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The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead
Is there a higher power in the universe? What happens to us when we die? Frank J. Tipler claims to scientifically prove the existence of God and the physical resurrection of the dead.
528 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
About the author
Frank J. Tipler
8 books27 followersFrank Jennings Tipler is a mathematical physicist and cosmologist, holding a joint appointment in the Departments of Mathematics and Physics at Tulane University.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 69 reviews
August 8, 2012
I bought this purely for the purpose of seeing how Tipler, a theoretical physicist, was going to construct a mathematically-based proof that the end of the universe will consist of God resurrecting all the souls of those who have ever lived and taking them on an eternity-trip to Heaven, replete with memories, milk, and stardust cookies—and then freely stealing his ideas where applicable in order to incorporate them into my own half-baked conjecture about this infinite wad of Silly Putty™ we call existence. And that is, indeed, what the well-intentioned author endeavors to prove, backed by some serious mathematical noodling: for notwithstanding that the milk and cookies bit above was unnecessarily snide, my reading has yet led me to the conclusion that this Theodicy will transpire at the winding-down of the universe due to beatific entropy, the blessed conservation of matter, and, in a fit of inspired quiddity, the holy hand grenade—for as we approach the Omega Point of a contracting universe (and this state of contraction may be manipulable by ultra-advanced science and its aggregate of artificial intelligence, if the universe refuses to play along) its state will progress to that of infinite entropy and infinite information, transferred to ever-higher energy states and supra-complex algorithms via the ungodly energy levels siphoned from gravitational shear and such. The speculation about this Big Crunch and what it portends for our past-lived human lives—encoded information at its most basic level—once we approach the Omega Point and a cosmic waveform of infinite information, trailing an AI-augmented human science expanding its scope in exponential fashion, is actually quite interesting; it is the attempts to shoehorn such theoretical workings into soteriological loafers that force Tipler to strain, with his analogies, contemplations, and numbers, towards making God's promise of immortality workable, nay, reasonable, within the physical constraints of a universe/multiverse bound by the laws of physics. God is, in essence, the Omega Point, capable of operating through reversed time to set the salvational scenario for that endpoint's status and retro-enacting the miraculous through the vestiges of accelerated spacetime.
It all seems appropriately and wonderfully wackadoo—another reviewer makes the believable claim that Tipler is nuts. Brilliant, interesting, compelling, but nuts. This book comes across as a genius's urgent need to heal the pain of the Holocaust by resurrecting the dead in the grandest thought-experiment of all time. But I'll be damned if I don't appreciate another fellow taking the time and effort to put his own private visions into understandable prose and formulae, taking them to the absolute limit while holding fast to his convictions, and then making them available for the inevitable scorn and mockery that will attend to them—as, apparently, it does to people like Esteban. Attaboy, Tipler!
It all seems appropriately and wonderfully wackadoo—another reviewer makes the believable claim that Tipler is nuts. Brilliant, interesting, compelling, but nuts. This book comes across as a genius's urgent need to heal the pain of the Holocaust by resurrecting the dead in the grandest thought-experiment of all time. But I'll be damned if I don't appreciate another fellow taking the time and effort to put his own private visions into understandable prose and formulae, taking them to the absolute limit while holding fast to his convictions, and then making them available for the inevitable scorn and mockery that will attend to them—as, apparently, it does to people like Esteban. Attaboy, Tipler!
June 28, 2013
I've never read such a pedantic, implausible piece of trash in all my years of studying physics as it relates to Cosmology. First, the author (book written sometime in 1996 so I realise technology has changed quickly), a professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University (if one could call him such), has the unmitigated gall to firstly suggest that the "findings of his research with some of physics's top minds" has nothing to do with Christianity or the existence of Christ. It will encompass all religions in an attempt to explain their own trajectory and how it relates to cosmology and the actual laws of physics concerning the end times, and when the planets finally get hungry enough to eat themselves. (Wait...I think I just threw up a little in my mouth....no, I'm okay.)
Well, okay, I'll stomach that one and move on to a later chapter, but THAT, my friend, was when I simply tossed my cookies. Let me see if I can provide a brief (why would I subject anyone to more of this crap than needed? I'm not a masochist for God's sake) quote concerning his next topic of import:
After tangent upon tangent at disproving the Turing Test, he then goes on to say that it won't be God's Second Coming that will raise us from our mortality and transform us into glorified beings; nor will it be simply understanding and taking a closer look at the actual Laws of Physics themselves that will help to supply some answers to coming events. (Sorry gang--I'm a BIG Hawking/Penrose fan on this one.)
His quote: "But the fundamental reason for allowing the creation of intelligent machines (thus tying it back to the impassable Turing Test) is that without their help, the human race is doomed. With their help, we can and will survive forever. To see this, let us first see how they could help us colonise space." THAT is his answer, folks! He used the rest of the book for finding practical ways of making these machines a reality. The kicker? Inside the first flap is this sub-title: "What if science, in its relentless drive to uncover the secrets of the universe, discovered God?"
I SO wanted to like this book. It borders on my Astrophysics Physics Thesis. But it sucks eggs. And not any old egg--a Turing Egg.
Well, okay, I'll stomach that one and move on to a later chapter, but THAT, my friend, was when I simply tossed my cookies. Let me see if I can provide a brief (why would I subject anyone to more of this crap than needed? I'm not a masochist for God's sake) quote concerning his next topic of import:
After tangent upon tangent at disproving the Turing Test, he then goes on to say that it won't be God's Second Coming that will raise us from our mortality and transform us into glorified beings; nor will it be simply understanding and taking a closer look at the actual Laws of Physics themselves that will help to supply some answers to coming events. (Sorry gang--I'm a BIG Hawking/Penrose fan on this one.)
His quote: "But the fundamental reason for allowing the creation of intelligent machines (thus tying it back to the impassable Turing Test) is that without their help, the human race is doomed. With their help, we can and will survive forever. To see this, let us first see how they could help us colonise space." THAT is his answer, folks! He used the rest of the book for finding practical ways of making these machines a reality. The kicker? Inside the first flap is this sub-title: "What if science, in its relentless drive to uncover the secrets of the universe, discovered God?"
I SO wanted to like this book. It borders on my Astrophysics Physics Thesis. But it sucks eggs. And not any old egg--a Turing Egg.
April 28, 2012
Wandering the library, comfortably lost in more ways than one, I found myself gravitating towards the physics section. Scanning the spines of hundreds of potential candidates to fill in my spare time, I happened across one curios title... The Physics of Immortality.
As some modicum of hope stirred within me, disturbing - for a brief moment - the pessimistic cynicism that I have operated under ever since apostatizing at the age of seven, I pulled the book from the shelf and began reading on the spot.
It started out terribly hopeful. I was so excited, honestly. Despite the many arguments I've had with theists, where I speak with such condescending conviction; I was looking forward to finding how wrong I have been...
I read on... To find more promises of accrediting the after-life, the existence of a soul etc. He claimed religion was merely a branch of physics, which had a fantastical ring, to my mind...
A few hours passed, the guy persisted in bringing the reader up-to-speed on modern physics, which really was a topic in itself for other books, I thought to myself. Soon it just felt like he was procrastinating and displaying how much he knows about physics. Self-indulgent musing. Tedious... I found myself growing skeptical.
His appendix was impressive, he obviously knows his stuff, I resolved. Then I found myself thinking: 'hey, why haven't I heard of this book?!' And when I flipped to the start to find it was published over a decade ago, I just shat bricks. Really.
