Oddly enough, for me, it was the mention of "Dr. Emoto" which is 'sufficient cause' to disapprove strongly of this movie.

Lying to people is wrong.

Dr. Emoto is at least honest enough to admit to people that he instructs his photographers to take many photos and select the photo that fits their purpose.

The end result though, is a completely lie.

There is no evidence that our thoughts effect the crystal structure of water, and there is evidence that it doesn't.

Simply mentioning Dr. Emotos snake oil in a way that lends him credibility is irresponsible, onto itself.


To be clear, Metal, I agree with you that getting people interested in science is a good thing. Please don't interpret my comments on specific elements of the movie as a disagreement on that point.

Metal, I understood that this was your take, and I think its a reasonable take to have based on simply watching the film. Have you looked into the degree of involvement the Ramtha School of Enlightenment had in making this film? I lack concrete evidence, but it smells fishy to me.

I went and checked the interviews with the producers. Will Arntz financed the whole thing, it was not funded by any organization. Betsy Chasse knew nothing of science or philsophy (according to her) before the show was made. Mark Vicente goal in the production was to get people to "ask questions".

Other than to get people to take control of their lives and education, there is no secret agenda I can tell.

Thanks for digging that up Metal, good to know.

A funny thing is that each interview just raised more questions and expanded how little the producers knew of the topics ... which eventually let to the title.

I went and checked the interviews with the producers. Will Arntz financed the whole thing, it was not funded by any organization. Betsy Chasse knew nothing of science or philsophy (according to her) before the show was made. Mark Vicente goal in the production was to get people to "ask questions".

Not until the credits roll, when the “experts” are finally introduced, do we learn that the two people who do most of the talking about neuroscience and physics are not actually scientists. One is a chiropractor. The other is a 35,000-year-old warrior named Ramtha, who is being “channeled” by a blonde woman from Washington. [Oh, and the chiropractor is one of her devotees. As are the filmmakers. In short, what we’ve got here are the musings of a cult masquerading as a science documentary.

]I actually really enjoyed Dr. Emoto's work. Not just from this particular film but also from other books of his, so I would like to see other information. I'm open to learning more about it.

massage, I would be interested in seeing the evidence as far as thoughts having no effect on the water structure.

A funny thing is that each interview just raised more questions and expanded how little the producers knew of the topics ... which eventually let to the title.

Is there a transcript of the movie anywhere?

modern physics

I would not call string theory modern physics, nor even theory. Its a nice 30 year project into the mathematics of strings vibrating which has created enough connections with the standard model (and a way to link in gravity) to warrant continued work. There is no scientific model of string hypothesis which is considered physics by physicists.

Right now its one of the only shows in town (and gets the most press), so people tend to think that makes it an accurate representation of reality, however to my knowledge no experiment has been done to verify ANY part of M-"theory". Many physicists criticize string "theory" becuase to make the math work you have to arbitrarily assign values that we have no empirical data for. Get empirical data, get experiments to verify aspects which either could not fit within any other model or require strings and we then have something we might want to call theory, but then it takes even longer to be called modern physics.

Cart before horse.

Your statement (aside from your opinion) is completely false. The top theoretical physicists are M-theorists. You appear to be totally unaware of what happened to the world of physics in 1995 by Edward Whitten.



The LHC is conducting tests to see if the sum of energy in collisions equals the sum of the energies produced to make the collisions specifically to test if particles such as gravitons are exiting this dimension. You should not make definitive statements about topics of which you obvious know little. M-theory is the theory of modern physics and tests are being run to prove it. Recent tests have shown continued problems with the standard model.

Problems and controversy

Although string theory comes from physics, some say that string theory's current untestable status means that it should be classified as more of a mathematical framework for building models as opposed to a physical theory.[30] Some go further, and say that string theory as a theory of everything is a failure.[31][32] This led to a public debate in 2007,[33][34] with one commentator expressing this opinion:

"For more than a generation, physicists have been chasing a will-o’-the-wisp called string theory. The beginning of this chase marked the end of what had been three-quarters of a century of progress. Dozens of string-theory conferences have been held, hundreds of new Ph.D.s have been minted, and thousands of papers have been written. Yet, for all this activity, not a single new testable prediction has been made, not a single theoretical puzzle has been solved. In fact, there is no theory so far—just a set of hunches and calculations suggesting that a theory might exist. And, even if it does, this theory will come in such a bewildering number of versions that it will be of no practical use: a Theory of Nothing." -- Jim Holt.[35]

[edit] Is string theory predictive?

String theory as a theory of everything has been criticized as unscientific because it is so difficult to test by experiments. The controversy concerns two properties:

1. It is widely believed that any theory of quantum gravity would require extremely high energies to probe directly, higher by orders of magnitude than those that current experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider[36] can reach.
2. String theory as it is currently understood has a huge number of equally possible solutions, called string vacua,[37] and these vacua might be sufficiently diverse to explain almost any phenomena we might observe at lower energies.

