Frank J. Tipler: The Laws of Physics Say The Singularity is Inevitable!

The evidence tipler uses is based upon language, which in turn depends on history, not physics.

A major question about this discussion that really needs to be answered: why, if Tipler is an empiricist, doesn’t he follow the empirical fact that the bible does not contain any knowledge that is indicative of it being inspired by a deity that knew how to design our planet, let alone the laws of physics and the entire universe? Example: god doesn’t teach us agriculture, writing, or physics, nor even does the bible inspire a clear understand of where we are in the cosmos, its size, or its contents! A single instance of God inspiring man to write mathematical equations revealing fundamental physics would suffice so long as they were written thousands of years ago. Because we know for those equations to be accurate we must observe reality, but no human society could perform the requisite experiments 2000 years ago. Asking for any particular piece of knowledge isn’t my point, but instead the ancient texts make it appear that God doesn’t understand nature. So tipler says he knows what the bible truly means. It all depends on that interpretation! Wow. So lets test it? Not the physics, but God’s knowledge. But we can’t. Thus he isn’t an so empirical after all.

In essence, the evidence is not there to even look to the bible as the correct source of any hypothetical deity. It is true he could be right anyway, but not by the empirical evidence.

When Jesus was walking the earth and had a rather mundane conversation, you honestly believe he knew all of this because of metaphors drawn between different concepts that have yet to exist during his time. Indeed, God shares these properties, but no one knew them at the time. They came after, hence my skepticism. If I wanted to spend 20 years, I could come up with thousands of differences that metaphorically deny the logical consistency you built up. But, why do that? Its a metaphor.

One single example that you didn’t address: Jesus didn’t know the natural world beyond what we knew. So how could we infer empirically that he was super-knoweledgeable, let alone omniscient since there is zero historical evidence to support this fact. One way out of this is to have Jesus explicitly explain concepts in science better than science can, but God doesn’t even seem aware of our ideas today.

Yeah, that’s basically what I was saying. Kudos. Hardly a disproof though, so the arguments will just keep going on and on.

Hi, Matthew Fuller. As you had previously written, “A single instance of God inspiring man to write mathematical equations revealing fundamental physics would suffice so long as they were written thousands of years ago.” Parsing this statement into its components, your syllogism runs thus:

Major premise: If God exists, then He would have given mankind a physics or mathematics theorem (or some such) which could only be confirmed later.

Minor premise: God did not give mankind such a riddle.

Conclusion: God does not exist.

Here we see that is is the major premise of your syllogism which is false, as it’s a non sequitur.

However, God’s existence is a mathematical theorem per the known laws of physics (viz., the Second Law of Thermodynamics, General Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics), of which have been confirmed by every experiment to date. Hence, the only way to reject God’s existence is to reject empirical science. As Prof. Stephen Hawking wrote, “one cannot really argue with a mathematical theorem.” (From p. 67 of Stephen Hawking, The Illustrated A Brief History of Time [New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1996; 1st ed., 1988].)

For a great deal more on this, see my following article:

James Redford, “The Physics of God and the Quantum Gravity Theory of Everything”, Social Science Research Network (SSRN), Sept. 10, 2012 (orig. pub. Dec. 19, 2011), 186 pp., doi:10.2139/ssrn.1974708.

Hi, Baktash Babadi. In answer to your numbered items, respectively:

1.) Profs. Krauss and Turner point out that “there is no set of cosmological observations we can perform that will unambiguously allow us to determine what the ultimate destiny of the Universe will be.” (See Lawrence M. Krauss and Michael S. Turner, “Geometry and Destiny”, General Relativity and Gravitation, Vol. 31, No. 10 [Oct. 1999], pp. 1453-1459.) While cosmological observations cannot tell us what the ultimate fate of the universe will be, the known laws of physics themselves can, as the universe is forced to end in finite proper time in order for unitarity to remain unviolated. By sapient life annihilating baryons in the universe via electroweak quantum tunneling (which is allowed in the Standard Model, as baryon number minus lepton number, B – L, is conserved), the Higgs field is forced toward its absolute vacuum state, canceling the observed cosmological constant and thereby forcing the universe to collapse.

