From: (No Email available)

Date: 2004-03-02 23:56:45

Comment:

...and doesn't have much to do with real science. The film invokes quantum mechanics in the most superficial way ("did you know you never actually touch anything") and then goes on and on about how unintuitive the quantum world is. That's certainly true. However, the film then constructs an "alternative intuition", if you will, that reality doesn't really exist, or that it's really constructed by our consciousness, that our brains don't know the difference between reality and memory because they look the same on PET scans, etc., etc. (sound like your inane philosophy 101 discussions?).

A more prosaic explanation might be that since we don't experience the quantum world in any sort of everyday way (that's why they build the big particle accelerators), there is no reason to expect that our intuition or senses would have evolved to understand the quantum world easily, in the way we understand time, cause and effect, or gravity on an everyday level. In other words, maybe quantum mechanics is hard to understand because our brains haven't *had* to understand it until very recently, and so we have to use our intellectual capacities to study it as an advanced physics subject (in the same way we study reading or math, which also are not part of our evolutionary past). Of course, such an explanation would be a real downer, since it wouldn't allow for all the new age self-actualization talk that makes up the last half of the film. Gee, reality bites...

There is one thing that this film does *really* well, although I think it's unintentional. It does a superb job of showing how desperate we humans can be to impose reason, purpose, and meaning on the chaotic and uncaring universe we live in, jettisoning our better judgement in the process. We as a society don't seem able to accept that reality may not be intuitive and that there may not be some uber-being out there with a plan and reason for our existence. There's a lot we don't know, and lots of mystery left in the world; but rather than accept it as mysterious, we have to replace the mystery with what we want to be true.

Oh, and the filmmakers also showed that if you wrap up lame fragments of quantum, new age self-help blather, religion-bashing, addiction and body image issues, and cosmic interconnectedness into one big hallucinatory fattie, you'll sell a lot of tickets in Portland! But hey, they took some great footage of this beautiful town (especially its wonderful light-rail system), so I guess not every frame is a bad joke...just don't think this is a NOVA special or even close to that credible.