If these properties are true, string theory as a theory of everything would have little or no predictive power for low energy particle physics experiments.[38][39] Because the theory is so difficult to test, some theoretical physicists have asked if it can even be called a scientific theory. Notable critics include Peter Woit, Lee Smolin, Philip Warren Anderson,[40] Sheldon Glashow,[41] Lawrence Krauss,[42] and Carlo Rovelli.[43]

All string theory models are quantum mechanical, Lorentz invariant, unitary and contain Einstein's General Relativity as a low energy limit.[44] Therefore to falsify string theory, it would suffice to falsify quantum mechanics, Lorentz invariance, or general relativity.[45] Hence string theory is falsifiable and meets the definition of scientific theory according to the Popperian criterion. However to constitute a convincing potential verification of string theory, a prediction should be specific to it, not shared by any quantum field theory model or by General Relativity.

One such unique prediction is string harmonics: at sufficiently high energies—probably near the quantum gravity scale—the string-like nature of particles would become obvious. There should be heavier copies of all particles corresponding to higher vibrational states of the string. But it is not clear how high these energies are. In the most likely case, they would be 1014 times higher than those accessible in the newest particle accelerator, the LHC, making this prediction impossible to test with any particle accelerator in the foreseeable future.
[edit] Swampland

In response to these concerns, Cumrun Vafa and others have challenged the idea that string theory is compatible with anything. They propose that most possible theories of low energy physics lie in the swampland. The swampland is the collection of theories which could be true if gravity wasn't an issue, but which are not compatible with string theory. An example of a theory in the swampland is quantum electrodynamics in the limit of very small electron charge. This limit is perfectly fine in quantum field theory — in fact, in this limit, the perturbation theory becomes better and better. But in string theory, at the moment the charge of the lightest charged particle becomes less than the mass in natural units, the theory becomes inconsistent.

The reason is that two such charged massive particles will attract each other gravitationally more than they repel each other electrostatically, and could be used to form black holes. If there are no light charged particles, these black holes could not decay efficiently, barring improbable conspiracies or remnants. From the study of examples, and from the analysis of black-hole evaporation, it is now accepted that theories with a small charge quantum must come with light charged particles. This is only true within string theory—there is no such restriction in quantum field theory. This means that the discovery of a new gauge group with a small quantum of charge and only heavy charged particles would falsify string theory. Since this argument is very general—relying only on black-hole evaporation and the holographic principle, it has been suggested that this prediction would be true of any consistent holographic theory of quantum gravity, although the phrase "consistent holographic theory of quantum gravity" might very well be synonymous with "string theory".

It is notable that all the gross features of the Standard model can be embedded within String theory, so that the standard model is not in the swampland. This includes features such as non-abelian gauge groups and chiral fermions which are hard to incorporate in non-string theories of quantum gravity.[citation needed]

You stated that M-Theory is not even a theory. That is a complete falsehood and shows a complete absence of knowledge of the topic. Changing what you say when it is in writing a few inches above is intellectually dishonest. You should be ashamed.

I don't work with people in physics. I work with physics. You stated that no experiments are being done to prove M-theory which, again, is completely false and again, shows you know nothing of the topic.

You don't even seem to be able to look up who is doing the experiments.

M-theory is the most current theory of modern physics and is taught in most, if not all, major universities. The revolution in the mathematics made by Edward Witten in 1995 is the basis of it all. Ed Witten is considered the greatest modern physicist by modern physicists. Again, you appear to know nothing of the facts of this statement.

Lisa Randall of Harvard is one of the LHC physicists conducting the research and you apparently do not understand the experiments by your incorrect description.

Everything I posted is true and your story is changing rapidly. The standard model of particle physics has always had serious problems and has had some serious setbacks lately.

I only what you know by what you post. What you posted was false.

If stringers admit that they're only theorizing about a theory, why is Krauss going after them? He dances around the topic until the final page of his book, when he finally admits, "Perhaps I am oversensitive on this subject … " Then he slips into passive-voice scientist-speak. But here's what he's trying to say: No matter how elegant a theory is, it's a baloney sandwich until it survives real-world testing.

[Laurence]Krauss should know. He spent the 1980s proposing formulas that worked on a chalkboard but not in the lab. He finally made his name in the '90s when astronomers' observations confirmed his seemingly outlandish theory that most of the energy in the universe resides in empty space. Now Krauss' field of theoretical physics is overrun with theorists freed from the shackles of experimental proof. The string theorists blithely create mathematical models positing that the universe we observe is just one of an infinite number of possible universes that coexist in dimensions we can't perceive. And there's no way to prove them wrong in our lifetime. That's not a Theory of Everything, it's a Theory of Anything, sold with whizzy PBS special effects.

It's not just scientists like Krauss who stand to lose from this; it's all of us. Einstein's theories paved the way for nuclear power. Quantum mechanics spawned the transistor and the computer chip. What if 21st-century physicists refuse to deliver anything solid without a galaxy-sized accelerator? "String theory is textbook post-modernism fueled by irresponsible expenditures of money," Nobel Prize-winner Robert Laughlin griped to the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this year.