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 to come up with his own possible solutions to the maddening problem of blending the theories of relativity and the properties of gravity with the theories of quantum physics and the properties of the micro-world of subatomic particles (leptons, bosons, quarks, etc.). The field of physics has been busy working on this since the days of Einstein (who also took a crack at it, but died in frustration). Today’s leading candidates for a “theory of everything” are string theory and loop quantum gravity. But there are still plenty of problems with both; neither of them seem to completely resolve all of the remaining questions and fit in with all that we presently know about the universe on the micro and macro level.

Tipler basically tried to take his own approach to “the story of the universe”. What makes his approach different from the standard theoretical approaches to the quantum gravity problem is 1.) he decides to carve out a role for conscious life and what it might yet do to the universe in the future, assuming that it survives and expands over the eons throughout the universe’s billions of light years; and 2.) he refuses to veto the use of “infinity factors” in the equations that he uses to model the forces and structure of the universe (most physicists and cosmologists interpret an infinity factor as a bad sign, as they favor a discrete description of a discrete reality).

So, as a result of his work along a “road less traveled” by the scientific academy, Tipler came up with a breathtaking scenario whereby intelligent, sentient life digitalizes and miniaturizes itself (yes, shades of “The Matrix”); uses Star-Trek like antimatter engines (or other more advanced baryon annihilation techniques) to propel and reproduce itself throughout the universe; annihilates enough protons over billions of years to reverse the universal expansion now being accelerated by dark energy (through some quirk in the Higgs field, the thing that gives “mass” to the world); exploits all the energy buildup from a contracting universe to weave together a super-computer that would control the contraction in such a way that all of the “digital life matrix” colonies and their supercomputer would come to an “Omega Point” in the time instant just before the universe disappears, into the same sort of singularity from which it sprung (i.e., the Big Bang).

At this Omega Point, the accelerating energy and density levels would, if Tipler’s equations are right, trigger off an infinite moment for the conscious-being collective (makes me think of Whitney Houston’s “One Moment in Time”). This would be the “God moment”, the moment beyond time, the moment of infinite capabilities. During this moment, Tipler assumes that the life collective and its fantastic computer will bring back to life every sentient being that ever existed (given that we all leave tiny signal-traces of every moment of our lives, out in the electromagnetic and gravity fields throughout space). So, everyone is resurrected into this infinite Omega reality, and we all live happily ever after.

Tipler’s implied solution to the underlying problem of relativistic gravity versus quantum electro-strong-weak forces is fairly similar to the Many-Worlds interpretation of physicist Hugh Everett. It solves a lot of the equations, but it requires that the entire Universe split at every random quantum action point, such that the quantum particle went both ways. Well, given all of the quantum particles in the Universe and all of the random things that they do every second (jump this way, jump that way, etc.), that would make for more Universes that envisioned by those mind-blowing kalpa cosmologies from India, outlined in the ancient Purana scripts. But hey, when you’ve got an infinite moment and an infinite computer with infinite energy, you can bash out a lot of universe scenarios.

Obviously, this theory is way off the beaten track of academic physics. And obviously, many if not most scientists in Tipler’s field have written him off. You can find a wide assortment of attacks on Tipler throughout the Internet. What made it worse is that Tipler responded to all of this by going even further (in his book “The Physics of Christianity”), claiming that Jesus worked his miracles and his bodily resurrection by somehow applying baryon-annihilation technology, a technology that even today we can only anticipate someday in the future — maybe.

And to make himself even less popular, Tipler is also a critic of global warming theories. You can, however, find a few real scientists who say that his Omega Point scenario is at least interesting and not necessarily ruled out, even if it does build upon a long list of unlikely or very questionable future events. E.g., will humankind live long enough to gain access to the technologies that Tipler envisions for the colonization of space? They involve such high energies (well beyond what nuclear power technology allows) that if they were actually realized and then weaponized, one slip-up could blow the planet away.

But say that we did get our reproducing, baryon-annihilating space bullets going, spreading over the eons and across the galaxies like cockroaches, infesting the entire universe; then what else could go wrong? Well, are we the only game in town? Maybe some other intelligent species from some other galaxy has the same idea – can we cooperate, or will there be war over who will own the Omega moment? How do we know that some advanced civilization won’t go neurotic on us, and destroy all our digital life bullets just for the heck
of it? (Can we assume that evil will go away in the far distant future?) Or maybe this other civilization will just disagree with our philosophy, maybe they just don’t think that any intelligent form of life should conquer the Omega Point. Who knows what kind of wild science fiction scenarios could spin off from something like this?

And one more thought – what if Murphy’s Law still applies? I.e., controlling the Big Crunch (if Tipler’s theories are right and there would actually be one; he could still be wrong on that) would be something that the life collective would have to get right the first time, and it would be incredibly tricky. Just one slip, one bit of unadjusted chaos, and the whole souffle could go flat. There would be no practice runs for this.

Well, eventually I will get to Tipler’s book (the Immortality one, not the Christianity one). From my pre-perusal, it should be an enjoyable read for me. It is easy to discard Tipler, given how far he has strayed from the kind of research that you can use to solve current world problems. And yet, maybe what he is doing is still a worthwhile exercise. Maybe something good can come from such an exercise, even if it is extremely unlikely to unfold as mapped out. It is still interesting to think that perhaps what we do presently know about physics could lead to such an incredible denouement. None of the criticisms that I have read can simply dismiss Tipler’s equations as obviously wrong, although they certainly are attacked as requiring things that could turn out to not be true; his boundary condition logic is often attacked as wishful thinking and begging the question.

I said up front that my book inventory is entirely non-fiction. But with Tipler in it, you have to put a footnote on that. The “Physics of Immortality” certainly presses the limit between science fact and fiction, and “Physics of Christianity” probably goes over the line (using baryon-annihilation technology to explain miracles in the New Testament does violate Occam’s Razor, given that there were all sorts of miracles and magic attested as true in literature from the early days of the Roman Empire). But I’m certainly not afraid of big thinking and taking the intellectual path less traveled. So, stay tuned for more on Tipler. (Hopefully sometime before the Omega point!).