2.) If Quantum Mechanics is true, then the multiverse’s existence follows as a mathematically-unavoidable consequence. For the details, see Frank J. Tipler, The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1994), pp. 483-488.

3.) The Schrödinger Equation is simply the Hamilton-Jacobi Equation with the constraint imposed that determinism is maintained, as the Hamilton-Jacobi Equation is indeterministic, because when particle trajectories cross paths a singularity is produced, thereby making it impossible (even in principle) to say what occurs afterwards. For further details, see my following post: James Redford, “Video of Profs. Frank Tipler and Lawrence Krauss’s Debate at Caltech: Can Physics Prove God and Christianity?”, alt.sci.astro, Message-ID: jghev8tcbv02b6vn3uiq8jmelp7jijluqk[at sign]4ax[period]com , July 30, 2013.

4.) Actually, the mutual mathematical consistency of the known laws of physics (viz., the Second Law of Thermodynamics, General Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics) requires that a naturally-evolved sapient species develops roughly once every Hubble volume. For the details, see Frank J. Tipler, “Intelligent life in cosmology”, International Journal of Astrobiology, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Apr. 2003), pp. 141-148.

5.) On the contrary, the mutual mathematical consistency of the aforesaid known laws of physics requires sapient life to develop and to evolve to infinite intelligence. For the details, see p. 925 (cf. pp. 904-905) of F. J. Tipler, “The structure of the world from pure numbers”, Reports on Progress in Physics, Vol. 68, No. 4 (Apr. 2005), pp. 897-964; and see James Redford, “The Physics of God and the Quantum Gravity Theory of Everything”, Social Science Research Network, Sept. 10, 2012 (orig. pub. Dec. 19, 2011), Sec. 3: “Physics of the Omega Point Cosmology”, Subsec. 3.1: “The Omega Point”, pp. 12 ff.

Hi, James.

Thank you for taking time and answering my points, however I don’t think I am convinced with the answers which mostly refer me back to the book “Physics of Immortality”. I read the book two years ago. Although I found many brilliant ideas in the book, the big picture provided there did not persuade me.

While I appreciate Prof. Tipler’s unique perspective and am willing
to concede that, if not disallowed by physical laws, we cannot rule his
theories out, I am very skeptical of grand unified explanations of everything,
especially those that interweave religion. They tend to come off sounding too
much like the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and
Everything from “The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

Prof. Tipler tossed around phrases like “the only correct
interpretation” and “Einstein got it right—all these other scientists got it
wrong.” I think the conviction of absolute certainty is an impediment to
scientific discovery; a healthy dose of humility and skepticism often serve as
a better guide. After all, an interpretation is just that, a particular way of
making sense of a set of facts. But interpretations are based upon supposition
and carry a lot of baggage and ambiguity. The first century astronomer, Ptolemy,
accurately described the movement of the planets in the sky, but his interpretation
of those facts was constrained by the prevailing Earth-centric worldview. It
can be said that any interpretation, whether it be the Copenhagen or
many-worlds interpretations of quantum physics, is equally valid so long as it
does not contradict the set of known and provable facts. As in Ptolemny’s case,
only through falsifiable tests can we discount this one or that one. And we
have to always be on the alert for various biases that may creep into our
thinking; we’re only human, after all.

No disrespect to Prof. Tipler, but I fundamentally disagree
with his premise that we basically know all there is to know about physics. We
don’t even know what dark energy is made of or why some of the fundamental
constants of physics have the values they do. How can we claim to have already
solved the destiny of the universe and leap to the conclusion that it is a
foregone inevitability? I don’t think the goal of science is to provide THE
EXPLANATION for everything—certainly not at our nascent stage of development. Rather,
I see science as an ongoing PURSUIT of ever better explanations, leading to
ever more incisive questions and deeper levels of understanding. But when we
elevate a particular interpretation to the level of established, even
religious, dogma, we cut off other lines of scientific inquiry before we have a
chance to discover what they may reveal.

rolling of the heavens = a vague description. This is why I am skeptical. The more details you add, the harder it is to get every detail right. The more vagueness, the easier it is to make the descriptions fit.

