Recently this nonfiction trend has entered the movies. Public television features documentaries, and perhaps the most notable is Brian Greene's three-part trilogy "The Elegant Universe", released in 2004. Now quantum physics has made its entrance in moviehouses, with "What the Bleep Do We Know", which also opened in 2004. Both these examples deal with physics itself as the subject, rather than physics as a background for the story.
Why put physics in the movies at all? To teach it to the public? To make it attractive and bring in funding? Because it would enrich people’s lives? Because it might make a good movie? All these were certainly reasons to put it in books and on stage, since each medium contributes its own unique attributes. Books may be read at leisure, and can take the time needed to explain ideas. Theater transfers it from the abstract to the experiential What can the film medium do that the others can’t?
One preconception about physics is that it is boring and filled with incomprehensible mathematics. Both these films attempt and succeed at overcoming this, but with a difference in orientation. Each film sugarcoats the physics to make it attractive. Greene's film uses entertaining animation but the point is to get the basic ideas across. "What the Bleep" skids over to metaphysics and New Age verbiage. This is a trend which began with Zukav's book. 20th century physics affords much opportunity to discuss the holistic nature of the universe, and this unfortunately is fertile ground for spiritualistic philosophising. This can cause physicists' hair stand on end, but proves attractive to many people who feel more comfortable in discussing feeling and spirit than equations. One may wonder if there is any value at all in such discussion, and an inspection and comparison of these two films may shed some light on the subject.
"The Elegant Universe" is a three-part documentary aiming to introduce the totally uneducated viewer to the world of physics. It is based on Brian Greene's book of the same title; the book was a best-seller and then made into a film. Greene is a professor of physics at Columbia, and he appears in the film as narrator. He takes the watcher through a clearly defined route from the general desire for unification through to string theory. Both book and film are excellent and clear introductions to the subject. The question here is what the medium of film contributes as such.
The film begins at Einstein's house in Princeton, where rays of brilliant light cut through a colorless environment in a spooky film noir effect. Greene himself stands there, and talks of Einstein's dream of unification of the laws of the universe. This will lead to string theory – and the screen fills with abstract animation, many shimmering strings looped and quivering. Then we see four identical cellists (an obvious pun on "strings"), interspersed with the strings.
Greene tries unsuccessfully to explain Einstein's general relativity equations to his dog. This gentle humor pervades the movie and relaxes the viewer, in a brilliant strategical step, making the viewer receptive to the explanations. The viewer is taken through Newton's picture of gravity, Einstein's perception that light has finite speed, Maxwell's unification of electricity and magnetism, all with clear and humorous visual elaboration. The use of graphics to clarify ideas is generally successful. One example is Einstein's picture of spacetime: we see the planets as balls in a grid of white lines on a black background, like a fabric which is curved and warped in those places where the planets appear. We see gravitational waves traveling across the lattice like ripples in a pond. This visualization surely conveys understanding to the general public. It may also be beneficial to the viewer who already has gone through the math; not everyone is gifted with a visual imagination, and the film can help develop a clearer intuition of the ideas.
Maxwell's unification of electricity and magnetism is illustrated with the same sharp impact. Green himself is on a mountain in a thunderstorm, and shows how the storm causes the points of his compass to spin, as background for Maxwell's compulsion to explain the relationship between electricity and magnetism. Another brilliant visual demonstration makes use of the magic of cinematography: Greene leaps off a tall building and falls – and lands on his feet. "Of course I should have been flattened", he says, tranquilly undisturbed by his adventure and its miraculous outcome, "but what kept me from crashing through the sidewalk and hurtling to the center of the earth? – electromagnetism", and the screen fills with a lattice of green dots with lightning streaks between them, representing electrical charges. This is characteristic of the film as a whole: brilliant swings from realistic animation such as leaping off the roof, to graphic portrayal of abstract concepts such as electrons or strings. The narration is intercut with comments by noted physicists, such as Edward Witten, Sheldon Glashow (generally rather opposed to string theory), Steven Weinberg and similar luminaries.