I. Shat. Bricks. All over the floor of the aisle.
It wasn't wholly due to the fact that I was really hoping for his outrageous theory of the Omega Point to be law, it was also because of the pompous language he uses in parts of the book. He talks like he's the next fucking Issac Newton. And he waves his equations around in order to overwhelm his more laymen readers into accepting that he must be right because he obviously knows his shit. But his mathematics have no apparent relevance to anything he talks about.
I might as well construct some wild theory that cheese contains the only particle capable of resisting the gravitational pull of black holes, and that one day all matter will be sucked into a black hole, only to leave an abundance of cheese floating in space, wherein the dairy product will eventually clump into spheres, become massive enough to warp space and develop a gravitational field. Then a species of cheese dwellers will evolve.
It's going to happen, you'll just be dead, so you don't know if I'm right or not.
It's highly credible, I assure you, let me just toss some formulas and equations at you to make sure. *hurls massive clump of math*
Now we just need to figure out a way to splice human DNA with cheese.
EDIT - I don't usually utilize the fools method reductio ad absurdum, mind you, but the proposition in question is of such absurdity that it requires no reduction whatsoever.
As some modicum of hope stirred within me, disturbing - for a brief moment - the pessimistic cynicism that I have operated under ever since apostatizing at the age of seven, I pulled the book from the shelf and began reading on the spot.
It started out terribly hopeful. I was so excited, honestly. Despite the many arguments I've had with theists, where I speak with such condescending conviction; I was looking forward to finding how wrong I have been...
I read on... To find more promises of accrediting the after-life, the existence of a soul etc. He claimed religion was merely a branch of physics, which had a fantastical ring, to my mind...
A few hours passed, the guy persisted in bringing the reader up-to-speed on modern physics, which really was a topic in itself for other books, I thought to myself. Soon it just felt like he was procrastinating and displaying how much he knows about physics. Self-indulgent musing. Tedious... I found myself growing skeptical.
His appendix was impressive, he obviously knows his stuff, I resolved. Then I found myself thinking: 'hey, why haven't I heard of this book?!' And when I flipped to the start to find it was published over a decade ago, I just shat bricks. Really.
I. Shat. Bricks. All over the floor of the aisle.
It wasn't wholly due to the fact that I was really hoping for his outrageous theory of the Omega Point to be law, it was also because of the pompous language he uses in parts of the book. He talks like he's the next fucking Issac Newton. And he waves his equations around in order to overwhelm his more laymen readers into accepting that he must be right because he obviously knows his shit. But his mathematics have no apparent relevance to anything he talks about.
I might as well construct some wild theory that cheese contains the only particle capable of resisting the gravitational pull of black holes, and that one day all matter will be sucked into a black hole, only to leave an abundance of cheese floating in space, wherein the dairy product will eventually clump into spheres, become massive enough to warp space and develop a gravitational field. Then a species of cheese dwellers will evolve.
It's going to happen, you'll just be dead, so you don't know if I'm right or not.
It's highly credible, I assure you, let me just toss some formulas and equations at you to make sure. *hurls massive clump of math*
Now we just need to figure out a way to splice human DNA with cheese.
EDIT - I don't usually utilize the fools method reductio ad absurdum, mind you, but the proposition in question is of such absurdity that it requires no reduction whatsoever.
July 16, 2019
Unfortunately irritatingly presented philosophy, theology and pointless Bible citations mixed in with musing on speculations in the guise of cosmology and physics. It’s a pity that the author is somewhat of a clown because there is a story that is worth telling that almost gets told but not quite because of the author’s myopic fixation on God (he’ll call it the Omega Point), false framing of complex relationships and his lack of comprehension concerning philosophy.
This book was written in 1995 and he proactively predicts as confirmation for his theory the Higgs Boson twice as massive as what it turned out to be and he requires a collapsing universe in order to get at his Omega Point rather than the currently accepted expanding universe.
Heidegger was oddly a big influence for this author. The author drops a lot of philosophy and selectively quotes philosophers in support of what he is arguing for. I’ve been recently listening to Heidegger’s ‘Basic Problems’ and this book over the same time period, and I will give an illustration why Tipler is shallow. Both books had big discussions on Kant’s ‘existence is not a predicate’ and Tipler really had no idea what he was talking about while Heidegger makes perfect sense. Most readers will gloss over Tipler’s physics and not get bothered by his obvious inadequate comprehension of philosophy. I found he was both shallow and unintentionally misleading with his theology, philosophy, logic, history, wild ass speculation and at times his logic, and his simplistic take on natural evolution, Godol incompleteness, Turing universal complete machines and the author��s simplistic progress driven world view with too much pernicious teleology driving his thinking.
Tipler is on to something but he doesn’t have the wherewithal to put the pieces together correctly and he definitely mixes it up way too much with his religious mumbo jumbo. Yeah, he says he’s not a believer and blah blah blah, but why bore me with the Bible, the Koran, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jesus’ words, Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Barth, medieval scholastics and so on. For example, he says Luke must have been written earlier than what most scholars would say because Jesus predicts the destruction of the Temple and Luke would have noted that; bad, bad, stupid logic. It is irrelevant to his big theme in the book and so what if the author thinks of himself as being not a theist, just don’t bore me with religious tropes when they add nothing but distractions.
The author can’t appeal to the multi-verse in 1995 (though he does bring up Hugh Everett III and his MWI) or the expanding universe because overwhelmingly the world thought in terms of the singular event of the big bang and a collapsing universe with time being not even rationally defined before the singularity; the author says that in so many words. I want to say that Neil deGrasse Tyson says we are living in a simulation in his hosted debate on the topic (check out that debate, it is well worth it). I don’t want to dismiss everything the author says or mock him because it’s possible to slightly reframe what he is saying into a slightly different bucket and in such a way that we are in a simulation or are just one universe within a multitude of other universes. Though, his telling me that dogs will not be there with me in his version of heaven means that with certainty I don’t want to go (if dogs can’t go to heaven, I’m not going. Nuff said).
What led me to this book was a review I read last week on Neil Stephenson latest book ‘Fall’. It said that that book was inspired by Deutsch’s ‘Fabric of Reality’, and Deutsch says that his book is an elaboration of this book by Tipler. Deutsch took out the bad physics, the theology and replaced the shallow philosophy with his own shallow understanding of philosophy, but even then it’s possible to see a sketch for an outline of a science fiction worthy novel that could be worthwhile to understand. There is some merit in this book but it takes a lot of shoveling of the muck to get at it.
Tipler twice mentioned how Frederick Hayek’s view of capitalism as being similar to his Omega Point theory and Tipler assumes existence needs meaning outside of ourselves similar to what Gilder did in ‘Life after Google’, and both of these authors comment on the inadequacy of Markov Matrices for capturing meaning. There are overlaps between these books and they each including Hayek have an implicit appeal to mystically magical thinking that is best appreciated by teleological thinkers.
If the author wasn’t so weak on philosophy and theology and if he did not appeal to religious mumbo jumbo as he was claiming that he didn’t believe in it in the first place and if the author did not appeal to other just as irritatingly unsupported assertions inadequately derived from physics and logic this book could have been a worthwhile listen, but take away all of those things and it would not be the same book, and therefore I can’t recommend this book.
This book was written in 1995 and he proactively predicts as confirmation for his theory the Higgs Boson twice as massive as what it turned out to be and he requires a collapsing universe in order to get at his Omega Point rather than the currently accepted expanding universe.
Heidegger was oddly a big influence for this author. The author drops a lot of philosophy and selectively quotes philosophers in support of what he is arguing for. I’ve been recently listening to Heidegger’s ‘Basic Problems’ and this book over the same time period, and I will give an illustration why Tipler is shallow. Both books had big discussions on Kant’s ‘existence is not a predicate’ and Tipler really had no idea what he was talking about while Heidegger makes perfect sense. Most readers will gloss over Tipler’s physics and not get bothered by his obvious inadequate comprehension of philosophy. I found he was both shallow and unintentionally misleading with his theology, philosophy, logic, history, wild ass speculation and at times his logic, and his simplistic take on natural evolution, Godol incompleteness, Turing universal complete machines and the author��s simplistic progress driven world view with too much pernicious teleology driving his thinking.
