Rick Cook
THE PHYSICS OF IMMORTALITY: MODERN COSMOLOGY, GOD, AND RESURRECTION by Frank J. Tipler, Doubleday, ISBN 0-385-46798-2, $24.95
Get a tight hold on your credulity. Physicist Frank Tipler is about to take you on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride through modern physics in search of the answer to the immortal question: Is there a God?
I won't keep you in suspense. Tipler's answer, rooted in current notions in quantum cosmology, is: "Not yet, but there will be." What's more, we will all be reincarnated and live forever in a computer simulation in the final fraction of a second before the universe recollapses in the big crunch. While you may not agree with Tipler's ultimate conclusions, you'll learn a good deal along the way and--if you approach it in the right spirit--have a lot of fun getting there.
When t
raveling with Tipler, the journey often looms larger than the destination. Along the way, we encounter the Bekenstein bound, which is the limitation on the number of quantum states in a bounded region, or to put it another way, the upper limit on information density, assuming each quantum state encodes 1 bit. We also meet the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who coined the term omega point and whose notion of "radial energy" bears a striking resemblance to the modern notion of information. We are treated to historical discourses on the ideas of eternal return and the immortality of the soul, and discussions of more modern concepts, such as the halting problem, Taub universes, and Cauchy spacelike hypersurfaces.
At the very least, Tipler deserves an "A" for originality. This is not another of those dreary tomes about how the new physics proves that Hindu theologians and Taoist alchemists had it right all along. Tipler is a serious and well-respected scientist, a professor of mathematica
l physics at Tulane University, with a firm grasp of the standard model of particle physics. True, he is speculating on a cosmic scale, but his speculations are rooted in the tools and concepts of modern science. Nor is this book dreary in any sense. Again and again, Tipler manages to surprise and delight you with novel approaches and new information.
The Physics of Immortality
is an outgrowth of an earlier book Tipler wrote with John D. Barrow,
The Anthropic Cosmological Principle
, which argued that we exist because the universe is exactly the way it is. They pointed out in considerable detail that if the universe were almost any other way, life as we know it would be physically impossible. There have to be three large-scale dimensions of space, for example, for chemical compounds to fold themselves in the ways they must for life to exist. It is only a short step from the anthropic cosmological principle to the old argument from design for the existence of God--that God must exist be
cause the universe was designed exactly for us. In the earlier book, Tipler and Barrow pointed this out only to denigrate it. Here, Tipler isn't so sure.
Tipler's God at the end of the universe is no scowling Yahweh or thunderbolt-slinging Jupiter, or even kindly, gentle Gaea. His Holy Spirit is the universal wave function of quantum mechanics, and his God is the most super of all the supercomputers, an information-processing construct that literally encompasses the whole universe.
One novelty for what is ultimately a work of theology is that Tipler offers series of testable hypotheses based on his theory. This is probably the only work ever written that posits as an eschatological proof that "the mass of the top quark must be 185 20 GeV, and the mass of the Higgs boson must be 220 20 GeV."
It has been truly said that in physics the line between genius, wise guy, and utter loon is often hard to draw. I'm not sure which side of the line Tipler lands on with
The Physics of Immortality
. Perhaps he has a foot in all three camps--a notion no stranger, and ultimately no less plausible, than some of the physics that Tipler lays out for your delectation.
Rick Cook writes novels from his home in Phoenix, Arizona. You can reach him on the Internet or BIX at
rcook@bix.com
.
Is There a God?
