illuminating science

So, as you all know, last Friday I went to see “What the bleep do we know!?” I thought I’d write a review from a physicist’s perspective. That includes, but is not limited to, evaluating the physics (or otherwise) included in the movie. My review of the post-movie discussion will follow tomorrow!

So, brief synopsis: The movie follows our “hero”, Amanda, as her life is changed through a series of strange encounters, where weird “quantum effects” (apparently) intrude on her life, and a Morpheus-clone talks at length about reality and basketball. Throughout, we hear the opinions, thoughts and, occasionally, rants of various “experts” that comment on quantum mechanics, philosophy, biology and religion. These snippets are linked into the story, and are there to “explain” what Amanda is experiencing. They range from a 35,000 year old spirit from Atlantis (who is being channeled through the leader of the cult/school that the film makers hail from) to a scientist who’s “trying to learn physics” to a guy who mentally creates (yes, literally) his day every morning.

If we were purely going on cinematography, then the movie is quite impressive, especially for an independent film, with some neat special effects and computer generated graphics. The acting is good, the music appropriate, etc. But then we reach the subject matter. To be honest, the story lacks coherence (there’s a quantum joke there for the physicists among you…) The movie attempts to “open our eyes” to a world of possibilities, and convince us that we are in charge of our destiny, and by the power of positive thinking we can actually create the reality we want. There’s some interesting ideas there, but the basic messages are really just common sense - be positive, optimistic, organised and take control of your life. The movie just takes everything a little more literally, a lot of which stems, I think, from misinterpreting the language of quantum mechanics and physics in general.

Much of the movie’s philosophy comes from a boy with a passion for quantum physics and basketball, and who is almost certainly Morpheus from a Matrix beta-test. Just like in the Matrix, he talks about the nature of reality and the over-worked analogy of journeying down rabbit holes like good ol’ Alice. Is there reality independent of us, and of what we see? Or does reality only take form when our brains process what we see? If so, can we control reality by our thoughts? If you’re confused, then don’t worry - so are the movie’s “experts”.
While I’m open to all sorts of spiritual beliefs (no matter what my personal opinion of them, which in this case is that they’re a little wacky) the movie completely falls apart when they attempt to justify and even “prove” their ideas through first quantum mechanics and then biology. While they have some real physics in there (and, at times, actually explain some pretty advanced concepts quite well) the bottom line is that at best quantum mechanics might not disprove their theories, whereas they would like you to believe that their spiritual ideas have a quantitative basis in science.

Let’s take one of the central themes from the movie: humans have the capacity to create their own reality. In quantum mechanics, there’s an important principle that when we measure a system, we affect it. The idea goes is that an object (electron, atom, basket ball) can be in two or more places at once - called a “superposition”. But when we try and see where it is, it’s forced to choose where it will be: we say that the superposition collapsed into a definite state. It may seem strange, but experiment agrees brilliantly with this picture.

The movie says this shows that we can affect the reality around us, and by positive thinking we can create the reality we want. ‘Fraid not. The collapse mentioned above is non-deterministic: you can’t control which position the object collapses in to. You can make statistical guesses, which are right in the long run (like tossing heads 50% of the time) but you can’t predict, let alone control, each collapse. This is strongly backed by experiment. Furthermore, it doesn’t have to be us doing the measurement - as even one of the experts points out, the “collapse” can come from interacting with a rock or a tree - should we assume they also create their own reality?!

But it gets worse - while they correctly note that atoms, and hence matter, are mostly empty space, they then liken atoms to “thoughts”, and suggest that matter is made up entirely of thoughts and our imagination! One expert claims that he firmly believes humans can walk on water if they set their mind to it. Others talk about “antigravity magnets” and “holographically imprinted chemicals”. I guarantee you, these have no basis in reality.

But, you might ask, what about all the experts on the panel? They had a dozen scientists there - surely they can’t all be wrong? Unfortunately, we have some sample bias. If you were to survey all the scientists in the world, then that dozen in movie are probably the only ones who believe it. In fact, the only dissenter interviewed was misrepresented, when in fact he disagrees that quantum mechanics and consciousness are connected. In fact, any sort of scientific method goes completely out the window in this movie, not least of all in the “water crystals” that apparently respond to thought, but are in fact almost certainly just the experimenter selecting the “correct” images for display.

In summary, I can’t help but think that if the the movie had focussed on just either the spiritual development or the quantum mechanics then we might have had an interesting movie. The spiritual and philosophical questions about reality had the potential to be interesting, but got mired in wacky ramblings. And the role of quantum mechanics in biology (and, to a lesser extent, consciousness) is actually a real and fascinating field (and also the topic of my PhD!) and could have made an interesting documentary, involving real physicists on both sides of the fence. Instead, fringe researchers with dubious credentials pose half baked theories and loose analogies and claim it to be a spiritual revolution. In particular, as a physicist I couldn’t help but laugh at what they were proposing.

My advice? Go and have a long relaxing bath, then read a top class popular physics book by Paul Davies. An hour and a half of that will enlighten you much more than this movie will. In the end, I couldn’t help but think not “What the bleep do we know!?” but just, “What the (bleep)!?”