bleep bleep

Jen-Luc Piquant is feeling very Spiritually Enlightened today, reveling in her newly discovered mystical connection to the billions upon billions of molecules of consciousness scattered about the cosmos. Blame it on an ill-advised viewing late last night of what critics have been calling a "surprise sleeper New Age hit."  I'm talking, of course, about What the (Bleep) Do We Know? -- a half documentary, half drama that also spawned a recently released sequel, Down the Rabbit Hole.

It's a bit late to be hopping on the Bleep-bashing bandwagon, so I won't waste your time with a lengthy analysis and/or debunking of its more questionable assertions, other than to say we clearly need more public outreach and education on the notion of quantum decoherence (not to be confused with the quantum incoherence in the film), among other concepts, and a better public understanding of the ongoing scientific debate on any possible links between quantum effects and macroscale systems. Others have already weighed in on the issue, who are far more better-informed and eloquent than I, including the Guardian's Ben Goldacre (Mr. "Bad Science" himself) and Dennis Overbye of The New York Times.

Suffice to say, I was less than impressed by the film. Maybe it was the simplistic story line of a snarky yet self-hating photographer (played by Marlee Matlin) who learns the secret of cosmic happiness by taking a long, luxurious bath while covering herself in hearts. (Don't get me wrong, a nice long soak can be quite refreshing, but spiritually enlightening on a cosmic, I-am-one-with-the-universe scale? Give me a break.) Perhaps it was the fact that the film is blatant kooky-cult propaganda, having been funded by an organization run by a mystic who claims to be able to channel a 35,000-year-old warrior from Atlantis.

But mostly it was the hijacking of respectable quantum mechanics by flaky New Age mystics that offended me most. I ranted at length in a recent post about the effectiveness of exploiting pop culture and the mass media to communicate physics concepts to the public at large. Let me clarify that with a caveat: I wasn't talking about this film. Like everything in life, my pedagogy-for-the-masses approach has its benefits, and its potential pitfalls. The same tool can be used to spread misinformation about physics, particularly in a society that, to be blunt, doesn't seem to practice, or place much value on, critical thinking.

But even critical thinkers have been taken in. That's because (a) quantum mechanics is tricky stuff, and (b) What the Bleep  blurs the line between fiction and reality in a way that goes beyond irresponsible; it's downright dishonest. Quantum physics is mysterious and confusing enough without muddying the waters with a bunch of New Age claptrap. As Goldacre put it, "Why retreat into nonsense? ... There are much stranger and more important things going on out there, and it is a lot more interesting than making stuff up."

For instance, water might not be affected by my PMS-induced negativity -- although I might be adversely affected by the trace amounts of pharmacological compounds that apparently lace US waterways -- but it really is kinda weird stuff on the quantum level. Just take a gander at the April 8 cover story in New Scientist on the mysterious quantum properties of water and their possible impact on water's vital role in living processes. And many esteemed scientists, including Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff -- who is also featured in the film -- have speculated that human consciousness involves a specific form of quantum computation. The difference between the Bleep film and, say, Penrose's work on quantum consciousness, according to Goldacre, is that Penrose clearly identifies what is conjecture and what is supported by solid scientific evidence. I have to agree with Goldacre on this point; that's an important distinction.

Clearly, my molecules of consciousness are not that highly evolved, unlike those of Jen-Luc Piquant, who has been trying to communicate telepathically with the individual electronic pixels of other avatars ever since watching the DVD (to no avail, I might add). Why did I even bother watching it at all, you may well ask? Mostly in the interest of fairness. I keep running into people at readings, during interviews, or online who have been deeply affected by the film, and I didn't feel I could fairly criticize something I hadn't seen.

Sure, there was one very sweet bohemian woman who approached me after a reading to share her belief that the higher elements in the periodic table exhibited consciousness, and that she, being psychic, was able to communicate with them directly. But most of the people who ask me about the film are quite scientifically literate. There was the nice couple who struck up a conversation with me in a local Starbucks, one of whom had a degree in engineering. They'd seen the film and were particularly struck by the whole bit about the water molecules being affected by bad vibes. The same was true of a well-educated computer programmer and physics enthusiast, who acknowledged that a good deal of the material was nonsense, but still felt the film might be onto something.

There must be something about this film that resonates with these good people. And this in turn leads me to reflect on how we might exploit this resonance to educate them about real quantum physics. In many respects, What the Bleep is an easy pseudoscientific target, and it's tempting to just dismiss it out of hand, while hurling snarky sarcasm-darts its way. This may be entertaining when preaching to the converted, but such an approach might not be in our best interest when it comes to winning others over to our point of view. After all, you could conduct a thousand scientific studies, each concluding that praying for people to recover from an illness is ineffective, but it won't keep believers from praying just the same -- and believing their prayers make a difference.

