Frank J. Tipler: The Resurrection of the Omega Point

According to Frank Tipler, the most fundamental of the fundamentals, the holiest of holies, is that everything it postulates (resurrection, an afterlife, immortality) is predetermined by the laws of physics, no more, no less.

So what does Frank Tipler postulate? Its basic premise is that life (including you and me), the Universe and everything will be resurrected down to the quantum level in what Tipler calls the Final Singularity or the Omega Point. This has nothing to do with religious verbiage, but can be expressed in harsh language and in the laws of physics. This is the ultimate goal of the cosmos that produced human intelligence which in turn will resurrect the cosmos (and everything it made and contains) at the Omega Point.

Frank Tipler begins with the laws of physics that will require biological intelligence (that is, humans) to venture into the Universe, and humans, being humans, will remake the Universe more to their liking. It’s kind of an oversize of Genesis 1:28. Human intelligence will take control of the entire Universe, which would seem to make us an inevitable Type 4 civilization (which no astrobiologist has ever postulated, a Type 3 being the highest theoretical, one that has dominance over an entire galaxy). That humans will evolve into a type 4 civilization, well that’s a pretty big question and it’s certainly not predictable according to the laws of physics that I know of. For comparison, astrobiologists label our modern civilization type 0.7, so we have a long, very long way to go. The potential fly in the ointment is that humanity could be gone long before we are within screaming distance of achieving even Type 1 or Type 2 status.

In fact, what they (our descendants) will do, according to Tipler’s laws of physics, is stop the ever-accelerating expansion of the Universe, reversing this in a Universe that begins to contract and leads to a Big Crunch, or as Frank Tipler calls it, the Final Singularity or Omega Point. From what I can determine, the laws of physics do not require such mandatory astro-engineering on the part of intelligences in the cosmos. Frank Tipler does not explain why he posits this inevitable emergence that arises from the laws of physics. In my humble opinion, if there is one thing that cannot be predicted as an emergent phenomenon from the physical sciences, it is behavior and intention, human or animal.

Anyway, one has to make the ever-expanding Universe start to contract, otherwise there can be no Final Singularity, no Omega Point, and therefore there will be no resurrection of anything or anyone.

But wait, maybe ET wants the Universe to keep expanding, so are we going to have a Star Wars on whether the Universe is expanding eternally or not? Of course, no doubt Frank Tipler would argue that ET would also want to reverse the expansion of the Universe, but then given the age of the cosmos, and that technologically advanced ET civilizations should have been strutting for eons, why don’t we see any? Evidence of ET astro-engineering the Universe to cause contraction and an eventual Final Singularity?

According to Frank Tipler, the exterior of the Singularity is outside of space and time (a meaningless and totally indefinable and groundless concept, if there ever was one), but the interior of the Singularity is within space and time. , since we are inside and we are within space and within time.

The concept of being outside of time and space is an unscientific, junk science, and unverifiable pseudoscience. The concept is so bad that it is not even bad. It doesn’t even deserve that much dignity.

Other than that, the Singularity is a physical impossibility where the laws of physics break down into what could be called pure bovine fertilizer. Taken to its logical extension, a Singularity should have zero volume and infinite density. However, that is not just real nonsense, but theoretical nonsense. Frank Tipler should know! Tipler’s precious laws of physics rule out the very structure he requires.

Frank Tipler also equates the initial Singularity (the Big Bang event with zero information content) with the final Singularity (which is also called the Omega Point that has infinite information content). Tipler’s god is the “god” of physics, but his Singularities of physics (initial and final) equate to what others call the God of theology. It’s just that the big dirty ones understand the language of theology but not the language of physics, so people who believe in the God of theology really believe in the ‘god’ of physics, but ignore that fact.

