Frank J. Tipler: The Omega Point Resurrection

Frank J. Tipler: The Omega Point Resurrection

We nearly all desire immortality and we nearly all tend to look to a God of Theology to provide it. However, one physicist, Frank J. Tipler promises you a resurrection, an afterlife and immortality all thanks to the god of physics, or as he calls it the laws of physics. The laws of physics will give you what you seek, and you don’t have to do anything good, bad or ugly to achieve this. It will just happen. That’s the good news. The bad news is that he is his own convert, no other physicists believes a word Frank Tipler says on the subject.

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

So what does Frank Tipler postulate? His 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 mumbo-jumbo but expressible in the hardcore language of, and in the laws of physics. This is the ultimate goal of the cosmos which produced human intelligence which in turn will resurrect the cosmos (and all it ever did and does contain) at the Omega Point.

Frank Tipler starts with the laws of physics that will require that biological intelligence (meaning humans) will venture out into the Universe, and humans, being humans, will remake the Universe more to their liking. It’s a sort of super-sizing of Genesis 1: 28. Human intelligence will take control over the entire Universe which would appear to make us an inevitable Type 4 Civilization (which no astrobiologist has ever postulated, a Type 3 being the theoretical highest, one which has domain over an entire galaxy). That humans will evolve into a Type 4 Civilization, well that’s a pretty big ask and certainly not predictable according to any laws of physics I know. For comparison, astrobiologists tag our modern civilization as about Type 0.7, so we have a long, long way to go. The potential fly in the ointment is that humanity might just go kaput way before we come within shouting 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 halt the ever accelerating expansion of the Universe, reversing this into a Universe that starts contracting leading to a Big Crunch, or as Frank Tipler calls it, the Final Singularity or Omega Point. As far as I can determine, the laws of physics require no such mandatory astro-engineering on the part of intelligences in the cosmos. Frank Tipler doesn’t explain why he postulates this inevitable emergence that emerges out of the laws of physics. IMHO, if there is one thing that cannot be predicted as emergent phenomena from the physical sciences, it is behavior and intent, human or animal.

Anyway, one has to have the currently ever expanding Universe start to contract, otherwise there can be no Final Singularity, no Omega Point and thus no resurrection of anything or anybody.

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

According to Frank Tipler, the outside of the Singularity is outside of space and time (a nonsense and totally indefinable and unsubstantiated concept if ever there was one) yet the inside of the Singularity is inside of space and time since we are on the inside and we are inside space and inside time.

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

Quite apart from that, the Singularity is a physical impossibility where the laws of physics break down into what one could term pure bovine fertilizer. Taken to its logical extension, a Singularity should have zero volume and infinite density. However, that’s not just actual nonsense but theoretical nonsense. Frank Tipler should know that! 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 termed the Omega Point which has infinite information content). Tipler’s god is the ‘god’ of physics but his (Initial and Final) Singularities of Physics equate to what others term the God of Theology. It’s just that the great unwashed understand the language of theology but not the language of physics so people who believe in the God of Theology actually really believe in the ‘god’ of physics but are ignorant of that fact.

Then, Tipler postulates that current advances in computers are such that our human descendants will be able to create computers that hold data and simulate things with ever and ever greater realism which will ultimately result in a Mother of All Computers that will enable the Mother of All Simulations. That Mother of All Simulations will contain all of the past and present information or knowledge content of the Universe, which is as close to infinity – if not infinity – as makes no odds. The evolution of computer power will be such that it can simulate, that is resurrect anything and everything including every human who has ever lived down to the quantum level so there will be no doubt that when you are resurrected as a simulation you will have absolute connection to the you that really existed way back when. Your sense of self, of identity, will remain intact. Note that according to Tipler’s laws of physics, humans will construct this Mother of All Computers, apparently out of thin air, but certainly not because any laws of physics is forcing the issue.

This all of a sudden morphing of the Mother of All Computers that will resurrect life, the Universe and everything by simulating all life (past and present), all of the Universe (past and present) and everything that is or ever was – in 100% perfect detail down to the quantum level isn’t adequately explained. Exactly where this Mother of All Computers will come from if humans fail to build it isn’t outlined. Maybe ET will build it! Tipler’s laws of physics explain all. But IMHO, the laws of physics don’t construct computers or demand humans build computers; they just allow them to exist.

Maybe I’m missing an important point here, but if a computer is going to be able to simulate the entire content of the Universe down to the most fundamental of levels, then the computer will have to be the size of the Universe! Further, simulations need to be programmed and that would mean that the human programmers would have to be all-knowing to create a simulation identical to all that was and is. Maybe I’m missing Tipler’s boat again, but if it’s called the Titanic, well maybe that’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 a computer simulation in the end times which is the Final Singularity which in turn requires a contracting Universe. 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 (danger money) wage remuneration. IMHO Tipler is a few quarks short of a proton. Nor am I alone in such an opinion. In fact Tipler has been bucketed by his peers. Even a brief scan of Tipler’s entry on Wikipedia shows such peer reviewed opinions of Tipler as being a “crackpot” and a physicist who engages in pseudoscience. Tipler’s Omega Point resurrection scenario has been phrased by his colleagues as a “masterpiece of pseudoscience’; a “most extreme example of uncritical and unsubstantiated arguments put into print by an intelligent professional scientist”; “completely ridiculous”; “pure speculation”; “many flaws and missing proofs”; “highly conjectural”; “unverified”; “improbable”; not to mention “pseudoscientific eschatology”.

Now this hostility is rather strange if as Frank Tipler claims, all he postulates follows of necessity from the laws of physics. If it were this cut and dried, this inevitable, his hypothesis would follow no matter what other physicist crunched the numbers. All other physicists would reach the same conclusion as Frank Tipler did just like all physicists will come up with “42” if asked to calculate what “7 times 6” is. All physicists have access to the same laws of physics, yet only Frank Tipler comes up with the Omega Point resurrection as being inevitably derived from those laws. Tipler’s hypothesis should be standard and universal in all physics texts yet to the best of my knowledge no physics text includes the Omega Point resurrection as standard issue (like Newtonian gravity). That implies that no physicist adopts Tipler’s point of view. If I were Frank Tipler, I’d say that something is screwy somewhere and that something is Frank Tipler himself.

I’m not sure where Tipler got his academic bona-fides in physics from, I rather suspect from inside a cereal box. Okay, that’s a bit harsh since he is a professor of mathematical physics as Tulane University in New Orleans, but he certainly never took a course in Logic 101, or if he did, he didn’t pass it! I’m no 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 version IMHO.

Further reading:

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: