You may have heard or read about the recent movie 'What the #$! Do They Know?,' a cinematic apology for goofy religious beliefs about reality and the misuse of quantum physics. To understand just how bad the film is, one needs merely examine how the reviews of critics are misrepresented.
In the January/February issue of Skeptical Inquirer, Benjamin Radford writes:
It’s perhaps not surprising that a cult-like film would achieve a cult-like following, and it seems that much of the revenue is generated not by new filmgoers but by repeat ones trying to figure out just what the film is trying to say. ... Mainstream filmgoers have more or less ignored the film, while the critics have almost universally panned it. Maitland McDonagh, of TV Guide, says the film “quickly tumbles down a rabbit hole of annoying psychobabble, dubious science, and embarrassingly silly animation.” Washington Post critic Michael O’Sullivan described the film as “Part talking-head documentary, part live-action narrative featurette and part goofy animation [that] fails on all three levels ... stiffly written, badly acted, choppily edited, and awkwardly redundant ... On the whole, it feels like a cross between a PBS special hosted by a series of low-rent Deepak Chopras and an infomercial for self-help audio tapes. Bleep, indeed.” ...
These are probably some of the better reviews, which explains why “positive” blurbs used by the movie are taken out of context:
The Los Angeles Times, for example, is quoted as calling the film “Mind-Bending!” though a look at the actual review (by Kevin Crust) is decidedly less enthusiastic: “It’s easy to question how much further you wish to go with the movie.... The journey produces more questions than answers [and is] a mixed bag ... fraught with an excessive amount of navel-gazing.”
Roger Ebert published a reader’s comment:
“There’s little to no accurate science in the film, and, as a physicist pointed out recently, the individuals who are quoted are pretty far from qualified experts on the field of quantum mechanics. Case in point: One of the persons expounding on causality and quantum physics ... is a chiropractor.” Ebert responded, “I knew there had to be something fishy when the expert who made the most sense was channeling a 35,000-year-old seer from Atlantis.”
In the September/October issue of Skeptical Inquirer, Eric Scerri explains some of what is wrong with the movie:
[B]y making quantum mechanics the heart of the movie, the filmmakers have fallen prey to a crude form of reductionism which is usually regarded as the enemy of New Age ways of thinking. By focusing so much on basic physics, the filmmakers do not seem to realize that they are shooting themselves in the foot. One moment they talk about all kinds of emergent phenomena, such as global consciousness, that go far beyond the reductionist worldview. The next moment they seem to suggest that the physics of fundamental particles explains human behavior!
Even if we grant that quantum mechanics tells us that particles can be at two places at once--which, of course, it does not--how can one then assume that such bizarre effects work their way right up to macroscopic dimensions with no attenuation in order to determine human behavior? As many scientists and philosophers now realize, even if matter is fundamentally governed by the laws of quantum mechanics, this does not entitle us to suppose that chemical and biological phenomena will follow those same forms of behavior. This is to say nothing of even larger leaps such as the question of whether human behavior is dictated by the laws of physics.
Why would people who otherwise complain about reductionism suddenly turn to and rely upon reductionism here? Because it serves an ideological purpose: if anti-reductionism is called for, then that is what will be used. If reductionism is called for, then that is what will be used. In either case, all that matters is latching on to whatever can serve to bolster the religious, ideological goals people have.
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This is good that you talked about it. I was initially impressed, and still admire the way it was put together (didn’t seem choppy like the article says).
I looked again at what concepts they were supporting once I heard of the Ramtha connection, and yeah, they’re pretty messed up. They cite those water crystals as evidence! Those don’t heve have a shill of support for them.
It’s pretty scary what this can lead people to believe. A friend I talked to online used it to justify his belief that if he just trains his mind hard enough, he’ll be able to fly with psychic abilities. I said that he might get to that point someday, but it would only be in a make-believe self-delusion and that he’d probably die because of it.