To me the most successful and effective use of the film medium is in the "Quantum Café". This is a café in the style of the late 1920's in Germany. A man in brown suit and rimless glasses reads a newspaper at a table behind the narrator. Two others are playing dice (naturally!) as Greene describes uncertainty and probability ruling the world. Then, as he discusses the changing scientific picture of reality, a door opens and the café becomes modernistic, with bright light and Perspex, walls which shift and glow. The weirdness of quantum mechanics is blown up in this café to macroscopic scale. Brian Greene goes to the bar and says "I'll have an orange juice, please". The waitress says doubtfully "I'll try". She is not used to people placing definite orders! They are generally ruled by chance. Brian Greene received a blue drink, which suddenly turns yellow and then red. Four more Brian Greenes appear, and each takes a glass, as the original glass becomes five glasses. Physicist Walter Lewin (MIT) remarks at this: "A thousand probabilities - all will happen each in a different universe." There is a chance, however tiny, that particles can pass through barriers – and we see ice cubes vanish from the glass. Greene says "Even I could pass through a wall, though the probability is tiny" – and he does, because in the Quantum Café this can happen. You have to abandon your everyday assumptions about the world to understand quantum mechanics.
This is the triumph of the film, and demonstrates one of the major contributions this medium can make to understanding. Quantum mechanics is considered counter-intuitive, and these visual tricks help towards intuitive understanding not only for the layman but perhaps also for the physicist well versed in the subject. It's difficult to imagine something of which you have never seen the like. Making it visual, with the aid of such cinematic wizardry, is certainly a road to intuition.
The bulk of the film is devoted to string theory. Here, interestingly, the visual contribution is somewhat less effective. Over and over the screen fills with tiny glowing loops and strings. But there is little linkage of the animated drawings to visual reality. In the first part of the film ideas are illustrated with a mixture of realistic and abstract animation. For example, in an attempt to explain that force is conveyed by virtual particles, we see Brian Greene playing catch with another Brian Green, throwing a photon in the form of a glowing green ball, and recoiling as he catches it, or being drawn to the other Brian Greene like magnets. However when he goes on to string the animation is entirely abstract, and does not speak as powerfully to the viewer. Is this because the subject is more abstract? Or is there less understanding of its implications for the actual picture of the world? Or is it only that the filmmakers themselves have less understanding of that? One thing is clear: an attempt at visual expression of ideas helps clarify these ideas to the viewer as well as to the filmmaker. This may be the strongest reason to continue making such movies.
The second film, "What the Bleep Do We Know", is not a documentary and is not intended for educational purposes. It is more an expression of wonder at the world, a continual asking of questions. There is a fictional narrative, interspersed continually with shots of scholars seated full face to the camera, asking questions and making comments about life, consciousness, and quantum physics. The interviewees here are not of the caliber of Brian Greene's film. They include scientists, but these have mostly drifted over to the study of consciousness, philosophy of physics, and the vague limbo between physics and metaphysics. The most sensible comments about quantum physics actually come from someone who admits he is not a physicist at all but only a student: Dr. Jeffrey Satinover, a psychiatrist now doing his PhD in physics at Yale. The most apparently precise information in the film is given by neurologists, molecular biologists and physicians, and deals with the chemical basis of emotion. There are also "spiritual teachers", including a woman named JZ Knight who claims to be the vessel for Ramtha, a 35,000 year old mystic. In fact much of what she says makes sense, but it is expressed, as are so many of the interviews, in a tone of enthusiastic sanctity with which I for one have some difficulty.
The storyline centers around a disillusioned photographer, played by the deaf Oscar-winner Marlee Matlin. She shares a trendy, brick-lined apartment with a wacky and attractive artist friend. She goes off to work on a train and has a strange and unhappy day, lost in thought. She goes to the movies and we hear a voice (the film has a constant background accompaniment of questioning voices) saying: "Are all realities existing simultaneously?" and we immediately see several additional Marlee Matlins. One is accompanied by a man, some seem happier.
She passes a little boy playing basketball and he invites her to play with him, entering his magic court where anything can happen and possibly going back in time. She enters a train station and is captivated by an exhibition of water, where the artist has pasted words to samples of water and the words have affected the molecules, rather reminiscent of homeopathy. All this is constantly accompanied by metaphysical voice-overs about life and the meaning of things, and portentious pontifications about quantum physics.
