What Is Reality?: the fringe theory that puts consciousness at the center of physics

A presenter shows a checkerboard, casts the shadow of a crystal onto sand and, within half an hour, arrives at the conclusion that the entire universe may be the work of a collective consciousness that, from the future, creates the past. What Is Reality? is entertaining, well produced and far bolder than physics allows.

The film was written and directed by David Jakubovic, presented by Marion Kerr and produced by Quantum Gravity Research, a Los Angeles nonprofit institute founded in 2009 by Klee Irwin.

The theory in three steps

The starting point is a real mathematical object, the E8 lattice, an eight-dimensional structure. The institute proposes projecting it down to four and then three dimensions to obtain a quasicrystal: an ordered pattern that never repeats. Its basic unit would be a tetrahedron the size of the Planck length, a kind of pixel of space. Since each pixel can take on a few states, someone or something would have to choose among them, and that is where the film brings in consciousness.

The seven clues

To support the idea, the film lines up what it calls seven clues: reality as information, causal loops in which the future influences the past, indeterminism, consciousness, pixelated space, the E8 crystal and the golden ratio, which supposedly appears from the quantum scale to black holes. In the end, it suggests that the whole universe tends to organize itself into one great consciousness that already exists somewhere in the future.

What physics says

Emergence theory is a fringe proposal, developed outside universities and without a single prediction confirmed by experiment; the institute itself describes it as being at an early stage. Several premises are presented as consensus when they are not. That the Planck length is the smallest possible distance is speculation. Contrary to what the film says, the speed of light in a vacuum has had an exact value since 1983, because the meter came to be defined by it. And the idea that particles exist only when observed is one among several interpretations of quantum mechanics. There is also a conflict of interest: the film closes with a request for donations to the institute.

Why watch

As a lighthearted introduction to difficult subjects, from quasicrystals to digital physics, it works. Watch it knowing that it is one group's showcase for its own thesis, not a picture of what science knows.