Hi, Socrates. Thank you for this interview with physicist and mathematician Prof. Frank J. Tipler.

For those who would like more information on Prof. Tipler’s Omega Point cosmology and the Feynman-DeWitt-Weinberg quantum gravity/Standard Model Theory of Everything (TOE), which are mathematically required by the known laws of physics (viz., the Second Law of Thermodynamics, General Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics), see my following article. This article also examines the societal implications of the Omega Point cosmology.

James Redford, “The Physics of God and the Quantum Gravity Theory of Everything”, Social Science Research Network (SSRN), Sept. 10, 2012 (orig. pub. Dec. 19, 2011), 186 pp., doi:10.2139/ssrn.1974708.

Additionally, in the below resource are six sections which contain very informative videos of Prof. Tipler explaining the Omega Point cosmology and the Feynman-DeWitt-Weinberg quantum gravity/Standard Model TOE. The seventh section therein contains an audio interview of Tipler. I also provide some helpful notes and commentary for some of these videos.

James Redford, “Video of Profs. Frank Tipler and Lawrence Krauss’s Debate at Caltech: Can Physics Prove God and Christianity?”, alt.sci.astro, Message-ID: jghev8tcbv02b6vn3uiq8jmelp7jijluqk[at sign]4ax[period]com , July 30, 2013.

The foregoing resource also provides details regarding the point Prof. Tipler made in his present interview about how modern physics (i.e., General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and the Standard Model of particle physics) are simply special cases of classical mechanics (i.e., Newtonian mechanics, particularly in its most powerful formulation of the Hamilton-Jacobi Equation), and how Quantum Mechanics is actually more deterministic than Newtonian mechanics.

I find it interesting that Prof. Tipler mentioned (58:56 min:sec ff. of the video) Julian Jaynes in this interview and Jaynes’s book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976). A footnote is provided to Jaynes’s said book in Ch. 7: “Quantum Mechanics and the Anthropic Principle” of The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1986) by John D. Barrow and Tipler, but I don’t recall Tipler elsewhere having mentioned Jaynes.

I myself have written on Jaynes and the implications of his theory of the bicameral mind vis-à-vis the widespread belief among the ancients circa three millennia ago and before that they actually directly interacted with the gods. The type of unconsciousness which Prof. Tipler mentioned in his interview in the works of Homer and Chinese writers from the era can also be found very strongly in the Tanakh, particularly the Torah. Jaynes’s theory can also explain the superhuman longevity found in the Tanakh as deriving from a time when people would hear the voices of their dead ancestors and pass on the memory (and preserved bodies) of them to their descendants; and the near-lack of a concept of an afterlife in the Tanakh until the Latter Prophets (e.g., Isaiah 26:19; Daniel 12:2).

I haven’t heard supporters of Jaynes mention this as an item in Jaynes’s favor before, but muscarinic acetylcholine receptor antagonists, such as scopolamine, provide strong evidence for Jaynes’s theory–indeed, perhaps the strongest, since it makes the voice-command state Jaynes wrote about completely reproducible. Lloyd deMause’s work on psychohistory also fits well the Jaynes theory.

Dr. Tipler quickly runs off the road with his conclusions that a god exists and there is life after death. An uncaused first cause in the creation of the universe is not evidence of a god. Can you imagine that billions of people are praying to a singularity and many say it answers them? People torment themselves about why god did this or that, well there is a “theory” of everything that fits very well and that is, there is no god. Talking of a god that is not a entity (which Tipler thinks is an entity) which interacts with humans, is not talking of a god that means anything. He seems to have been brainwashed in his belief and spends his time trying to justify it by using the bible to provide “proof”. Good luck with that whole life after death thing, Houdini couldn’t do it and you won’t either.