Name: The Physics of Immortality
ISBN: 9780385467995

Frank J. Tipler

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.

Modern Cosmology, God, and the Resurrection of the Dead

The Physics of Immortality

Tim Pendry

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 ...

The Physics of Immortality Modern Cosmology, God, and the Resurrection of the Dead

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