So, Tipler posits that current advances in computers are such that our human descendants will be able to create computers that hold data and simulate things with increasing realism, ultimately resulting in a Mother of All Computers that will allow the Mother of all. Simulations That Mother of All Simulations will contain all the past and present information or knowledge content of the Universe, which is as close to infinity, if not infinity, as there are no probabilities. The evolution of computer power will be such that it can simulate, that is, resurrect anything and everything, including all humans who have ever lived to the quantum level, so there will be no doubt that when you resurrect as a simulation , you will have an absolute connection. For the you that really existed a long time ago Your sense of yourself, of identity, will remain intact. Note that according to Tipler’s laws of physics, humans will build this Mother of all computers, seemingly from scratch, but certainly not because no law of physics is forcing the problem.

This is a sudden transformation of the Mother of all computers that will resurrect life, the Universe and everything by simulating all life (past and present), the entire Universe (past and present) and everything that is or ever was – in 100% perfect detail down to the quantum level is not adequately explained. It is not described exactly where this Mother of all computers will come from if humans do not build it. Maybe ET will build it! Tipler’s laws of physics explain everything. But IMHO, the laws of physics do not build computers or require humans to build computers; they simply allow them to exist.

Maybe I’m missing an important point here, but if a computer is going to be able to simulate all the content of the Universe down to the most fundamental level, then the computer will have to be the size of the Universe! Furthermore, simulations must be programmed and that would mean that human programmers would have to know everything to create a simulation identical to everything that was and is. Maybe I’m missing Tipler’s ship again, but if it’s called Titanic, well, maybe it’s not a bad thing.

To repeat, Frank Tipler insists that the laws of physics absolutely dictate that this scenario, that we will be brought back and resurrected along with a New Earth as an end-time computer simulation, which is the Final Singularity which in turn requires a Universe in contraction. . This will happen with 100% certainty.

I don’t know if Tipler has a psychoanalyst, but if so, he should put that person on higher pay (dangerous money). IMHO Tipler is a few short quarks of a proton. Nor am I alone in such an opinion. In fact, Tipler has been classified by his peers. Even a brief scan of Tipler’s Wikipedia entry shows peer-reviewed opinions of Tipler as a “nutty” and a physicist who is into pseudoscience. Tipler’s Omega Point resurrection scenario has been expressed by colleagues as a “pseudoscience masterpiece”; a “more extreme example of unsubstantiated and uncritical arguments published by an intelligent professional scientist”; “completely ridiculous”; “pure speculation”. ; “many failures and missing tests”; “very conjectural”; “not verified”; “unlikely”, not to mention “pseudoscientific eschatology”.

Now this hostility is quite strange if, as Frank Tipler asserts, everything it postulates is necessarily derived from the laws of physics. If it was this cutting and drying, this inevitable, your hypothesis would continue no matter what another physicist tore the numbers to shreds. All other physicists would come to the same conclusion that Frank Tipler did, just as all physicists will come to “42” if asked to calculate what “7 times 6” is. All physicists have access to the same laws of physics, but it occurs only to Frank Tipler that the resurrection of the Omega Point inevitably follows from those laws. Tiper’s hypothesis should be standard and universal in all physics texts, but as far as I know, no physics text includes the resurrection of the Omega Point as a standard subject (like Newtonian gravity). That implies that no physicist takes Tipler’s point of view. If I were Frank Tipler, I would say that something is crazy somewhere and that something is Frank Tipler himself.

I’m not sure where Tipler got his academic bona fides in physics, rather I suspect from inside a cereal box. Okay, that’s a bit harsh since he’s a professor of mathematical physics at Tulane University in New Orleans, but he certainly never took a Logic 101 course, or if he did, he didn’t pass it! I’m not a fan of religion and theology and the notion of supernatural deities and eschatology, but such philosophies make more sense than Tipler’s laws of physics IMHO.

Other readings:

Tipler, Frank J .; The physics of Christianity; Doubleday, New York; 2007:

Tipler, Frank J .: The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead; Doubleday, New York; 1994: