remake a human from that brain. But I think actually doing what is done in the show — just taking out someone’s brain in a reasonably careful medical extraction and then cryogenically freezing it and then putting it into space — is possible.”

3 Body Problem Cast Breaks Down 8 Major Moments

3 Body Problem is now streaming on Netflix.