There might even be a scientific explanation for the stubbornness of belief. Consider a January 29 article in the Washington Post reporting on a social psychology study by an Emory University psychologist that found that someone's emotions and implicit assumptions and beliefs not only influence their political affiliations, but that these strong partisan leanings (left or right) will cause people to stubbornly discount any information that challenges those pre-existing beliefs. The same is true when it comes to people's religious or spiritual beliefs. Not only that, but brain scans taken during the study found that whenever subjects rejected negative information about their favorite partisan candidates, the "reward centers" of their brains were activated. That's right: it makes us feel good when we reinforce our beliefs, which goes a long way towards explaining the popularity of FOX News, doesn't it? It's hard to argue with the pleasure principle.

Several years ago, while attending a physics conference in Minneapolis, I visited the Science Museum of Minnesota, arriving just as one of the demonstration lectures was about to begin. A pretty young woman got up and proceeded to talk about this wonderful new energy-generating machine her family had designed on their small-town farm, that essentially could run indefinitely with no need to be plugged into an outlet. It was all very Norman Rockwell in tone, and you could feel the audience warming to her homespun tale. She was just so darned likeable and fresh-faced. Who cares if she was, um, wrong?

Well, me, for one. I was horrified to find a highly respected science museum perpetrating this kind of nonsense. I wasn't alone. A self-proclaimed physicist in the audience let the young woman know, in no uncertain terms, that her family's invention was nonsense, that she was a scientifically illiterate fool with no grasp of the basics of thermodynamics, and that she had no business lecturing to the people in the science museum about anything, least of all energy sources. By the time he was finished "making his case," the young woman was near tears.

The physicist was 100% correct in his technical assessment of the device she was presenting. But here's the thing: the rest of the audience hated him... even me. We agreed with his assessment, we knew he was right, but he was just so arrogant and smug, so infuriatingly condescending to this sweet young woman who simply hadn't been taught any differently. Even worse, he was ill-mannered: he chose to publicly humiliate her in the middle of her lecture, rather than dealing with the issue privately and diplomatically. His "you're wrong so you must be an idiot" attitude made me cringe in embarrassment for the field of physics, just like a teenager forced to appear in public with his/her way-uncool parental units.

The joke was on us. Just when I was beginning to fear the self-righteous physicist would be lynched by an angry mob for making the poor farm girl cry, they revealed that the whole thing was a set-up to elicit just those emotions. The man was an audience "plant," a professional actor (who gave an Oscar-worthy performance, nailing the stereotypically obnoxious know-it-all scientist to a "T"), and the young woman was a graduate student in physics at a nearby university. She used the episode to launch into a detailed explanation of thermodynamics, even revealing the secret behind her free-energy device (which had been operating continuously during the entire scene): a power source hidden behind the stage. It was a very memorable approach; I guarantee anyone in the audience remembered the basics of thermodynamics and why they rule out free-energy schemes for a good long while. But the need for public education and outreach never ends. Just like entropy forces us to constant add energy to a closed system in order to keep it running, we need to keep pouring energy into reaching out to non-scientists.

There's also a lesson there about effective modes of discourse. Far too often, physicists do come off as arrogant know-it-alls laying down the law to all the rest of us mentally challenged sorts who couldn't hack graduate studies in physics. And that really hurts the whole outreach cause, especially since the truth is that physicists don't have all the answers -- that's what makes it such a vital, fascinating field. I'm reminded of science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke's famed "three laws":

(1) When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

(2) The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

(3) Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

We don't need to indulge nonsense like that contained in What the Bleep? However, it's possible to adhere to scientific principles while still retaining enough of an open mind to allow for as-yet-undiscovered advances that could one day make us all seem like superstitious primitives.  Just look at Roger Penrose, asking all those deep, penetrating questions about quantum consciousness. And remember that astrology and alchemy, to name just two examples, were once considered valid scientific fields of study. (Isaac Newton, among others, studied alchemy extensively, and it ultimately did give rise to modern chemistry, even if alchemy itself was discredited.)

So the next time you're tempted to jump all over the latest example of bleepin' bad science, thereby unleashing all your pent-up frustration at once again having to repeat yourself to clear up what you feel is a Very Basic Point -- I hope you remember the young woman in Minnesota and pause, just for a moment. Take a deep breath and ask yourself this: Is it more important for you to be right, or to be heard? And frame your response accordingly.

Comments

[Blake Stacey]

They had to get a professional actor to play the arrogant know-it-all physicist? Surely it would be cheaper to get another physics grad student to do the job! I'd like to think this implies it's easier to feign naivete than arrogance, but then again, I know quite a few students and ex-students who'd love to try, in a good cause.

