Geoff Arnold

What the bleep was I doing?

For reasons that I won't go into, I found myself watching the DVD of What the Bleep Do We Know? this evening. After nearly an hour of increasingly nonsensical stuff, my blood pressure and I could stand it no longer. I skipped to the last DVD chapter to watch the credits, to find out which reputable scientists and philosophers had given their support to such hokum. Fortunately, the answer seemed to be "None".

The writers weren't even that creative in the way the fabricated the bleeping stuff. They mostly relied on two tricks:

• Take a term such as "observer", "consciousness", "unity", etc. and then use it interchangably in metaphorical and literal senses.
• Consistently use the term "possibility" in place of "probability", conveying a subtle suggestion of unboundedness and unpredictability.

So, if you want to get really drunk really quickly, get a bottle, a glass, and this film and take a shot every time someone recycles a metaphor as literal truth, or opens vistas of boundless possibility wherever a probability distribution belongs. Otherwise, stay away. (I thought we got all that New Age stuff out of our system last century, but I guess not....)