Product Description

A professor of physics explains how he used a mathematical model of the universe to confirm the existence of God and the likelihood that every human who ever lived will be resurrected from the dead. Reprint. PW.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #52701 in Books
• Published on: 1997-09-18
• Released on: 1997-09-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 560 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780385467995
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Mathematical physicist Tipler attempts to demonstrate via scientific principles the existence of God and the likelihood of reincarnation.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Expect to hear a great deal about this book, which will be boosted through major advertising and a 13-city author tour. Tipler, a professor of mathematical physics at Tulane, presents a scientific argument for the existence of God.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
What to make of a book that postulates mathematical proof of the existence of God, guarantees the resurrection of the dead, and promises that, for those who so desire, there will be sex in heaven? Tipler certainly has all the credentials of a bona fide physicist. He's a professor of mathematical physics at Tulane University and specializes in global general relativity, the branch of physics pioneered by Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking, but his study of the cosmos has led him to some rather extreme and disconcerting ideas based on an uneasy mix of science, theology, and fantasy. While some of his discussions about time, space, and life, which he defines as "information preserved by natural selection," are challenging and alluring, his conclusions are simply wild. For instance, Tipler rather blithely tells us that after leaving the doomed earth to colonize other planets, our species will eventually become extinct, but life itself will survive in our "machine descendants," who will, in turn, ensure the resurrection of each and every person who ever lived. When will this occur? "The dead will be resurrected when the computer capacity of the universe is so large that the amount of capacity required to store all possible human simulations is an insignificant fraction of the entire capacity." Apparently, Tipler takes great comfort in this thought, as will, perhaps, some of his readers. The rest may just experience an overwhelming sense of dismay. Donna Seaman

Customer Reviews

Circular Argument
I enjoy having my brain stretched, so, with that goal in mind, I picked up Dr. Frank J. Tipler's "Physics of Immortality."
There are a number of serious problems with this book, logical, scientific, philosophical, and theological, to wit:

1. The argument is completely circular. (The main thrust is that life, broadly defined, will be able to manipulate the physics of a closed universe in the final moments of its existence in such a way that a form of subjective immortality is possible, for all conscious intelligences, including ourselves.) In order to get from point A to point B, Tipler assumes part of his conclusion. He assumes that life must exist forever, and then uses that assumption in his proof, a definite logical no-no.
Similarly, Tipler includes a "proof" of his argument, saying, in essence that if certain facts about the Higgs boson and the top quark are true, he's right. His conclusions do not follow from his premises at all.

2. Even if one can accept Tipler's main argument, his subsidiary argument is weak. Tipler assumes that his future god-like intelligences will be beings of infinite compassion, who will grant you and I resurrection and immortality, essentially because they're nice guys. This seems like a very slender reed to lean on. The history of intelligent life on this planet (the only intelligence we know anything about) suggests that greater intelligence is not necessarily correlated with greater compassion.

3. Tipler goes off on a strange theological tangent when he attempts to equate his "omega point" being with the God of the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). While there are similarities between his concept and those of some theologians, there are very many more differences, the major one being that most theologians would assert that God transcends time and space, while Tipler's omega point is bounded by both. Whether God exists or not is usually not considered a scientific question; his attempt to make theology a branch of physics is somewhat embarrasing.

4. Finally, even if we can assume that Tipler's argument is plausible, (a stretch), it looks as though the Universe is not cooperating with him. While some of the bounary conditions listed in his proof are as he predicted, the most recent observations seem to show that the Universe's expansion is increasing, not slowing down. Most cosmologists conclude from this evidence that the Universe is open, not closed...and unless the Universe is closed, the rest of Tipler's case falls apart. It's far too early to conclude that the Universe is open (the observations of supernovae in other galaxies which underly the current consensus can be explained in other ways), but at the same time, even without the latest observations, there doesn't seem to be anywhere near enough mass in the universe to allow gravity to eventually slow the expansion down.

Frank Tipler was a well respected physicist before this book, and is still regarded as an expert in the field of quantum cosmology. He is not the first world-class scientist to take a flyer on an implausible idea. I think it's interesting that in the book he condemns Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit paleantologist from whom he took the term "omega point" for doing precisely what Tipler does in this book. Teilhard did outstanding work investigating early hominid primates in Asia before he began working on his "omega point" speculations, which attempted to wed evolutionary biology and theology, and then began to believe that his speculations were scientific facts. Tipler has been caught in the same trap.

I give the book two stars, not one, however, because I find the ideas fascinating, and I did spend a considerable amount of time grappling with the physics and philosophy, which is the precise reason I picked up the book. He shouldn't have attempted to present it as a scientific theory, though, at least in my opinion.