Tipler is on to something but he doesn’t have the wherewithal to put the pieces together correctly and he definitely mixes it up way too much with his religious mumbo jumbo. Yeah, he says he’s not a believer and blah blah blah, but why bore me with the Bible, the Koran, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jesus’ words, Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Barth, medieval scholastics and so on. For example, he says Luke must have been written earlier than what most scholars would say because Jesus predicts the destruction of the Temple and Luke would have noted that; bad, bad, stupid logic. It is irrelevant to his big theme in the book and so what if the author thinks of himself as being not a theist, just don’t bore me with religious tropes when they add nothing but distractions.
The author can’t appeal to the multi-verse in 1995 (though he does bring up Hugh Everett III and his MWI) or the expanding universe because overwhelmingly the world thought in terms of the singular event of the big bang and a collapsing universe with time being not even rationally defined before the singularity; the author says that in so many words. I want to say that Neil deGrasse Tyson says we are living in a simulation in his hosted debate on the topic (check out that debate, it is well worth it). I don’t want to dismiss everything the author says or mock him because it’s possible to slightly reframe what he is saying into a slightly different bucket and in such a way that we are in a simulation or are just one universe within a multitude of other universes. Though, his telling me that dogs will not be there with me in his version of heaven means that with certainty I don’t want to go (if dogs can’t go to heaven, I’m not going. Nuff said).
What led me to this book was a review I read last week on Neil Stephenson latest book ‘Fall’. It said that that book was inspired by Deutsch’s ‘Fabric of Reality’, and Deutsch says that his book is an elaboration of this book by Tipler. Deutsch took out the bad physics, the theology and replaced the shallow philosophy with his own shallow understanding of philosophy, but even then it’s possible to see a sketch for an outline of a science fiction worthy novel that could be worthwhile to understand. There is some merit in this book but it takes a lot of shoveling of the muck to get at it.
Tipler twice mentioned how Frederick Hayek’s view of capitalism as being similar to his Omega Point theory and Tipler assumes existence needs meaning outside of ourselves similar to what Gilder did in ‘Life after Google’, and both of these authors comment on the inadequacy of Markov Matrices for capturing meaning. There are overlaps between these books and they each including Hayek have an implicit appeal to mystically magical thinking that is best appreciated by teleological thinkers.
If the author wasn’t so weak on philosophy and theology and if he did not appeal to religious mumbo jumbo as he was claiming that he didn’t believe in it in the first place and if the author did not appeal to other just as irritatingly unsupported assertions inadequately derived from physics and logic this book could have been a worthwhile listen, but take away all of those things and it would not be the same book, and therefore I can’t recommend this book.
October 3, 2015
This is definitely a very odd book. Two decades ago, Frank Tipler, a seriously bright cosmologist and mathematical physicist, attempted to prove that the core revelation of religion - that God exists and we are immortal - could be derived from contemporary physics.
Tipler writes quite well so, noting the sections of pure science that cannot be easily understood (and their appendices 'for scientists' that perhaps only a handful of humans can comprehend), this can be read as serious entertainment at least by intelligent lay people.
His intelligence is not in doubt. He does not, at any time, fall into some of the more obvious traps of those who want religious revelation to be true but the book is ultimately unpersuasive. It stands as a theory of possibility and speculative science but no more.
The problem throughout is one of base-line assumptions. To get to the point where God exists, as absolute information at Omega Point, and can reconstruct us in physical form as an immortal physical sub-programme, he has to make a number of early leaps in the dark.
I do not doubt what I cannot understand - the mathematical physics - but I can reasonably doubt these assumptions and so the attempt to create a modern science-based primordialism becomes interesting and even entertaining but not something that will change my life.
As with many of my reviews, my interest is less on the claims of the author but why such claims appear culturally at a particular point in time and particular place - in this case, the United States in the final fifth of the twentieth century.
Perhaps the best way of approaching this is to look for the cultural clues when Tipler abandons science and starts looking into revelation and opinion - into theology, other religions and American Deism. Why does he even need to do this? Just to connect to his readers?
Surely his Omega Point Theory should stand on its own two feet as theoretical science and lead us to the conclusions without any requirement for any reference to the beliefs of the past. Is he suggesting that great minds in the past 'intuited' scientific truth?
There is an ambiguity and woolly-mindeness here that he corrects himself frequently but which will puzzle the European reader in particular. It reads a little as a variant of 'Fox Mulderism' - if not 'I want to believe' then 'I know you need to believe'.
What seems to be going on here is that a sincere mathematical physicist thinks he has found a theory of cosmology that ends up with outcomes close to those of the great religions and he wants to connect with his confused and less bright audience by offering hope.
One can imagine that some people might grasp at this straw - though I see no evidence that either scientists or theologians have en masse taken his theories very seriously. It is a straw that hopes to reintegrate science and religion, the liberal dream of the age.
There are clues to the ethical motivation throughout - family horror at the Holocaust (a nightmare that has become demonically symbolic for American liberals), the problem of evil, the fear of extinction, the quiet unusually ignorant rage against existentialism.
This is a cry for help from a decent man whose science has stripped away all hope in a culture that still believes in non-sense on no scientific basis at all. Science is superior to faith so someone needs to give faith a scientific basis! He tries. He fails.
It is a cry from the depths of an America that suffers from a cultural internal contradiction that is playing itself out with even more intensity two decades later - between simple stupid faith and the complexities of a science understood by only a few.
Recent decades have seen many attempts, often laughable, to reconcile religion and science, faith and reason. They usually end up a liberal spiritual mush that evades and avoids deep thought.
Tipler is rightly critical of liberal theologians who actually believe in nothing but a vague good will and an ethics based on no serious consideration of their origin. His is not a soft option by any means. His notes are sometimes worth reading on this score.
But we are not dealing with one of the more ridiculous appropriations of science to invent reasons to believe - you know the sort of thing: that quantum physics has proved that spirit inhabits all of existence. Aum! No, it does not.
To his credit, Tipler sweeps all this nonsense away so that his theory is not non-sense - it makes good sense once certain assumptions are taken for granted - but science of a sort. Unfortunately, it is highly speculative science. Little can be built on it.
'Speculative science' has its logic but it sits between the science of experiment and science fiction. It is science but not reliable or true in itself, a source of wonder which yet cannot be taken as a description of the world. Still, it drives the liberal imagination
However, frustrating though the book has been, there are insights into a wide variety of areas - and not just science. Unusually among scientists, Tipler has a breadth of knowledge that applies critical thinking to fields as diverse as history, ethics and religion.
I cannot really recommend this book ultimately to anyone looking for meaning in the universe - to find meaning in it would be to be guilty, I think, of 'mauvaise foi' - nor is it entertaining as such but I can suggest it to any intelligent reader for its nuggets of insight.
This is a book that could only have been written in the United States during a crisis of faith by a man of fundamentally liberal values faced with the internal contradictions of his own culture.
The book may last not as science but I think it may do as a text that helps document that crisis, a crisis that has since gone global ...
December 18, 2007
Wishful thinking disguised as science.
November 17, 2015
I must admit I only read about 40 pages of this book, and usually under those circumstances I would not feel able to offer an opinion. However, the grandiose claims made in the introduction are followed by such deeply inadequate arguments that I feel able to make the following comment. I am confident, on the basis of the first 40 or so pages, that the rest of the work is utter nonsense.
