Actor-turned-self-proclaimed scientist Terrence Howard has released what he calls a feature film titled “A New Understanding of the Universe,” and it is exactly what you might expect from a man who has spent recent years insisting that 1 times 1 equals 2.
The 74-minute production is less a film and more, as YouTube educator Professor Dave Explains described it, “an extended YouTube video” consisting largely of AI-generated stock graphics, background music, and Howard narrating a script riddled with scientific-sounding terminology strung together with little coherent meaning.
Howard opens the film with grand proclamations about challenging conventional science, promising to explore “the standard models” and present “a new set of tools for a new understanding of our universe.” He also promises to audit academia’s fundamentals, though he misspelled the word “academia” on screen.
Along the way, he invokes Euler’s number, Planck’s constant, the Bohr radius, and the fine structure constant, among many other real scientific terms, without demonstrating any understanding of what those terms actually mean.
Central to Howard’s thesis is his long-standing claim that 1 times 1 does not equal 1. He argues that because the universe operates through “harmonic wave paths” and curves rather than straight lines, standard arithmetic is fundamentally flawed. He frames multiplication not as a mathematical operation but as something closer to two living waveforms meeting, asserting that “when one meets one in the true embrace of being, they become two.”
Professor Dave, who has covered Howard’s scientific misadventures across multiple videos since Howard’s now-notorious appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, sat down to react to the film and found it uniquely painful to watch. He noted that Howard’s claims about Newton’s laws, prime numbers, the square root of two, and the geometry of the universe reflect a pattern of borrowing legitimate scientific vocabulary and deploying it without any connection to actual meaning.
On Howard’s contention that Newton’s first and third laws somehow contradict each other, Professor Dave concluded that Howard “just doesn’t understand middle school level physics.” On the claim that the square root of two represents a “tautological loop,” he noted that Howard simply does not grasp basic algebra.
Howard appears throughout the film in what has become something of a trademark look, a hoodie topped with a Panama hat, delivering remarks before what appears to have been a pseudoscience conference in New Mexico, where he was invited as a keynote speaker.
The film also introduces something Howard calls “the Howard comma,” a concept left almost entirely undefined. Despite the fact that Howard charges money for access to the production, Professor Dave obtained a copy, made it through roughly 25 minutes of the 74-minute runtime, and ultimately called it quits, describing it as “the hardest thing to watch ever that I have ever seen.”