In all the blogospheric Bleep-bashing, I haven't seen anyone mention this, so I figured I should: Carl Sagan comes down pretty hard on Ramtha in **The Demon-Haunted World** (which is recommended reading anyway, naturally). He gives a fascinating list of questions one could ask a 35,000-year-old Atlantean. We could check out some of the answers scientifically (what was the weather like, and which stars were near the North Celestial Pole?); others would point us towards new knowledge, presuming the questions we can check give us any reason to trust the ones we can't. Just how did that "high technology" of Atlantis work, anyway? Instead, all we get are -- in Sagan's words -- "banal homilies."

Aha, I just found an old Salon article which makes the connection. It's not up for free, but anyway:

http://archive.salon.com/ent/feature/2004/09/16/bleep/index_np.html

I read about Penrose's theories of quantum consciousness when they first came out, and now I have to wonder. . . perhaps consciousness is intrinsically a NON-quantum phenomenon. It seems to me that any machine which passes the Turing Test has to have an awful lot of switches, meaning lots of parts in constant interaction with a noisy environment. Even if the individual switches are small enough that QM is necessary to describe them, the aggregate has to be larger than any "decoherence length" and thus behave in a classical way. If so, why should the elementary switches be required to use quantum weirdness to operate? Divide the system into the smallest chunks possible which still obey classical probability rules (such chunks would be the size of a neuron or smaller), and replace them with little boxes which take the same inputs and spit out the same outputs. You'd then have "functional isomorphism" -- a classical brain operating to produce the same kind of consciousness as the quantum.

It's all doubly conjecture, of course. (-: Still, there is a difference between computers whose parts are just so small that QM has to be taken into account (the kind Feynman theorized about back in the 1980s), and the kind we rapturize over nowadays, which can do things bigger, faster and better than classical circuits, like factoring huge numbers into primes. Who says the stuff inside a nerve cell is of the second kind and not the first, if it is either? Could natural selection feasibly hit upon a design of the second kind? If it is of the second kind, is it sufficiently extreme that we couldn't mimic it with old-style machinery, like the Tinkertoy computer which plays Tic-Tac-Toe? A slow-thinking brain which exhibits consciousness would still be pretty darn impressive.

With a cool laser technology that goes by the name of "optical tweezers", we can move subcellular components around under the microscope. People like to pull on the ends of DNA molecules and see how hard they are to stretch, for example. According to the people I know who work on these things, it's the sort of experimental science where one in five trials might work at all, or one in ten -- but when that one happens, you write up a paper and it magically appears in Nature. I bet one could devise a way to send pulses down the insides of microtubules and test their decoherence properties. . . .

[Jennifer Ouellette]

In a serendipitous twist, I just ordered Sagan's "Demon-Haunted World" from Amazon... I'm hoping it will convince Jen-Luc Piquant to ditch the turban and come back down to Cyber-Earth. :) And I confess that I had to bite back a number of tongue-in-cheek questions to ask the psychic woman who approached me, namely about what those higher elements in the periodic table had to say. ("I hate my half-life" might be one such response.)

I do think there are many things physics/science can't yet explain -- human emotion strikes me as being about more than mere biochemistry, for instance. How the brain actually works is largely a mystery to us. Ditto for things like intuition and gut instincts. And I'm intrigued by the notions of quantum consciousness, or a universal wave function, despite some skepticism. I don't think there's anything innately magical or spiritual about any of this, just that science has yet to progress far enough to explain them.

[Blake Stacey]

I think the elements who are part of the "island of stability" are a bit more rational than the others, who just fly apart at the slightest provocation. If you ask the transuranic elements about their politics, I think you'll find that berkelium is just to the left of californium, while americium is definitely to the right of francium.

http://www.webelements.com/webelements/elements/text/periodic-table/key.html

[Jennifer Ouellette]

Note to self: do not read Blake's comments while sipping Diet Coke, since said comments may cause laughter-induced involuntary spewings. :)

[Blake Stacey]

(Laughs out loud)

Thanks, many thanks indeed. I do what I can, and if four years of MIT did anything for me, they taught me that horrible science jokes are both natural and necessary. There's "high magic to low puns", as that jokester Thomas Pynchon says.

Right now, I'm working my pleasurable way through an Alan Sokal essay called "Pseudoscience and Postmodernism: Antagonists or Fellow-Travelers?" It addresses, in part, the outright ludicrous claims which have been "justified" with a quantum mumbo-jumbo paint job. Sokal has been accused of know-it-all physicist arrogance a few times himself, though I note that the people doing the accusing are the ones his wonderful prank stung the most, ten years ago.

http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/pseudoscience_rev.pdf

[N. Peter Armitage]

>There must be something about this film that resonates with these good
>people. ... In many respects, What the Bleep is an easy pseudoscientific
>target, and it's tempting to just dismiss it out of hand, while hurling
>snarky sarcasm-darts its way. This may be entertaining when preaching to
>the converted, but such an approach might not be in our best interest when
>it comes to winning others over to our point of view.