The author, apparently a distinguished Physicist, feels equipped to hold forth in what must be described as a rather condescending manner on issues philosophical and theological. Unfortunately, he seems to barely understand what is at stake in the issues he discusses. His treatment of John Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment is a particularly laughable case in point. He objects to Searle's conclusions on the basis that, in the scenario Searle envisages, the person in the room would be unable to access a sufficiently large amount of information in a sufficiently short time to pass a Turing test convincingly.
As first-year undergraduate philosophy students the world over will tell you, this is utterly irrelevant. Thought experiments do not, in most important respects, have to mimic an actual possible set of events to be accurate; what they isolate is the meaning of concepts. In this case, Searle is pointing out that processes can be designed to manipulate symbols in a way which is meaningful to an end user, but this does not mean that the process user, or the process itself, actually understands what is being done. His point is that thought cannot be boiled down to computation, so there is no way that a computer could 'think' irrespective of how great its computational powers were.
On the basis of this dreadful nonsense, I felt able to discard the book without further inspection.
The author, apparently a distinguished Physicist, feels equipped to hold forth in what must be described as a rather condescending manner on issues philosophical and theological. Unfortunately, he seems to barely understand what is at stake in the issues he discusses. His treatment of John Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment is a particularly laughable case in point. He objects to Searle's conclusions on the basis that, in the scenario Searle envisages, the person in the room would be unable to access a sufficiently large amount of information in a sufficiently short time to pass a Turing test convincingly.
As first-year undergraduate philosophy students the world over will tell you, this is utterly irrelevant. Thought experiments do not, in most important respects, have to mimic an actual possible set of events to be accurate; what they isolate is the meaning of concepts. In this case, Searle is pointing out that processes can be designed to manipulate symbols in a way which is meaningful to an end user, but this does not mean that the process user, or the process itself, actually understands what is being done. His point is that thought cannot be boiled down to computation, so there is no way that a computer could 'think' irrespective of how great its computational powers were.
On the basis of this dreadful nonsense, I felt able to discard the book without further inspection.
January 7, 2012
Religion and science...ahhh, those classic antagonists. The Catholic Church sees fit to torture poor Galileo and Copernicus, whose observations do not fit in with the Ptolemian geocentric universe that so nicely fits in with its philosophy. Petr Beckmann's fine History of Pi takes the Church to task for the Dusk and Night of scientific discovery in the Middle Ages. The litenay of new atheist books out, from Dawkins to Hitchens, claims we cannot have science and religion together.
On the other side, Hasidim take the plethora of evidence we have for the age of the universe and tell us that it was all planted by G-d to test our faith. (Faith?!?) Yes, really, the Earth is 5768 years old. And don't even get me started on this evolution business; I mean, c'mon, everyone knows it's just a theory. (Gravitation, too, is "just" a theory...it's hard to type while I float away.)
Or, can religion and science live together? Many of my fellow science geeks (me included) live in a world where we depend on accepted and experimentally proven scientific principles to advance our careers, and yet, we still manage to have some religion while not feeling like complete hypocrites. I justify this by defining the scientific universe to be that space of ideas that we understand enough to model, while religion concerns those ideas that cannot be proven or disproven. Yes, there are nuances, but it is a simple division that helps to guide me as I work and raise children.
Now comes along one Prof. Frank Tipler, who, with The Physics of Immortality (TPOI), takes everything one giant step further by asserting that science and religion not only can coexist, but religion is in fact a branch of physics. Holy mind-bend, Batman!
The first hint the reader has that this is all a bunch of mush is that this book came out nearly 15 years ago. If the theology as branch of physics idea had any legs, well...don't you think it's a big enough idea that you may have heard of it by now?
Yes yes, some ideas are so good, so ahead of their time, that they take at least that long to sink in.
In any case, Tipler, who co-wrote "The Cosmological Anthropic Principle," is continuing on a theme in that book: that there exists a singularity in space-time which he calls the Omega Point. His interpretation of this singularity is such that all life is resurrected in the Judeo-Christian sense when we reach this Omega Point in space-time. The rub is that Tipler claims to have a pure physics explanation and proof of this.
The main part of the book is a review of philosophy and cosmology, from Marx & Engels and Heidegger to Penrose and Turing. In one sense, the book fits right into the genre popularized by Hofstadter and Penrose about the science of consciousness and intelligence. Much discussion is given to computing bounds, testable physical theories, quantum mechanics, and general relativity (in the most general sense possible). Much better discussions of these things, and more, can be found in Penrose's "The Emperor's New Clothes."
In another sense, this book tries to cover the realm of human knowledge in about 300 pages, discussing technology, economics, religion, science, etc. It makes for a dizzying experience to try to keep a narrative going, and one gets the feeling that Tipler is merely showing off how much he's read over the years.
The death knell for this book, however, is the "Appendix for Scientists." I must simply quote the beginning to give you a flavor of the attitude he holds toward his readers:
"Unfortunately, even for the expert, the science in this Appendix for Scientists is extremely interdisciplinary. To comprehend it all without reference to a research library would require Ph.D.'s in at least three disparate fields: (1) global general relativity, (2) theoretical particle physics, and (3) computer complexity theory. My own Ph.D. is in (1), and I myself can understand (2) and (3) without the Ph.D.'s only because I've spent the past 15 years teaching myself those fields. I've done it, so you can do it."
In trying to democratize his knowledge ("I've done it, so you can do it."), Tipler is actually daring the reader to verify that the contents of the book are simply bullshit. Hey, it should only take us, what, 15 years? By the way, the equations are correct as far as I can tell, but what they have to do with the truth of his asinine hypothesis, I have no idea This appendix is the biggest snow job I have ever seen.
There is, however, valuable information in the book, so long as you try to take it out of context. It's just that you can find it elsewhere, better written, and with an actual point to be made that won't have you howling.
On the other side, Hasidim take the plethora of evidence we have for the age of the universe and tell us that it was all planted by G-d to test our faith. (Faith?!?) Yes, really, the Earth is 5768 years old. And don't even get me started on this evolution business; I mean, c'mon, everyone knows it's just a theory. (Gravitation, too, is "just" a theory...it's hard to type while I float away.)
Or, can religion and science live together? Many of my fellow science geeks (me included) live in a world where we depend on accepted and experimentally proven scientific principles to advance our careers, and yet, we still manage to have some religion while not feeling like complete hypocrites. I justify this by defining the scientific universe to be that space of ideas that we understand enough to model, while religion concerns those ideas that cannot be proven or disproven. Yes, there are nuances, but it is a simple division that helps to guide me as I work and raise children.
Now comes along one Prof. Frank Tipler, who, with The Physics of Immortality (TPOI), takes everything one giant step further by asserting that science and religion not only can coexist, but religion is in fact a branch of physics. Holy mind-bend, Batman!
The first hint the reader has that this is all a bunch of mush is that this book came out nearly 15 years ago. If the theology as branch of physics idea had any legs, well...don't you think it's a big enough idea that you may have heard of it by now?
Yes yes, some ideas are so good, so ahead of their time, that they take at least that long to sink in.
In any case, Tipler, who co-wrote "The Cosmological Anthropic Principle," is continuing on a theme in that book: that there exists a singularity in space-time which he calls the Omega Point. His interpretation of this singularity is such that all life is resurrected in the Judeo-Christian sense when we reach this Omega Point in space-time. The rub is that Tipler claims to have a pure physics explanation and proof of this.
The main part of the book is a review of philosophy and cosmology, from Marx & Engels and Heidegger to Penrose and Turing. In one sense, the book fits right into the genre popularized by Hofstadter and Penrose about the science of consciousness and intelligence. Much discussion is given to computing bounds, testable physical theories, quantum mechanics, and general relativity (in the most general sense possible). Much better discussions of these things, and more, can be found in Penrose's "The Emperor's New Clothes."
