I’m always on the lookout for non-fiction books with a new or off-beat approach to a topic that interests me. The problem is that I’m not a fast reader; I like to plod and think things over as I read. So, I have an inventory of books waiting to be read, and they can sit around for years until I get to them. One of the books in my current inventory is Frank Tipler’s “The Physics of Immortality”. I’ve had it for about 2 years now, but I don’t see myself getting to it until maybe later this year. However, I opened it up and started to peruse it the other day in a spare moment, and it got me interested. Not interested enough to start reading it (I’m now trying to slog my way through Steven Pinker’s “How the Mind Works”, a 500+ page tome written in a breezy, chatty style that just begs for a ‘skip-around’ approach). But interested enough to do a Web search for a summary and some opinions on Tipler’s ideas. Enough to hit the ground running when I do finally get to his book.
Tipler is a 64 year old mathematical cosmologist, a legitimate physicist who teaches at Tulane University. Like many modern physicists, he was an atheist most of his life. However, he had a “road to Damacus” experience and decided to affirm God and Christianity, supposedly as a result of his theoretical research. He became noted (perhaps not really “famous”) for his Omega Point Theory, which is explained in “Physics of Immortality” (yes, shades of Teilhard de Chardin).
In a nutshell, Tipler set out » continue reading …