Matlin's character, Amanda, is forced to photograph a wedding, although this is a job she hates because apparently at her own wedding the groom betrayed her. The wedding scene is one of the most entertaining in the film. This is where the biological experts take over from the physicists. In documentary-type animation we are shown the chemicals influencing emotion, and they become formless and funny little creatures which influence everything that happens at the wedding, from lust to shyness, jumping around at the characters' feet like little cartoon demons.
Amanda awakens the next day with a dreadful hangover, looks in the mirror and sees her thighs get fatter and fatter, shouts at her image with very moving conviction "I hate you", and then her attention is caught by water dripping from the faucet. This brings her back to the exhibition at the train station: "if thoughts can have such an effect on a drop of water, what can they do to us, who are 90% water" (isn't it actually closer to 80%?) She is gradually reconciled to herself, and begins drawing hearts and affectionate designs on her skin. She emerges into the world, back to the same movie house, out in the sunny air, finally happy. This wonderful actress with her intelligent, expressive features, and the strange toneless voice of the deaf, actually does convey to us the emotional seesaw and eventual joy of her ordinary but distressing day, and this alone may make the movie worthwhile.
The storyline is constantly interrupted by interviews with the experts, expressing their views of life and its meaning, and of the implications of quantum physics for its meaning. This is often facile and misleading . One sentence caused me to laugh out loud in its distortion of quantum mechanics terminology: we are told that "God is a superposition of souls."
Amanda's progress through the day is accompanied by a constant background noise of questions, and these reflect her own distress and wonder at life. This has considerable artistic and poetic value. The answers provided by these semi-spiritualist experts may not make any sense. The appeal to metaphysics may seem to the scientist a cheap and easy answer to the real questions. But it is good to arouse a sense of wonder. Life is indeed to be wondered at, and that impulse is behind all of physics. It is possibly the most important thing that physics can offer to the general public. The movie indeed succeeds in conveying that feeling. I noted that the theater was packed, there was not one free seat. The audience was of all ages and backgrounds. People emerged at the end with smiles on their faces, and alert and interested expressions. One comes out of the theater with a feeling that the world is fascinating and full of exciting questions that we should consider. Life seems to have more in it than we may previously have thought.
This is a common strand both in "What the Bleep" and in "The Elegant Universe". The voices of all the interviewees are suffused with this sense of wonder.
And yet in a way both films insult the watcher’s intelligence - "What the Bleep" with its assumption of the charm of metaphysics, and the blather about consciousness, as if that is the only way people would want to think about physics. Greene’s film has none of this, but it is very slow: ideas are elaborated in very simple and slow tones, as if talking to a two year old.
The attitude on both parts may well be justified. People do seem to need the metaphysical aspect to add glamour to physics. On the other hand Greene’s film contains an honest sense of wonder at physics, but would only be watched by people who were interested in the first place. Neither film really conveys much information. People I spoke to who watched either one did not see to have any clear idea afterwards of the physical ideas. However they all felt that they did. They said they felt the film had given them a grasp of the basic ideas of modern science, although it did not seem that they had gained any clear cut information. Perhaps it was more of a general impression of the landscape. That too seems worthwhile.
Both films try to use the visual means of film to heighten intuitive understanding. Both use clever animation. Both have a quirky, jerky structure, with rapid leaps from one thing to another. However "Bleep" makes use of a plot, of a day in a real person’s life. This makes it more effective in a way than "The Elegant Universe", because it serves to bring home the remarkable and so willingly ignored fact that life itself is just as weird on the human scale as on the microscopic.
When I saw "What the Bleep" the woman next to me kept talking to her neighbor without bothering to lower her voice. Eventually I told her it was disturbing me, which rather annoyed her. At the end of the film when the lights came on she said “Now that you have seen the film you must conclude that I was not disturbing you. It is only you who can disturb yourself.” I concluded nothing of the kind; it seems to me, rather, that people usually will only come out having learned things they already believe. But perhaps some people are open to learning that the world is an amazing place, and both these films enhance that experience.
References:
Many thanks to Dr. Ron Lifshitz for loan of the DVD of “The Elegant Universe”, which he presented at the wonderful spring semester Sunday@Noon lecture series at Tel Aviv University.
* photos from http://www.whatthebleep.com/ |
