What the Bleep? (a review)
What the #$*! Do We Know?, commonly called "What the Bleep," is billed as a documentary about the frontiers of physics, a splicing of interviews with prominent researchers. I went in expecting something like a PBS science program: various authorities would chat about the curious behavior or matter at the limits of scale, temperature, density, and acceleration, or maybe they would discuss the difficulties of performing real research rather than about scientific theories. I hoped for something a bit more substantial than a Nova program--a two-hour movie can afford more time for detailed explanations--but not a lot more substantial. After all, quantum physics is a confusing subject that only begins to make sense through some heavy underlying mathematics, and a general audience just isn't ready to tackle all that in one go.
I'm not a research scientist, but I have a grasp of established science and a fuzzy sense of what lies at the boundaries, about what you could pick up from a dozen college courses and periodically reading Scientific American. So it can be hard for an introductory science show to push my boundaries. More importantly, I know the difference between scientific method and mere conjecture about scientific topics. What the Bleep, apparently, doesn't.
The film starts very much like a Nova special, including some cheesy graphics of mathematical equations and curved planar coordinates floating across the screen to remind us that we are dealing with some real serious scientific stuff here, you betcha. Various authorities speak in snippets of interview about some oddities of quantum behavior. A silly back story uses a woman confused by encounters with ordinary objects behaving like subatomic particles to illustrate some of the weird principles the scientists describe.
After these opening grabbers, I was ready for the film to settle down to more thorough, rigorous description of quantum physics. Instead, it slowly disintegrated. A half hour in, it became clear the interviewees would never get down to specifics, like describing the actual experiments that demonstrate wave-like behavior of photons, or the relative strengths of environmental stimulus and internal reinforcement on the growth of neurons. The movie grows irresponsible drawing its implications. Where scientists don't yet have answers, What the Bleep offers spurious conclusions, without distinguishing speculation from experimentally verified material, or even positively disproven ideas. After pointing out that scientists have yet to explain why time should flow only one way, What the Bleep feels free to suggest that it does not, and that our future selves can influence our current growth. Since microscopic particles exist in probability fields until forced into a single state by an experimental observer, What the Bleep feels free to imply that we can consciously choose the point where a field collapses, and thus that we can create the future we want by observing what we desire. Since habits of thought reinforce themselves in the physical construction makeup of the brain, What the Bleep feels free to propose that negative thoughts are addictive, and should be treated as an addiction. This is not science. This is New Age philosophy posing as science by mimicking the right buzzwords.
The irritating back story expands to eclipse the scientific interviews. The central character is a photographer embittered by a cheating husband and divorce. She says mean things, loses her patience a lot, hates doing wedding shoots, and hates herself. She resents her roommate, a perpetually chipper painter who likes to hug. Fortunately, the photographer has an epiphany that ends with spiritual healing through drawing valentines on herself with a glitter pencil and sharing happy thoughts with her tap water. Really.
So everything works out in the end, and the scientists explain--possibly through disingenuously selective editing--why it all makes sense. After a while, it becomes clear that the drama isn't there to illustrate the science; the science is there to justify the dopey healing transformation.
Only at the conclusion of the film do you learn the names and credentials of the authorities it interviews. Although I slowly realized while watching the film that not all were experimental physicists, just who was who came a surprise. There were physicists, biologists, and spiritualists, and what could justifiably be called mainstream thinkers and flakes in each camp, but not necessarily matching my first impression. Revealingly, while several authorities did have impressive credentials in their fields, they spent a lot of screen time speaking outside those fields. What good is quoting a physicist on social policy, or a priest on unified field theory?
My wife's first contemptuous words on leaving the theater were, "That was just like a Nova special." If only it had been. I replied that it was like a Nova special, but three times as long, with one tenth the substance. And most of that was deeply wrong or misleading. Only two kinds of people could turn out a film like What the Bleep. One kind deliberately twists science (or anything else) to fit a harebrained doctrine, presumably on the rationale that more good than harm is done through elevating the audience's spiritual awareness through misinformation. The other kind tries its level best to study and discuss science, but is totally unequipped to distinguish between meaning and gobbledygook, or even recognize their inability to do so, like a medieval scholar trying to come to grips with endocrinology through Galen's four humours. It can be hard to tell the difference. Neither one knows #$*!.