If, like I am, you’re tired of people getting ensnared by the nonsense in the “What the Bleep…” movie, and asking you to explain it….(I scared myself just now by looking at the technorati tags for What the Bleep and Bleep…yikes)… please please help out Jennifer Saylor, a blogger who is a freelance writer with a passion for science. She wrote a post about the movie recently, which you can read here. She let me (and my colleagues over on CV) know about it, and -more importantly- let us know that she’d like to do something more than just blog about it expressing her annoyance. Let me reproduce some of her email:
Some people are suckered into watching this movie
because they are misled by dishonest marketing to
believe that the movie explains quantum physics
concepts. They watch it because they want to learn
science; instead, they get a money-grubbing shyster
and a lot of nonsense.So now that I’ve collected information debunking ‘What
the Bleep,’ I’d like to collect an “antidote”: a
listing of books, websites, and DVDs that offer the
lay person a legitimate scientific introduction to
quantum physics.Can any of you make any recommendations?
I think that the antidote idea is excellent, so please consider letting her know (I imagine using the comment section of that post) your suggestions. This is in a truly excellent and vitally important cause!
-cvj
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Hi,
You’re absolutely right that the objective argument should win the day, and that considerations of how many share the opinon, or whether the person putting the counter argument is a charlatan or not should be secondary.
I’m very happy to say that the outcome of such an objective examination is that most of what is suggested in this film as being fact is simply unverified conjecture and anecdote. Such things have been deliberately allowed by the filmmakers to be taken by gullible people as true facts. This is wrong. Very wrong. No amount of getting into the swimming pool slowly or whatever is going to change that.
Best,
-cvj
I really have never liked the practice of debunking an idea based on someone’s character. Rather one should listen to what the message is, weigh the supporting evidence and come to a conclusion in a pragmatic, peaceful (without pride) and scientific fashion. Doing it like this helps keep one’s self open minded and in a state of ever-ready growth.
In my limited consideration, science is the discovery and the understanding of the world around us through observation where observation is limited to point of view and reference. When people take science to a level that mimics the shackles of black and white it becomes an abomination of what science is.
Another argument that is disconcerting is, “hey there are more of us than there are of you therefore we’re right.†Hmmm. Can you think of anytime in the past where this argument was used? How about the earth being the center of the universe?
It is by mere chance that I stumbled across this blog, but I am glad I did. I think for some people the movie may have been too much, too fast. For those persons I empathize, when I was young, my mother would take about 30 minutes or so to actually get into the swimming pool on a very hot summer’s day. It was her understanding she had to slowly acclimate, first one foot, then the other, etc. She couldn’t handle the sudden change. It would make her experience unpleasant and cause her to change her point of view when it came to pools. I think if you are up to the challenge then maybe you could do the same thing with this movie “What the Bleep.†Just slowly get into it, watch a little bit then think about, ask around, research, and then comeback to it.
So how can you observe something you already know; especially you being something as dynamic as a human?
Yeah, I agree with you– the movie does fully undercut itself, and the point of the movie is of course the bunk.
You know the movie is in trouble when one of the more “reasonable” sounding scientists is Fred Alan Wofle. I discovered his book “Star Wave” when I was in college, and a few other Modern Physics sat around laughing at it. (Flake-o-rama.) Just reading the index is fun, finding “evil” a few lines below “eigenstate”.
-Rob
Yeah, but once you have that middle bit in there, no matter how wonderfully presented and true the beginning and end bits might be, the middle bit is so utterly misleading (believe me, it is – I met a massage therapist who “uses quantum mechanics” in her treatments “just like in What the Bleep…” at a party in Hollywood not long ago) that it makes the whole thing bunk. Bunk, bunk, bunk, bunk. And bunk. I can’t say that too many times.
-cvj
The thing is, not all of the film was bunk. Some of the stuff early in the movie about atoms and quantum mechanics and such was OK, and on a level of the Brian Greene Nova special.
Of course, the movie very quickly ventures into la-la land and says vastly, vastly wrong things. The fundamental mistake of the movie seems to be making the leap from the stochastic nature of quantum mechanics (we can’t predict exactly which eigenstate we will measure when we measure a system that’s in an overlap of states) into the conclusion that, therefore, we get to choose what state the system will go into. Utter poo!
Also, the concluding notion from the movie that you can help your own psychological state by affirming and not getting down on yourself also isn’t bunk… but doesn’t have anything to do with fundamental quantum physics. It has more to do with human psychology.
-Rob
I’m sorry Rissa, you are outnumbered here by people who have done the research in fundamental physics, and I think that your confusion with science and philosophy is exactly what we are rallying against. Groups such as the one that produced “What the Bleep” hope that, by conflating their religion with modern science, their beliefs will carry on an extra air of authority.
I think that if you really feel that the film “What the Bleep do We Know?” is a load of nonsense, then you obviously did NOT understand what they were trying to say in the film. Its like one of the scientists says in the film, “if I showed you a picture of a particle in two places in once, people wouldn’t drop jaws about it. Not because they think I’m lying or they say, ‘oh the scientists are confused’, they just wouldn’t grasp, thats the same thing in two places at once.” Here you are and he’s right, I can’t tell you enough the paradyme shift your life with undertake if you truly understand the film. I mean research quantum physics and theoretical physics, then really research philosophies and religions and myths and really sit, think, meditate on the message and if you still don’t have a paradyme shift, then maybe your conciousness isn’t mature enough to grasp such a mind-blowing concept.
I had a friend send me a copy – I think he was disappointed when I laughed it off and explained some reality to him. It really is interesting to watch, but completely ludicrous. I found it amusing, though.