A Loooong string of "if's"
The thesis in this book is that God (aka "the Omega Point" - an omniscient entity reminiscent of "Vger" in Star Trek) does not currently exist (but will develop at some point in the future) and will choose to replicate (emulate) exact duplicates of every human who has ever lived, in a virtual-reality Heaven. I made a list of the "if's" mentioned in this book, that all have to happen for this to occur:

IF
*strong (indistinguishable from human) artificial intelligence is possible
AND IF
*we can develop self-replicating interstellar probes
AND IF
*humans can be completely grown/raised/educated from stored DNA
AND IF
*on every planet, these seeded human colonists accept the destiny we assigned to them
AND IF
*nanotechnology is developed
AND IF
*250-gigwatt lasers are feasible
AND IF
*cost of materials relative to wages drops exponentially every 50 years
AND IF
*antimatter exists, can be feasibly manufactured, and harnessed as a means of propulsion
AND IF
*the universe is closed (will eventually contract)
AND IF
*a virtual "emulation" of a person in a computer is the same "consciousness" as the original person
AND IF
*all information in the physical universe can be retrieved without loss or distortion
AND IF
*a simulation of a living being also recreates perfectly its unexpressed internal states
AND IF
*emulations of every person in history can be made without also re-creating their diseases, conflicting ideologies, etc.
AND IF
*the cost of doing good is not significantly greater than the cost of doing evil, then an omniscient entity will choose the good
AND IF
*intelligent beings in the far future will have the desire to resurrect us to a life we will enjoy

THEN
on this basis, we might have hope of eternal life, "heaven," and a benevolent god.

If the thesis of this book is true, it won't matter what you believed anyway - resurrection is inevitable/inescapable. But personally I'm not going to bank my eternal existence on all these dice rolling the right way, billions of millenia from now. In my view, this requires much more "faith" than simply trusting in the conventional claim of Christianity...In my opinion, "Pascal's Wager" is a much better bet.

Theology is Now a Branch of Physics
A book like this (and really there is just one) is bound to pique not just a few people, and for contrary reasons depending on their viewpoint. Some here have wondered if Tipler is trying to pull one over on them and others, but one can be assured that the physicalist arguments in this book are for real: Tipler's Omega Point Theory first appeared in book-form at the end of _The Anthropic Cosmological Principle_ (1986) co-written by cosmologist John D. Barrow and Tipler, of which said book received almost universally fawning praise by the science media; and while the implications of it there were clear enough to anyone paying very close attention, Tipler did not in that book mention the resurrection mechanism or equate it with God--but infinite computation by any other name would still be as Godly. A later book to come out after _The Physics of Immortality_ which in part presents and defends Tipler's Omega Point Theory is the excellent _Fabric of Reality_ (1997) by physicist David Deutsch (inventor of the quantum computer and winner of the Institute of Physics Paul Dirac Prize for his work in the field). Thus it cannot be very well maintained that Tipler is some sort of kook or fraud--he is by no means either, and this Theory demands to be taken seriously by anyone who is serious.

Some have reported that not even Tipler believes in his own Theory, and it is true that Tipler did say this in the first part of the 12th chapter of _T.P.O.I._ (and in addition stating that he was still an atheist), but this just goes to show how intellectually honest Tipler was being in presenting his Theory--other than theoretical beauty he did not at that time (1994) have any confirming experimental evidence for it--but he also stated that if the Omega Point Theory is confirmed then he shall consider himself a theist. That was seven years ago, and things have progressed since then. For one, the top quark has been found (in 1995) with the mass as predicted it would be in the Omega Point Theory. Also, Deutsch derived the Omega Point using a completely different methodology (using the Turing principle) in the 14th chapter ("The Ends of the Universe") of his book mentioned above--as a matter of fact, this chapter is available on-line at Tipler's homepage (and with Tipler's replies to it) for anyone willing to do a search for it (which I advise). But probably most convincing are the arguments on the physical restraints (e.g., the Bekenstein Bound, general relativity, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics) which seem to _require_ that the universe evolve into the Omega Point in order for some of the most basic laws of physics to be mutually consistent (such as unitarity not being violated)--of which arguments are a later development than Tipler's book, _T.P.O.I._, and so were not included in there (see the Wired article by Tipler called "From 2100 to the End of Time," which is available on-line by doing a search; see also Tipler's homepage). "I'm very encouraged by all these things. It's developing much more rapidly than I had expected," Tipler has told USA Today columnist Sam Meddis--"I'm far more confident now." How much more confident? He's no longer an atheist. (The four-part USA Today series by Sam Meddis on Tipler's Omega Point Theory is available on-line; locate it by doing a search.)

And some have claimed that the recent supernovae data suggesting that the universe's expansion seems to be speeding up shows that the universe is open, as opposed to closed, which would obviate the Omega Point (since it requires that the universe be closed). But as Michael Turner and Lawrence Krauss have demonstrated in a recent paper (_Geometry and Destiny_ [Apr. 1999]; astro-ph/9904020--also available on-line) the supernovae data do _not_ show this. But moreover, the laws of physics _require_ that the universe must end in a finite time, which is only possible in a closed universe. As Hawking has shown, black holes evaporate over time, but if black holes were to evaporate completely away before the universe ends then quantum information would be lost and unitarity would be violated! But unitarity is one of the central postulates of Quantum Mechanics, confirmed again and again by every experiment to date--and indeed, quantum computation would not be possible without it.

In short, I highly recommend this book to any sapient person--along with David Deutsch's _The Fabric of Reality_. Both of these books are real mind benders, but in a good way. Any debate between atheism and theism which does not oft reference these books is still in the dark. Religion has now been subsumed by physics.