In another sense, this book tries to cover the realm of human knowledge in about 300 pages, discussing technology, economics, religion, science, etc. It makes for a dizzying experience to try to keep a narrative going, and one gets the feeling that Tipler is merely showing off how much he's read over the years.
The death knell for this book, however, is the "Appendix for Scientists." I must simply quote the beginning to give you a flavor of the attitude he holds toward his readers:
"Unfortunately, even for the expert, the science in this Appendix for Scientists is extremely interdisciplinary. To comprehend it all without reference to a research library would require Ph.D.'s in at least three disparate fields: (1) global general relativity, (2) theoretical particle physics, and (3) computer complexity theory. My own Ph.D. is in (1), and I myself can understand (2) and (3) without the Ph.D.'s only because I've spent the past 15 years teaching myself those fields. I've done it, so you can do it."
In trying to democratize his knowledge ("I've done it, so you can do it."), Tipler is actually daring the reader to verify that the contents of the book are simply bullshit. Hey, it should only take us, what, 15 years? By the way, the equations are correct as far as I can tell, but what they have to do with the truth of his asinine hypothesis, I have no idea This appendix is the biggest snow job I have ever seen.
There is, however, valuable information in the book, so long as you try to take it out of context. It's just that you can find it elsewhere, better written, and with an actual point to be made that won't have you howling.
November 23, 2020
The month when this book was released was also the month that astrophysicists reported that the expansion of this universe has been observed accelerating; while latest results and conclusions about astrophysics have utterly destroyed Professor Tipler's bizarre and false beliefs, some of his many baseless assertions were known to be wrong decades to centuries before he wrote this book.
False / baseless assertions:
1) Humans wish to live forever;
2) Humans are the only "intelligent" species in the universe;
3) Humans will one day inhabit all planets in all star system in the universe that can support humans, including heavily modifying environments to do so;
4) The energy in the universe can be, and will be, utilized by humanity;
5) Emulating via computer all possible humans, in all possible existences, is a version of"immortality;"
6) The near-infinitely powerful computer humans are "going to" create (not "if" but "when" according to Professor Tipler) will be what he called "god," and it will emulate all possible versions of humans.
7) The universe will collapse into a "big crunch" ("Omega Point") and humans will not only still exist at the time, but will be spread among the universe.
Needless to say, Professor Tipler's god is no more rational, and no more possible, than all of the other gods humans have so far believed / believe existed / exist. Like every other god, Tipler's will be created by humans.
When I mentioned these flaws to Professor Tipler, he told me that I "obviously did not understand the book;" *NO* *ONE* "understands" this book--- it is irrational.
False / baseless assertions:
1) Humans wish to live forever;
2) Humans are the only "intelligent" species in the universe;
3) Humans will one day inhabit all planets in all star system in the universe that can support humans, including heavily modifying environments to do so;
4) The energy in the universe can be, and will be, utilized by humanity;
5) Emulating via computer all possible humans, in all possible existences, is a version of"immortality;"
6) The near-infinitely powerful computer humans are "going to" create (not "if" but "when" according to Professor Tipler) will be what he called "god," and it will emulate all possible versions of humans.
7) The universe will collapse into a "big crunch" ("Omega Point") and humans will not only still exist at the time, but will be spread among the universe.
Needless to say, Professor Tipler's god is no more rational, and no more possible, than all of the other gods humans have so far believed / believe existed / exist. Like every other god, Tipler's will be created by humans.
When I mentioned these flaws to Professor Tipler, he told me that I "obviously did not understand the book;" *NO* *ONE* "understands" this book--- it is irrational.
February 25, 2008
Tipler is a recognized expert in the fields of computer science, physics, and astronomy/cosmology. This is a very difficult read. The second half of the book consists of mathematical equations proving his theory set for in the first half: That every human that ever lived will be immortalized in an emulation--and matched with his or her perfect mate. It is worth reading to gain insight into computer and programming theory. It also does a good job of laying out the future of the universe, in line with modern scientific theory. A church of Tiplerites has sprung up around this man's books.
May 21, 2008
Cosmos and nanotechnology
Imagine the entire cosmos conquered by nanotech self-replicating machines? That's just one of the far-out ideas to chew on in this book. Even if the whole theory doesn't hang together, a lot of the parts are extremely interesting.
Note: Readers without a background in science or engineering will find this tough going.
Imagine the entire cosmos conquered by nanotech self-replicating machines? That's just one of the far-out ideas to chew on in this book. Even if the whole theory doesn't hang together, a lot of the parts are extremely interesting.
Note: Readers without a background in science or engineering will find this tough going.
January 8, 2010
Tipler is nuts. Brilliant, interesting, compelling, but nuts. This book comes across as a genius's urgent need to heal the pain of the holocost by resurrecting the dead in the grandest thought-experiment of all time.
February 20, 2010
Uses relativity and the possible energies of the "Big Crunch" and relativity to explain how how god is a possible future. The book offers not entirely implausible theories providing hope about the physical universe and it's ultimate future.
August 18, 2009
Way out of touch, but way cool. A great book to open one's eyes about science.
August 30, 2022
I read this 30-year-old book because I couldn't find any other else on the subject of religion and science newer, I finished as I finish all books that I'm reading. I enjoy those new theories that posit but I guess should be in line with a proper argument and not randomly trow. Maybe the author was under drugs or after a severe head contusion. The main argument for his Omega Point Theory is that human beings could be wholly simulated by a computer at the end of the universe. How could exist a computer, which is a material thing if there's no universe? So that makes in my opinion his theory worthless. Let's not talk about the rest of the statements that he randomly trow throughout the book about theology and at the end pretends to develop some math to prove it. Personally, I don't know if there's a God or not, but the book doesn't make the point to prove either His existence or the author's Omega Point Theory.
I found a few things that I like to point out that the author describes and I found interesting, that is why gave it two stars.
I don't think that there's free will at all since we're limited by the circumstances in which we are born and the boundaries of our daily lives (age, cities, etc.) but observing doesn't mean interfering, knowing something doesn't mean acting on it. So despite that supposedly "God" is outside this universe observing us, and knowing all about us doesn't mean He is acting for us, so the author's argument is invalid. Do we have free will? No, at all we can choose whatever we want, we might run away from unpleasant circumstances, but we can't choose better circumstances as we want a few tweaks can be moved but nothing else, boundaries like geographics, language, age, relatives, born, etc limited our options as we would like. Above, His final judgment, if it's true, limited seriously our free will as we will judge for what we did, so if we don't behave as He wants we'll be condemned to hell, and that's the final argument of whether free will exists or not. Do as I want or I'll kill you? So why did you give me at all? And Heavens will be the same? Could free will exist? Is an incongruency as if it exists in Heaven and I do whatever I want 1) He couldn't judge me again 2) If I decide to kill someone could I be punished? 3) It could be said that in this supposed heaven all be peace since people there clean the clothes and accepted Him, well no one knows if Videla for example is there.
Many World Interpretation and Free Will, seem that are opposite since if any decision leads to new branches, there's no free will as all possibilities are covered and you can escape from them, even though you might know what a happened to the other branch the "God" see all can and doesn't let any choice since if you decide on something the other split decide on something different and probably opposite. Then in the end what is the true you, in the MWI, and at the end there will be meet all of that you? And for what? If all possibilities happened, as MWI accepts there would be no necessity for the creation or resuscitation. No creation since everything happened, Eve and Adan were expelled from paradise and were not. Resuscitation for a similar reason, you live all the possibilities of your choices so you might have sinned or not, so you couldn't be condemned since your guilty and not at the same time, there would be no you just a sanguinolent mass of something.
