What the bleep do we know?
by Ian Simmons
[ filmreviews ]
Following a trend that started back in the 70s with The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu-Li Masters, What the Bleep Do We Know? examines how quantum physics reflects and supports mystical insights into the oneness of the Universe through the story of a deaf photographer resolving an existential crisis. This has been a massive success in the US, prompting unprecedented numbers of people to buy DVD copies for their friends so they can share in the film’s life-changing qualities.
So, does quantum mechanics have a mystical message for us that can help us understand the spiritual side of the Universe? Well, if it does, What the Bleep? fails to deliver it; it combines vacuous New Age mysticism with junk science through extraordinarily ham-fisted film making and thoroughly nasty, low-budget CGI. It fails cinematically, as 75% of the screen-time comprises static cameras pointing at talking heads delivering sermons about how weird the universe is and how quantum mechanics underlines this in a mystical way. Its CGI fails, as it seems to have been done on a smaller budget than the monsters in a Xena episode by someone heavily influenced by early 90s Orb CD covers (it could only have been worse if they’d been OD'ing on Roger Dean), which makes for an unpleasant visual experience. It also fails spiritually because it fails to attach its vaporous meanderings to any coherent belief system: exactly which mystic tradition does quantum physics reinforce? All of them? Any of them? Some of them? And in what way? No, we just get New Age blather about one-ness, the Universe being created by our minds, and a rather terrifying blonde woman channelling a 35,000-year-old being called Ramtha, plus a couple of dodgy researchers from Maharishi Uni. It seems to be aimed at people espousing a kind of wet-brained, low-wattage pantheism with all the difficult spiritual exercises removed. As someone once said, I believe of Krishnamurthi, “Very deep on the surface, but really shallow underneath”.
So, if it is spiritually bankrupt, how does What the Bleep’s science hold up? Well, this is where it gets really entertaining. It is almost impossible to know where to start. Wolfgang Pauli had a phrase he used to use to students who presented work that revealed fundamental misunderstandings: “It’s not even wrong”. Well, the science of What the Bleep is beyond not even wrong: it is completely unrecognisable as science. Instead, the term “quantum physics” is constantly used, in a series of blatant non-sequiturs, as a mantra to provide a kind of pseudo-reinforcement to mystic drivel spouted by people who wouldn’t know an equation if it bit the psoriasis off their elbow.
Quantum physics is a purely mathematical system which can tell you the probability of subatomic events happening reasonably exactly; but as most people can’t do the advanced maths necessary to understand what it’s all about, it has to have a thin skin of linguistic metaphor drawn over it to make it comprehensible to laymen. But metaphor-skins have their drawbacks: they are the map, not the territory. The verbal description of quantum theory sounds pretty far out and is expressed in language that is sometimes deliberately derived from mysticism (e.g the eight-fold way), so a proportion of those encountering it are tempted to see it in a mystical light and extrapolate furiously from it into all sorts of rarefied realms, which What the Bleep does in spades. You can’t do that. You have to extrapolate in the maths, then describe it in words. No one in What the Bleep ever backs up their pronouncements with the math; when someone asserts that “quantum theory really does show that the universe can be contained in a mustard seed”, they need to produce an equation that demonstrates this, but don’t, unsurprisingly.
To make their quantum/mystic interaction work, it is necessary to set up a link between quantum functions at a sub-atomic level and human consciousness on a macroscopic scale, which they largely do by wilfully misunderstanding the observer effect, the idea in quantum physics that the outcome of any quantum interaction remains in a state of indeterminacy until “observed”, at which point the wave function collapses and the interaction resolves itself down to a definitive solution. What the Bleep treats this as if it needs a consciousness to interact with it, which is not the case, then extrapolates from this to the idea that consciousness can actively influence reality, and provides some priceless examples of “research” to back this up. We get a run-through of the ‘Maharishi Effect’, by which concerted transcendental meditation (TM) by a team of 4,000 Maharishi followers supposedly lowered the Washington DC crime rate by 25% for a month. Except the murder rate increased during the period and there has never been a clarification of the issue of 25% - compared to what? It’s not like you can run a control of the same month in the same city without the TM. The experiment was not double blind, all the “independent” reviewers were Maharishi followers and it has never, ever been independently replicated. Even worse, they go for the work of the appropriately-named Masura Emoto, who caused water to form regular crystals under a microscope by taping nice words to their containers, and irregular jagged crystals when he used nasty words. I assume he froze the water to get the crystals, though this is not stated, but water doesn’t crystalise unless you freeze it, and if you look at how he did this work, you once again find a metholodological shambles. The experiment wasn’t double blind (Emoto knew which words were on which bottles), he biased the data heavily by searching his samples for crystals that matched the words, there were no controls, there’s been no replication, and all sorts of other possible tests have not been carried out. Does this work whatever the language used? Does the word have to be spelled right? Would “hat” produce crystals as jagged as “hate” if the experimenter meant to write “hate” and indeed, would “love” produce jagged crystals if the experimenter was thinking really negative thoughts while they wrote it? Needless to say there have been no successful independent replications. It is also difficult to see how this could be a quantum effect, even if it was real, as it is clearly on a macroscopic scale.
In fact, the science doesn’t have to be quantum physics to be buggered senseless in the street by What the Bleep - they extend this courtesy to pretty much all disciplines. There are assertions that individual cells are conscious (evidence?) and a glorious claim that West Indians who encountered Columbus literally could not see his ships as their reality didn’t contain the concept of “ship”. Not only do they seem to have made the story up out of the whole cloth (I mean - how would they know?), but by that logic, iPods would have been totally invisible to us when they arrived. Do you usually find new gadgets invisible when they first hit the shops? Thought not.
This idea derives from a complete misunderstanding of the experiences of life-long blind people who have had their sight restored as adults. Often they can’t “see” an object until they have felt it, after which they can visualise it. This is due to their having become overwhelmingly reliant on a different sensory system and having to mediate new knowledge through that initially until they become more confident with their new-found sight. This doesn’t happen to us just because we see something utterly new.
These are just some of the most prominent distortions and misunderstandings. There are dozens more throughout; in fact, pretty much any time anyone opens their mouth... And when someone doesn’t say something flaky, it gets edited so they seem to. Prof David Albert, of Columbia University, is apparently very pissed off about this, as his statement of profound opposition to the linking of quantum physics and consciousness now sounds like a ringing affirmation.
I am left wondering what the point of all this is. To make money? To attract people to a cult? I doubt it is either, as it was independently made and financed and only hit the big time through luck, and it makes so little connection to any belief system that it’d be pretty poor recruiting material. I think the truth is more worrying: they actually think this egregious dog-toss is profound and meaningful and really want to share it, and that is most frightening of all. The extent of the mental attenuation this implies is enough to give you pause.
