Voyage vers l'infini

As "A Trip To Infinity" (2022 release; 79 min) opens, we are introduced to a group of smart, very smart talking heads including mathematicians, physicists, cosmologists, etc. And they start talking about what infinity is. One of them, applied mathematician Steven Strogatz, explains it by way of the story of The Infinite Hotel, as a cartoon plays out what Strogatz is talking about. At this point we are 10 minutes into the movie.

Couple of comments: this is co-directed by veteran documentarian Jon Halperin (who also co=wrote and co-produced this) and newcomer Drew Takahashi. The movie is divided into 9 Chapters and a Conclusion. There is of course no plot to speak of, and along the way we are confronted with seemingly simple questions like "can you go beyond infinity?", "is infinity real or a human invention", etc. The talking heads provide their perspectives, and I haven't a clue whether what they way is true or not. The fascinating thing is that their mind-bending musings are all accompanied by a montage of some sort, at times quite literally (see: The Infinite Hotel), at times very abstract. The original score is an intriguing electronic collage by newcomer Efrim Manuel Menuck. Can't wait to hear more where that came from. Bottom line: this is not your average documentary. I quite enjoyed it for what it was.

"A Trip To Infinity" premiered on Netflix earlier this week. If you are in the mood for something different altogether and don't mind that your brain might get scrambled a bit along the way, I'd readily suggest you check this out, and draw your own conclusion.

As seems to be the norm for Netflix type so-called 'documentaries', visual presentation trumps content depth, breadth and clarity.

Too much on-and-on ramblings on common and minor aspects, and some screen time are just downright irrelevant and totally time wasting - like literally waiting for the train to pass as the interviewee just sat there.

Pertinent and more complex concepts on the other hand are quickly glossed over or just left hanging.

The whole attempt seems to hinge on decorating narratives around the visuals rather than the other way round. Visual quotas seem to be the priority regardless of relevance.

Overall - weak. Only for the very casual viewer of this otherwise highly interesting topic.

For viewers who are already familiar with the rudimentaries of 'infinity' from much better documentaries, give this a miss. Not worth your finite conscious time.

The topic of infinity is interesting, puzzling, and maddening. In mathematics the notion of infinity arises from either a way to describe things we can comprehend or explain or when an equation describing a system leads to an undefined state often called a singularity. The movie provides exhaustive thoughts on the former but not enough of the latter. There is an array of respected physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers. I would have liked more differing viewpoints. Most of the discussion was homogeneous and became repetitive.

The production was top rate and I give full marks for graphics and insightful questions so it was interesting enough for me to recommend it to anyone interested in science and math.

This documentary avoids some of the mistakes that physics documentaries usually make. The visuals take a lot of artistic license but they're mostly not inane and actually help us visualize certain concepts, the experts give a lot of one-liners but they don't feel too much like trolling us or just bantering (for the most part), the subject is open-ended but there's a focus to ponder over just that.

However, I wish the questions and cues were a little less of a shtick so that the experts could expound on the subject a little more, in their own ways - there are actually many of us who like to be intellectually challenged (those who are seeking for entertainment wouldn't even give this a shot anyway).

For example, when the experts are given a glass globe in their hands and asked about holding infinity, it's cute but a little cringey. In fact, Levin already points out that's not how infinity works, if it's truly infinity, we won't be having a comfortable bird's-eye view of it, it's just a very human-centric approach. Moments like these attempt to lure profound statements over something that's already very profound on its own. Instead, what may work better is that, with each example that the experts give, they could go a little deeper, discussing things like how they may try to prove it mathematically/experimentally, what are the limits, paradoxes, different theories on it, etc.

This casual docu covers introductory info on physics, math, cosmology and related stuff. However, the style of delivery is heavily kids-oriented. The art side of this docu is amazing, and there is tons of creativity gone into making every concept interesting and easy to consume by someone who e.g. Doesn't have a higher education and has grown up on bite sized TikTok videos.

About their final thoughts that life and even humanity or life as a whole are just quick blips that won't leave a trace - we actually don't know that yet! Only in 1998 did they notice that galaxies are flying off at accelerating speeds. What else will physicists discover later on? So, it's just silly to make big judgements if your life has meaning or not on some contemporary state of knowledge that's being changed and improved once every few decades.

I'd stay positive. I'm certainly not religious, in fact I'm a militant atheist. Yet I believe that, as long as our knowledge is still vastly incomplete, we shouldn't fall into the "curse of the Western atheist" of the 19th and then the 20th centuries - the meaninglessness and the existentialism. Just accept that we don't yet know the meaning of our lives. Some time in the distant future we (or our descendants) might. Our purpose is simply to carry the torch until then.