The author makes the argument that "homo sapiens" is one step in the chain of evolution, and in the future will be replaced by the most advanced mind non-homo sapiens, these new species would be an information processing machine. But the Bible (and the God) he proclaims said that will be resurrected, in a new body, but would be ourselves. So that makes his argument nonsense, moreover, in a sense we're an information processing machine, but we don't know what "soul" or "consciousness" is and if it can be encoded in any "computer" whatever it would be. The boldest statement is resurrected individuals we'll be emulated in the computers in the future.
According to the author, the soul doesn't exist, so what is the purpose of talking about God (or a deity) or even of resurrection if there's no soul, just photons of us with our information traveling along the universe, and since when just these photons of information would have all information about us, in any case, could just have information about our appearance, not even our voice since sound doesn't travel thru vacuum, and much less our thoughts and feelings that can't be coded in photons.
One good point is "How is the reconstituted person on the Last Day to be identified as the original me; as opposed, that is, to a mere replica, an appropriately brilliant forgery?" That's we won't be ourselves just a replica.
The author insists that human beings could be emulated by a computer simulation with feelings and thinking after a long death in the resurrection. There's no way that feelings could be emulated, some IA could detect some feelings but emulate all of them? Hard to think that's possible. The main point is how these "computers" that emulate people are(what material, quantum computers?), and where they would be if the universe has a hot endpoint. If it isn't in another universe it's impossible that kind of computer exists at all.
A good point that the author makes is about the resurrection with all illnesses healed(blindness, dow, etc) that truly affect personality. Will these people be the same? If those illnesses affect personality it's a bit difficult to accept that, even though there's a core personality people would be the same.
Theodicists argue that evil is logically necessary to have either (1) free will or (2) a universe in which hardy souls are forged (without evil to test one's mettle, only a flabby soul would result). Even granted this logical necessity, reply the skeptics, why such a large amount of evil? For it is not enough to show that evil is logically necessary, one must also show that the actual amount of evil in the world is logically necessary. Would the world be logically impossible if just one baby suffered just one minute less from the flu? Or if one less person died in the Holocaust? Are all those Jewish souls better off for being gassed? ---> That also shows that the "God" is not omnipotent and he can't make souls harder(or already forged), only can make souls that could be tested and by themself be forged(or saved in the case that they pass the test). The allegation that for souls to be saved needs their collaboration only means that not anything could be made and needs another entity to be built. That again shows that this "God" is not omnipotent, despite His creation of the soul that helps Him to build a stronger(forged) soul.
The eternal contradiction of Jesus's picture of a loving God and his insistence on eternal punishment in hell. ---> Thousands of pages have been written about this, even some "Jesus apparitions" saying about His Justice and His Mercy...none resolves the contradiction. Mathew 25:41-46(condemn between right and left) vs II Peter 3:9 (Universal Salvation)
The author makes a good point. Even though the Bible could have been inspired by the Holy Spirit, and perhaps as any book could have between 1 million to 10 million bits it would be logically impossible for any book, including the Bible, to be clear up of such misinterpretation. This does not mean that God is limited, it only means that human beings are. I have at least two objections to his statement 1) There are many times that there's no misinterpretation but plain contradiction (Thou Shall Not Kill, and then exterminate everyone in the given land, Mathew 25:41-46 vs II Peter 3:9 just a few examples 2) If God is an omniscient, omnipotent, above/knowing all deity He/It could have better communication skills to avoid any misinterpretation by limited human beings that he/It creates and supposedly knows better than them what is good or bad for them, even though that, again supposedly, human beings have free will. For human beings to have free will at least should be free from having to be worried about misinterpretation above it. Otherwise, how could be made a proper judgment if misinterpreting something could be right or wrong( Kill vs not Kill for example)?
Did it ever make sense to pray to God? Certainly not, if prayer is regarded as the sending of a message to God. If God is omniscient, then He knows what you are going to say before you say it. In information theory, a message contains "information" only if the receiver learns something from the receipt of the message. Therefore, prayer cannot be the sending of a message to God. Only helps in the sense that could relieve something from yourself, but doesn't help at all. Is the same as talking to another person, or the wall some listening but no help. The argument that He knows what's better for not answering your prayers falls as it would have been so good an already forged soul should have been created.
I found a few things that I like to point out that the author describes and I found interesting, that is why gave it two stars.
I don't think that there's free will at all since we're limited by the circumstances in which we are born and the boundaries of our daily lives (age, cities, etc.) but observing doesn't mean interfering, knowing something doesn't mean acting on it. So despite that supposedly "God" is outside this universe observing us, and knowing all about us doesn't mean He is acting for us, so the author's argument is invalid. Do we have free will? No, at all we can choose whatever we want, we might run away from unpleasant circumstances, but we can't choose better circumstances as we want a few tweaks can be moved but nothing else, boundaries like geographics, language, age, relatives, born, etc limited our options as we would like. Above, His final judgment, if it's true, limited seriously our free will as we will judge for what we did, so if we don't behave as He wants we'll be condemned to hell, and that's the final argument of whether free will exists or not. Do as I want or I'll kill you? So why did you give me at all? And Heavens will be the same? Could free will exist? Is an incongruency as if it exists in Heaven and I do whatever I want 1) He couldn't judge me again 2) If I decide to kill someone could I be punished? 3) It could be said that in this supposed heaven all be peace since people there clean the clothes and accepted Him, well no one knows if Videla for example is there.
Many World Interpretation and Free Will, seem that are opposite since if any decision leads to new branches, there's no free will as all possibilities are covered and you can escape from them, even though you might know what a happened to the other branch the "God" see all can and doesn't let any choice since if you decide on something the other split decide on something different and probably opposite. Then in the end what is the true you, in the MWI, and at the end there will be meet all of that you? And for what? If all possibilities happened, as MWI accepts there would be no necessity for the creation or resuscitation. No creation since everything happened, Eve and Adan were expelled from paradise and were not. Resuscitation for a similar reason, you live all the possibilities of your choices so you might have sinned or not, so you couldn't be condemned since your guilty and not at the same time, there would be no you just a sanguinolent mass of something.
The author makes the argument that "homo sapiens" is one step in the chain of evolution, and in the future will be replaced by the most advanced mind non-homo sapiens, these new species would be an information processing machine. But the Bible (and the God) he proclaims said that will be resurrected, in a new body, but would be ourselves. So that makes his argument nonsense, moreover, in a sense we're an information processing machine, but we don't know what "soul" or "consciousness" is and if it can be encoded in any "computer" whatever it would be. The boldest statement is resurrected individuals we'll be emulated in the computers in the future.
According to the author, the soul doesn't exist, so what is the purpose of talking about God (or a deity) or even of resurrection if there's no soul, just photons of us with our information traveling along the universe, and since when just these photons of information would have all information about us, in any case, could just have information about our appearance, not even our voice since sound doesn't travel thru vacuum, and much less our thoughts and feelings that can't be coded in photons.
One good point is "How is the reconstituted person on the Last Day to be identified as the original me; as opposed, that is, to a mere replica, an appropriately brilliant forgery?" That's we won't be ourselves just a replica.
The author insists that human beings could be emulated by a computer simulation with feelings and thinking after a long death in the resurrection. There's no way that feelings could be emulated, some IA could detect some feelings but emulate all of them? Hard to think that's possible. The main point is how these "computers" that emulate people are(what material, quantum computers?), and where they would be if the universe has a hot endpoint. If it isn't in another universe it's impossible that kind of computer exists at all.
