A Trip to Infinity

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source: A Trip to Infinity

This production is all style and inclusivity over substance. Style and inclusivity are important, but if that's all you have, actually, you have nothing. It's extremely slow and doesn't say a lot. It's difficult to even fathom how a documentary about such a beautiful subject fails to deliver so spectacularly. But actually, calling it a documentary is a bit of a stretch. The lack of big name experts like Gregory Chaitin is jarring, the lack of technicality is disrespectful to the audience and the lack of history is disrespectful to the great people that established this field. But then, it's 2022 and you can't have a bunch of mostly white men talking about the achievements and sacrifices of other men. So just get a diverse group of people inanely rambling about nothing while you throw a bunch of animations over it and hope no one notices. The problem is that anyone with the slightest interest in science and mathematics will notice and anyone who isn't interested is unlikely to even watch this so I'm struggling to work out who is the target audience. The subject of infinity is so hard to get your head around that a successful treatment of it might give you one or two brief flashes of understanding before your brain retreats to comfort. This documentary elicits no such response, at least not in me. But then I'm not surprised. Netflix documentaries are a meme at this point.

It's a good thing this documentary doesn't have an infinite running time! The first third/half based around mathematical infinity was ok. But then they tried to discuss physical infinity and failed miserably. Just turn it off after the math part, or better yet find a transcript and read it. There won't be that many words on it. If they were trying to be enlightening, they failed. This is a jumble of facts and half-points bathing in an 1 hr 19 min of artistic visuals, decent mood music, and chopped up interviews with mathematicians and scientists who get paid whether they accomplished anything or not. If you're confused after watching the 2nd half of it, that is completely expected, since there is no coherent objective to the entire 2nd half except to fill the running time with something.

Sadly this program was boring, uninformative and very misleading. One mathematician seems to think infinity was some sort of number she could put into a few equations and manipulate them at will. This and the super-dumb "infinite" hotel made for a very bad introduction to a program which then just got worse. What we needed was a clear and simple definition of infinity, namely: that which is unending and therefore unmeasurable. Then there should have been a discussion about the universe - which most probably IS infinite (after all, what is the alternative?). Instead we got confusing fantasies about heading off in one direction and (eventually) coming back to where you started. You can only do that on the surface of a sphere/spheroid - the universe is not on the surface of anything, it is 3-dimensional. We also needed less unscientific talk about wormholes and what may be at centre of a black hole. But what was slightly interesting was how in maths there are different infinities and how some are bigger than others.

Not a documentary for people without a scientific background, most of the concepts are pretty complex and will not be understandable by the regular folk. In fact, many people will probably be offended just because they don't believe in science in the first place and want to live in blissful ignorance. That is why it has reviews below 5 stars. There is also the risk of people mistaking infinity with god, which is a long stretch. Infinity is a mathematical convention that helps us understand things outside our scale, but math in itself isn't even a perfect representation of reality (although we use it as an approximation). There probably is a complex math-like language underlying the tissue of reality, one that could explain what infinity really aims to be, but it is still not within our reach. An advice: if you felt interested or doubtful about the concepts represented in this documentary, they are not new, there are a thousand of youtube videos and creators devoted to explain this matter better.

So much waste of the concept. Low on content, high on effects, animation, music, jazzy words and cliched sentences! Like a physics book with a great cover & nice wrapping but infinitely useless content. Looks and feels so fake. And worst - ZERO on curiosity Go through any good youtube tutorial on infinity and you will learn much more about the concept than spending 60+ minutes on this documentary. Or better still visit your local science museum/planetorium and take a one-hour journey into the cosmos. They have squeezed everything possible- event horizon, planck scale, pi, black holes, worm -holes, etc etc. Whoever made/wrote/directed this has a very finite understanding of infinity...