Yesterday, I saw What The Bleep do We Know!? with Eric to a full house a the theater — 500 seats, a third of them filled with people from Ridgway. There was not one empty seat.
I was really surprised not to hate it. Quantum physics being used to justify unrelated things really bothers me — but, while they kept talking about thought changing how things work, they didn’t make any actual links between the quantum world and biology, no matter how much they hinted that that’s what they believed.
It seems that when talking about the quantum world, people forget about Plancks constant. It’s a really small number, and that governs how big and how o likely quantum effects are. All that vague uncertainty about what’s going to happen isn’t as unpredictable as it first seems. Yes, your hand could pass throught the tabletop, and no, it’s not going to happen. The chances against all those molecules moving the right direction at the right time and just happening to not affect each other are trillions to one. Each. The combined probability is really really really really low. (Multiply fractions and you get smaller fractions. If the probability of any given atom going through the table were ½, then with a trillion atoms in your hand, we’re talking a probability of ½1,000,000,000,000, or one in whatever the trillionth power of two is. (The number has more zeroes than this post has letters. And then the first significant digit.)
But there’s a chance. The laws of the universe do say that it’s possible to walk through walls, to teleport, and to be in more than one place at once. And we don’t know how that chance happens. We have no idea why if you hit an electron with another identical electron, in identical conditions, why sometimes it will fly off one way, and sometimes another. Maybe we can influence that. We’ll see.
Even without quantum mechanics to justify why, the biology stuff, the neurology science in the film is real. We understand the brain a lot more than we understand the physics of our world, definately. Memory patterns (while not holograms, but similar in concept) to ingrain themselves that way. While we may be able to tell memory apart from the real thing a bit, it doesn’t take much to disturb that. We hang onto our observer status in our own head by a thread. It’s all so easy to get drawn in, to be a part of the action, rather than watch.
Entirely separately from the intellectual parts, the film packed an emotional punch that was really good.
If I were rating it: ★★★★, and, surprisingly, no asses.