A good point that the author makes is about the resurrection with all illnesses healed(blindness, dow, etc) that truly affect personality. Will these people be the same? If those illnesses affect personality it's a bit difficult to accept that, even though there's a core personality people would be the same.
Theodicists argue that evil is logically necessary to have either (1) free will or (2) a universe in which hardy souls are forged (without evil to test one's mettle, only a flabby soul would result). Even granted this logical necessity, reply the skeptics, why such a large amount of evil? For it is not enough to show that evil is logically necessary, one must also show that the actual amount of evil in the world is logically necessary. Would the world be logically impossible if just one baby suffered just one minute less from the flu? Or if one less person died in the Holocaust? Are all those Jewish souls better off for being gassed? ---> That also shows that the "God" is not omnipotent and he can't make souls harder(or already forged), only can make souls that could be tested and by themself be forged(or saved in the case that they pass the test). The allegation that for souls to be saved needs their collaboration only means that not anything could be made and needs another entity to be built. That again shows that this "God" is not omnipotent, despite His creation of the soul that helps Him to build a stronger(forged) soul.
The eternal contradiction of Jesus's picture of a loving God and his insistence on eternal punishment in hell. ---> Thousands of pages have been written about this, even some "Jesus apparitions" saying about His Justice and His Mercy...none resolves the contradiction. Mathew 25:41-46(condemn between right and left) vs II Peter 3:9 (Universal Salvation)
The author makes a good point. Even though the Bible could have been inspired by the Holy Spirit, and perhaps as any book could have between 1 million to 10 million bits it would be logically impossible for any book, including the Bible, to be clear up of such misinterpretation. This does not mean that God is limited, it only means that human beings are. I have at least two objections to his statement 1) There are many times that there's no misinterpretation but plain contradiction (Thou Shall Not Kill, and then exterminate everyone in the given land, Mathew 25:41-46 vs II Peter 3:9 just a few examples 2) If God is an omniscient, omnipotent, above/knowing all deity He/It could have better communication skills to avoid any misinterpretation by limited human beings that he/It creates and supposedly knows better than them what is good or bad for them, even though that, again supposedly, human beings have free will. For human beings to have free will at least should be free from having to be worried about misinterpretation above it. Otherwise, how could be made a proper judgment if misinterpreting something could be right or wrong( Kill vs not Kill for example)?
Did it ever make sense to pray to God? Certainly not, if prayer is regarded as the sending of a message to God. If God is omniscient, then He knows what you are going to say before you say it. In information theory, a message contains "information" only if the receiver learns something from the receipt of the message. Therefore, prayer cannot be the sending of a message to God. Only helps in the sense that could relieve something from yourself, but doesn't help at all. Is the same as talking to another person, or the wall some listening but no help. The argument that He knows what's better for not answering your prayers falls as it would have been so good an already forged soul should have been created.
December 17, 2020
I read most of this long ago, it was so bad that I set it aside and years later tossed it in to the trash.
The cultist knows that there is no evidence for his Christanic gods, leave alone any gods, so of course he set about to try to pretend that he could find some evidence using his fractured science and -- wotta surprise -- managed to find some, and wouldn't ya also know it, they're his Christanic gods, too, another surprise.
Had the cultist been born in to a Muslim family, the gods he thinks he found -- or wants to pretend to have found -- would have been the Islamic variants.
There was no science in this manifesto, none. I can see why cultists who also think that they have Christanic gods would find it worth while, they're all looking at actual science and seeing the progress that reality makes and they can see the high esteem in which science is held, then they look at their occult delusions, admit that they have no evidence and thus no logical reason to pretend they have gods, and they set out to try to pretend that science supports their delusions.
And wouldn't you know it, the gods they find are exactly like them, just as they were raised to believe.
The cultist knows that there is no evidence for his Christanic gods, leave alone any gods, so of course he set about to try to pretend that he could find some evidence using his fractured science and -- wotta surprise -- managed to find some, and wouldn't ya also know it, they're his Christanic gods, too, another surprise.
Had the cultist been born in to a Muslim family, the gods he thinks he found -- or wants to pretend to have found -- would have been the Islamic variants.
There was no science in this manifesto, none. I can see why cultists who also think that they have Christanic gods would find it worth while, they're all looking at actual science and seeing the progress that reality makes and they can see the high esteem in which science is held, then they look at their occult delusions, admit that they have no evidence and thus no logical reason to pretend they have gods, and they set out to try to pretend that science supports their delusions.
And wouldn't you know it, the gods they find are exactly like them, just as they were raised to believe.
October 10, 2009
It's a wild idea, God as the infinite Turing machine at the collapse of the universe. He finds the idea of the eternal return very repugnant. Given the current guesses about the state of cosmology, I would have to reject the basic premise as having been tested and found to be false. The universe is flat and expanding forever, at least until it hits another brane. We live in a multiverse and that would imply an infinite number of infinite Omega Points.
The idea that the future ultimate computer can resurrect every possible human is flawed. Assume that the UC is benevolent (a rational hope!.) Now if the computer resurrects all beings with all possible memories (roughly 2^10^17 according to Tipler) the vast majority of these beings are going to have disjointed memories that make no sense. They will be in schizophrenic. It would be hellish to resurrect these beings. But, according to the halting theory of computer science, it is impossible to determine if the output of a computer program halts or if it produces an infinite sequence of gibberish. Therefore, a benevolent UC would NOT resurrect every possible human out of concern that it would be condemning the vast majority of those resurrected beings to a hellish existence.
Also, a problem with eternal life. We are finite state machines so it is inevitable that we would enter into a previous mental state and then evolve away from that state in a loop, destined to repeat the same things over and over in a infinite loop. Ok, but I don't think that is what most people think of when they think of eternal life.
The idea that the future ultimate computer can resurrect every possible human is flawed. Assume that the UC is benevolent (a rational hope!.) Now if the computer resurrects all beings with all possible memories (roughly 2^10^17 according to Tipler) the vast majority of these beings are going to have disjointed memories that make no sense. They will be in schizophrenic. It would be hellish to resurrect these beings. But, according to the halting theory of computer science, it is impossible to determine if the output of a computer program halts or if it produces an infinite sequence of gibberish. Therefore, a benevolent UC would NOT resurrect every possible human out of concern that it would be condemning the vast majority of those resurrected beings to a hellish existence.
Also, a problem with eternal life. We are finite state machines so it is inevitable that we would enter into a previous mental state and then evolve away from that state in a loop, destined to repeat the same things over and over in a infinite loop. Ok, but I don't think that is what most people think of when they think of eternal life.
February 15, 2019
okay I got to the point where I had to stop because it just got too weird.
He states that by his definition cars are alive. Then it came to this definition:
I shall say that life continues forever if: (1) information processing continues indefinitely along at least one wordline () all the way to the future :c-boundary" of the universe, that is till the end of time.
(page 132)
okay so as long as we have machines that can keep going we have life - not so interested and I am sending the book back to the library.
He states that by his definition cars are alive. Then it came to this definition:
I shall say that life continues forever if: (1) information processing continues indefinitely along at least one wordline () all the way to the future :c-boundary" of the universe, that is till the end of time.
(page 132)
okay so as long as we have machines that can keep going we have life - not so interested and I am sending the book back to the library.
August 1, 2012
The physics explanations are extremely complex and incomprehensible, so when he uses his conclusions to support his omega point theory, there is really no way the reader can weigh the results or obtain even a basic understanding of what this guy is talking about. Definitely not effective at catering to the non physicist reader as he claims is his intention. I had to force myself to finish it.
September 17, 2016
Some interesting concepts, but that's it. If half of what he posits could be "mathematically proven" as he claims, as opposed to being wishful thinking, he would be the rockstar under physicists and mathematicians alike...
