Final Paper: The Cultural Influence of Physics: The Religion of Physics

August 7, 2008
AIMC Physics East & West

The Cultural Influence of Physics: Physics as Modern Religion (980 words)

A google search for the film “What the bleep do we know,” (searched using quotation marks) produces over a million hits -- precisely 1,080,000 hits. This 2004 documentary film explores the worlds of “Quantum Physics, Neurology, and Molecular Biology in relation to the spheres of Spirituality, Metaphysics, and Polish weddings” according to the official website for the film--basically suggesting a connection between the laws of quantum physics and collective consciousness. It has spawned over 100 “Study Groups” across the world, in places as far flung as Argentina, South Africa, Canada, and Turkey.It is hailed as one of the most successful documentaries of all time, and was distributed in over thirty countries. There is some controversy surrounding the film’s message, published in the journal Physics Today, about the accuracy of the science in the film. Whether or not all of the film’s claims can be scientifically proven is not the point of this paper. The point is that ideas being generated by physicists are being grabbed a hold of by millions of lay people. Physics has finally pervaded popular consciousness, and done so in a powerful way. So, what is the strong appeal of this film? Why are millions of people, who probably hated high school physics class, suddenly interested in physics?

There is a famous sequence in the film now titled “I create My Day” spoken by Dr. Joe Dispenza. In the interview, Dispenza talks of consciously designing his destiny from a spiritual standpoint, and by doing so he is “infecting the quantum field.” He goes on to say, “Now if (it) is in fact the observer’s watching me the whole time that I’m doing this and there is a spiritual aspect to myself, then show me a sign today that you paid attention to any one of these things that I created, and bring them in a way that I won’t expect, so I’m as surprised at my ability to be able to experience these things. And make it so that I have no doubt that it’s come from you.” This sounds an awful lot like a prayer to the great “observer” in the sky. You see, popular interpretations of physics have turned God into a scientist.

Science started replacing God in the late 1700s and early 1800s when scientific discoveries began to conflict with Christian thinking. At the end of the 1800s, with the publication of Darwin’s treatise, the “theory of evolution” began to replace a belief in God. Political ideologies, such as communism, which rose to popularity in the early 1900s, further eroded a reliance on religion and God. Perhaps God could be replaced by the social structure? In the West, the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s and 70s were partially successful because they were rebelling against the Christian thinking and behavior that had made somewhat of a comeback in the post World War II years of the late 1940s and 50s. The social revolution wanted to bring about greater freedoms and traditional Christianity was seen, for the most part, as restrictive. God was no longer speaking to the masses. The scientific worldview had begun to completely take over. In the 1980s and 1990s Christmas got pulled from school, the theory of evolution was commonly taught, and those still adhering to religious views began to home school their children. Yet it seems this mass exodus from churches left people feeling empty. The “Me Generation” got lost in consumerism, cocaine, overeating, and divorce; crime rates went up and things came crashing down. Once forbidden by religion, these behaviors became more and more okay. Scientific thought now led us and, for all its explanations for how things work, science doesn’t offer ethics, rules for the game, nor does it lend a lot of meaning -- it doesn’t answer the “whys” and “who am I” and “how should I behave.”

Enter physics. Physics is the only hard science that circles back around to exploring questions involving God. Through looking deeply at how things work, physicists began to offer up meaningful explanations that sounded a lot like the words of ancient mystics. David Bohm has been quoted as saying, “Individuality is only possible if it unfolds from wholeness.” Niels Bohr said, “Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.” Physicists even admit to a search for the “God particle.”

The film “What the bleep do we know” packages science and religion together for consumption by popular culture. It gives us permission to pray to the great “observer” in the sky without feeling embarrassed about being “religious” since religion went out of style long ago, around the time of Sir Isaac Newton’s influential temper tantrum when he declared that he would not believe in the invisible, and not believe something simply because someone told him it was. Newton’s Principia Mathematica declares the rules for the scientific method. The first is “We are to admit no more causes of natural things such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.” The funny thing is that Newton, a pioneer of modern physics, insisted on discovering the world for himself. This method of discovery -- science -- has led us back to God after all.

So we have been on a long journey together, searching for the truth. With Newton we disregarded everything that we could not explain. We lost mystery, and without mystery we lost meaning. From the numbers of people running to see “What the bleep do we know” and buying books with titles like “5 Steps to a Quantum Life: How to Use the Astounding Secrets of Quantum Physics to Create the Life You Want,” it seems that we are welcoming the mystery back, and many of us prefer to have that mystery wrapped in science.