what's the point?

What the #$*! do you know indeed!

We went to see What the #$*! Do We Know?! tonight at the Bijou. Never in my life have I been angrier at a movie. I was so close to just getting up and walking out. To really get perspective on what that means take this into account: I never even considered walking out on Battlefield Earth. This movie takes a complicated scientific principal, quantam mechanics, and tries to turn it into a unified theory of mysticism. It was two fucking hours of self-help propaganda bullshit and it made me angry. I can accept people who believe this kind of stuff, that's all well and good, more power to you. But to try and explain it as scientific, that's beyond insulting. The fact that the movie was interspersed with documentary style interviews with scientists made it even more infuriating. I was sitting there, crushing an emtpy box of Mike & Ike's, wondering how people could spout off such nonsense. What absolutely floored me though, was at the end, they gave the names and qualifications of all of the scientists. Half of them weren't even physicists and one of them wasn't even a scientist, she's some nutjob who channels some Atlantean warrior. I'm getting angrier as I type this. I'll leave you with this (long) comment from IMDB from someone more rational talking about the film.

I had numerous problems with this film.

It contains some basic factual information concerning quantum mechanics, which is fine. Although quantum physics has been around for over 50 years, the film presents this information in a grandiose way that seems to be saying: "Aren't you just blown away by this!" Well, not really. These aren't earth shattering revelations anymore. At any rate, I was already familiar with quantum theory, and the fact that particles have to be described by wave equations, etc. is not new.

The main problem I have with this movie, however, is the way these people use quantum theory as a way of providing a scientific basis for mysticism and spiritualism. I don't have any serious problem with mysticism and spiritualism, but quantum mechanics doesn't really have anything to do with these things, and it should be kept separate. The people they interviewed for this movie start with the ideas of quantum theory and then make the leap to say that simply by thinking about something you can alter the matter around you, hence we should think positively so as to have a positive impact on the world and make our lives better. The reasoning is completely ridiculous, and the conclusions do not logically follow from quantum theory. For every so called "expert" that they interviewed for this film, there are scores of theoretically physicists who would completely disagree. They would point out, quite rightly, that the unpredictability of the subatomic world does not lend support to mystical notions about our spiritual connectedness.

It disturbs me that people are going to see this film and completely eat it up because it leaves them with a nice positive feeling. The main thrust of the film is based on a total misinterpretation of quantum theory, and it is as bad in its reasoning as any attempt to justify organized religion with similar pseudo-scientific arguments.

Avoid this film.

Oh yeah. At one point, one of the "experts" says that since throughout history most of the assumptions people have made about the world turned out to be false, therefore the assumptions we currently hold about the world are also likely to be false. Huh? That totally does not follow. And even if it did, I don't see how that helps his argument. I mean, if his ideas ever became common assumptions then I guess we would have to assume that they are false too, based on his own reasoning.