June 29, 2016
I understood about 5 percent of this book. I read it on the ferry to Ellis Island in order to impress a girl. She wasn't that impressed.
March 21, 2008
A fascinating theory, but ultimately without evidence behind it to convince me.
March 17, 2024
Uninspiring, however his claim that for religion to survive it will need to be adopted by physics is quite interesting.
April 17, 2010
I'm gonna live forever
I'm gonna learn how to fly
I'm gonna learn how to fly
December 16, 2012
There are worse attempts. Met him at Tulane & more interesting in person then in his prose.
Read
July 18, 2013This guy is a nut job
May 18, 2016
Entertaining and informative even if very unlikely
October 4, 2018
The book presents some very interesting ideas like Turing test, Von Neumann probes etc. however the premise is so far fetched that its hard to take this book seriously.
May 6, 2020
Teaching bullshit worst books ever.
December 21, 2022
If two statements were to summarize my personal theology they would be: 1. Any cosmology with progress to infinity must necessarily end in God and 2.Theology should be a branch of physics.
In my opinion, at its core, this books summarizes and expands on both concepts brilliantly. Yet, it has been heavily criticized and it is actually easy to see why:
1. This is extremely speculative science -and a number of scientist would say that no science at all-
2. It is outdated science almost 30 years after its publication: Eternal Inflation is currently widely accepted as a cosmological model vs. Big Crunch, the Highs Boson was found with mass outside the range of what Tipler predicted and the list goes on...
3. Tipler goes out of his way to fit scripture into physical cosmology to a detail that, in my opinion, while being an interesting intellectual speculative exercise, ultimately subtracts from its credibility: Once we agree that humans are finite-state machines with an upper bound of states given by the Bekenstein Bound, it feels like a wasted effort to devote so much discussion to an inmortal soul vs. physical resurrection of the dead. It's the pattern that makes the Ship of Theseus itself! (btw, he was ahead of society and the AI community here. This is pre-Matrix after all!)
4. Applying Von Neumann & Morgensten's game theory to The Ultimate Being feels...anthropomorphic a bit?
So it is no surprise to see why a majority of the Physics community considers Tipler to be on the fringes -and most are not even that kind-. That said, I believe we are talking about a very serious intellect here that should be dismissed only at one's own peril and whose wide acceptance could very well go the way of Hugh Everett given time.
Tipler had a brilliant start to his career in physics, doing his post-doc work with no other than John Wheeler, doing significant and respected work in quantum gravity and theorizing the closed timelike curve known as Tipler Cylinder. This is not just some guy with a podcast.
So why the 5 stars?
1. I am in full agreement with his Theology. I find his cosmology fascinating and, not only plausible but a version of it inevitable if infinite energy & computation lie in our future (or at the boundary of our future!)
2. I am generally no fan of any level of the anthropic principle, yet I am forced to admit that his version of a cosmic anthropic principle might follow necessarily from infinite progress
3. Because I believe physics and theology to be one and the same, his cosmology is, in my opinion, a step on the right direction in a line that goes from Plato to Spinoza and includes Einstein, Sagan, Olaf Stapledon or Paul Dirac. All brilliant minds who didn't see much of a distinction between God, Nature, Physics, Theology, Morality or Science. The best physicist asked the exact same questions as the best theologians or the best science fiction writers. In writing Contact, Carl Sagan said that he tried to capture what the feeling of religious experience would be like for a skeptic, rational mind. It worked for me: I have been fascinated with "a message in PI' as a concept since my first read it. Tipler and his Omega Point inspired me in a similar way here.
4. I founds his discussion of deism in America enriching. I remember identifying with some of the "religious" writings of Thomas Payne or Benjamin Franklin but I now want to go and read them all.
If the Founding Fathers were somewhere in between deism and atheism, why did deism failed in America? "Because their deism was based on the blind watchmaker of Newtonian Mechanics. It turned a personal, loving God into an absent landlord...but deism is the way forward. Religion deals with self-interest, like Ethics does and like Physics does. We have to strive for a society in which morality derives from science. A society in which our "oughts" derive from "is" and in which we apply the scientific method to agree in our "is".
To me, this society does not subtract from the mystery of God one bit, on the contrary, it gets me closer to it. I left the book feeling that I wanted to pray -for the first time in years- but that my prayer would just be whispering my hopes for our future in the direction of a light cone all the way to the Omega Point.
In my opinion, at its core, this books summarizes and expands on both concepts brilliantly. Yet, it has been heavily criticized and it is actually easy to see why:
1. This is extremely speculative science -and a number of scientist would say that no science at all-
2. It is outdated science almost 30 years after its publication: Eternal Inflation is currently widely accepted as a cosmological model vs. Big Crunch, the Highs Boson was found with mass outside the range of what Tipler predicted and the list goes on...
3. Tipler goes out of his way to fit scripture into physical cosmology to a detail that, in my opinion, while being an interesting intellectual speculative exercise, ultimately subtracts from its credibility: Once we agree that humans are finite-state machines with an upper bound of states given by the Bekenstein Bound, it feels like a wasted effort to devote so much discussion to an inmortal soul vs. physical resurrection of the dead. It's the pattern that makes the Ship of Theseus itself! (btw, he was ahead of society and the AI community here. This is pre-Matrix after all!)
4. Applying Von Neumann & Morgensten's game theory to The Ultimate Being feels...anthropomorphic a bit?
So it is no surprise to see why a majority of the Physics community considers Tipler to be on the fringes -and most are not even that kind-. That said, I believe we are talking about a very serious intellect here that should be dismissed only at one's own peril and whose wide acceptance could very well go the way of Hugh Everett given time.
Tipler had a brilliant start to his career in physics, doing his post-doc work with no other than John Wheeler, doing significant and respected work in quantum gravity and theorizing the closed timelike curve known as Tipler Cylinder. This is not just some guy with a podcast.
So why the 5 stars?
1. I am in full agreement with his Theology. I find his cosmology fascinating and, not only plausible but a version of it inevitable if infinite energy & computation lie in our future (or at the boundary of our future!)
2. I am generally no fan of any level of the anthropic principle, yet I am forced to admit that his version of a cosmic anthropic principle might follow necessarily from infinite progress
3. Because I believe physics and theology to be one and the same, his cosmology is, in my opinion, a step on the right direction in a line that goes from Plato to Spinoza and includes Einstein, Sagan, Olaf Stapledon or Paul Dirac. All brilliant minds who didn't see much of a distinction between God, Nature, Physics, Theology, Morality or Science. The best physicist asked the exact same questions as the best theologians or the best science fiction writers. In writing Contact, Carl Sagan said that he tried to capture what the feeling of religious experience would be like for a skeptic, rational mind. It worked for me: I have been fascinated with "a message in PI' as a concept since my first read it. Tipler and his Omega Point inspired me in a similar way here.
4. I founds his discussion of deism in America enriching. I remember identifying with some of the "religious" writings of Thomas Payne or Benjamin Franklin but I now want to go and read them all.
If the Founding Fathers were somewhere in between deism and atheism, why did deism failed in America? "Because their deism was based on the blind watchmaker of Newtonian Mechanics. It turned a personal, loving God into an absent landlord...but deism is the way forward. Religion deals with self-interest, like Ethics does and like Physics does. We have to strive for a society in which morality derives from science. A society in which our "oughts" derive from "is" and in which we apply the scientific method to agree in our "is".
To me, this society does not subtract from the mystery of God one bit, on the contrary, it gets me closer to it. I left the book feeling that I wanted to pray -for the first time in years- but that my prayer would just be whispering my hopes for our future in the direction of a light cone all the way to the Omega Point.
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