Therein lies the rub eh? People get excited about science or what they think is science and it just doesn't feel right to squish that.

I first heard of this film in ...umm, of all places the ... umm, Hooters in Santa Monica CA (best buffalo wings on the West side), where our waitress veritably squealed with delight when I told her I was a physicist. She had just seen it the week before and it had 'seriously freaked her the bleep out'. 'Physics is AWESOME!' she said. She then proceeded to tell me all about it, the poor dear, and knowing the propensity of my mouth to fire off 'snarky sarcasm-darts' I decided all involved (me, her, science in general) were better off with my trap shut.

[Jennifer Ouellette]

Yes, it's THOSE people, the ones who have just realized that there is such a thing as physics and it's actually pretty cool -- except along with that, they think it's true that saying mean things to water alters its molecular structure, "and if it does that to water, well, you can imagine what it does to us!" One hates to discourage their nascent interest, but...

You should have seen the first draft of the post... snarky ranting right and left, which I read over, decided it was counter-productive and not what I really wanted to address, and hit "delete." *sigh* There were some great lines, too.

[Jennifer Ouellette]

And BTW... yeah right, Peter was at Hooters for "the buffalo wings." And guys only read Playboy for the interviews. :)

[Blake Stacey]

I'll remember that the next time I'm in Santa Monica and get the craving for buffalo wings. And the next time I want to read an interview.

Seriously, every fraternity house in America gets a free subscription to Playboy. I bet it's a pretty good investment on the publisher's part. I'd flip through them when they arrived (hey, I'm not made of stone), and on average, there was about one interesting article, one good joke and one funny letter per issue, plus a bunch of uninteresting photos. When the aliens transmit us plans for that wormhole machine and we send through a specimen of masculinity, I suppose I won't be on the boat.

(-;

[Jennifer Ouellette]

I think that just shows you have a little more imagination than the average guy. What's that line from the movie "Say Anything"? "Don't be a guy. Anyone can be a guy. Be a man."

[Blake Stacey]

My verbal avatar appears to be a wonderful fellow: imaginative, funny and well-informed. This must be the effect of having the "Preview" button and the chance to revise whatever he says. Oh, if only I could tap into a little of his surplus virtue -- if only we could have more in common than our love for chocolate!

People who hang out around here might like "Physics for Future Presidents", a course at UC Berkeley whose materials I just found online:

http://www.muller.lbl.gov/PffP

I found my way to this site via the professor's comments in (what else) a blogoid discussion. He says that other teachers have his permission to use the material in their classes, though naturally he would appreciate notification in such a case.

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/04/13/morley (scroll way down)

[Jennifer Ouellette]

That Berkeley course is the one taught by Richard Muller, who trashed "The Physics of Superheroes" book in PHYSICS TODAY. And I in turn excoriated him on this blog for an unfair trashing. :) Coincidence?

[Blake Stacey]

I **thought** the name looked familiar. The problem is that there are just too many Mullers, Millers and Muellers for my poor little brain to track any more (and Richard isn't that rare a name either). I heard that in the Screenwriters' Guild, no two members are allowed to have the same name. So, since there was already a "David Cohen", the co-creator of **Futurama** had to become "David X. Cohen". Incidentally, David X. was one of several people on the **Futurama** production team with absurdly advanced degrees in the hard sciences. Happily for all of us with real taste, the density of math jokes per square centimeter of **Futurama** was in consequence absurdly high.

http://www.mathsci.appstate.edu/~sjg/futurama/

I think my favorite moment was when Fry asks the Professor what he is teaching. "The same thing I teach every semester: Mathematics of Quantum Neutrino Fields. I made up the title so that no students would take it!"

Fry writes down, "Mathematics... of wonton... burrito... meals. I'll be there!"

Of course, the same sort of people love to use the mathematical moments in **The Simpsons** for educational purposes too:

http://www.mathsci.appstate.edu/~sjg/simpsonsmath/

All of which just goes to show that science in pop culture can benefit everybody.

[Ian]

"human emotion strikes me as being about more than mere biochemistry"

Why?

"Ditto for things like intuition and gut instincts"

Decisions using fuzzy logic based on apparently insufficient information.

[Paul Brown]

In the novel titled Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis the preacher discovers the explotation potential of the "new age" and happily refers to the movement as "an orgy of the mind". Self-absorption is a common personality characteristic of individuals involved in such nonsense - I make this observation from personal experience, having a wife who talks to space aliens thru a channel (Barbara Marciniak).