I watched a video a while back with some people from work: What the Bleep Do We Know: Down The Rabbit Hole It was an interesting “documentary” on life and quantum mechanics. At the time, it seemed pretty reasonable—there is more to life than meets the eye. Or is described by science. However, since then, I have realized some things. First of all, it is not wrong to continue to believe something even though I have not definitively proven every competing theory to be false. The burden of proof is on others. I can still be open-minded, and not a dogmatic stick-in-the-mud, and yet ask that ideas commend themselves to logic and reason, and actually match with experimental evidence.
Here are the major evidences and conclusions of the movie:
The double-slit experiment: if you watch which slit a photo goes through, it acts like a particle instead of a wave. Therefore: Subjectivity.
Probability: electrons are just jumping around randomly. Can’t really be sure about anything, things can act in non-normal ways. Therefore: fringe “science” is reasonable.
Entanglement: if you get two particles in sync, you can separate them by any distance, and they will act in concert. Therefore: telepathy, positive thinking.
Atomic forces: atoms interact, and push on each other without touching. Therefore: telekinesiscould work, as well as any other “spooky action-at-a-distance”.
Well, it made more sense after watching it, since they weren’t trying to show themselves to be ridiculous. But you get the point. I still agree with their posit that thinking positively is good—if you hate yourself, you will probably hate your life. And even at the time I disagreed with their conclusions about God: they had the idea of a god-force-ness, not really a Person but more of a collective energy. And, I saw that their explanation of Entanglement was factually flawed. See, they said that if you align two particles (photons, for instance) and then send one far away, that if you do something to one of them, the other will instantly (no light-speed-time-delay) be affected. This is actually kinda wrong. You can get two photon entangled, so that they act in similar ways, but rather than doing something to one, and it affects the other, it’s more like, measure them both, and the measurements are predictably related. This predictability, combined with the unpredictability of quantum particles allows companies to build and sell hardware that uses quantum mechanics and entanglement, and the same principles as the double-slit experiment, to transmit data very securely. Nobody can decrypt it, and you can immediately tell if someone is even listening.
So, this video, while interesting, had little scientific value because almost everything they said collapses in on itself if you don’t already believe it. Their syllogisms are faulty. Some of their evidence is factually challenged, and their conclusions are non sequitur. At the root of it, they attempt to use the weirdness of quantum mechanics to disprove science. It’s like saying, “Calculus is non-intuitive. Therefore, math can’t be really true. Can I get change for this $5?” But, the very weirdnesses they cite have experimental evidence to back rigid equations. Even probability is formulistic.
But, if you are invited to watch, “What the Bleep Do We Know” by some sophisticated mystical humanist engineers, go ahead—it will make for some interesting discussion. But don’t rip out your hair trying to convince them that just because there is measurement inaccuracy, a real value does actually exist.
