Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #459835 in Books
• Published on: 2000-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 560 pages

Synopsis
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. PW.

Customer Reviews

A visionary approach following a Strong Anthropic Cosmology
As a physicist, I can say that I found Tiplers book most interesting. It has received some critical comments from other cosmologists but also some very eminent theoretical physicists have argued that it could provide a useful model to work with as a philosophical backdrop(eg D Deutch). Personally,I find it an excellent medium for enthusing physics students with the study of the theoretical aspects of cosmology and quantum theory and I see no reason to be critical of, what might be considered a visionary approach. Einstein himself often used this method along with philosophical considerations generally to develop new physics and I am sorry that some workers in the field have been rather over critical of what I believe to be courageous work on the part of Tipler. Heaven help us if the scientific community shuns new and visionary approaches as once did the church!

One of the positive aspects of the work is, that if one adopts such a strongly anthropic approach then it prompts new questions. For example, for an adequate resurrection programme, it would require the extraction of a significant amount of information from the past light cone. Tipler argues that a "brute force" method would work simply on the grounds that every individual can, in principle, be replicated in the virtual space which means ALL possible variants! There seems a considerable amount of redundancy in all this. Every possible me along with all me's at all possible stages of the me's lives would have to be replicated to ensure that the one me that actually did exist in the past is resurrected. However, an infinite amount of information could be processed allowing for this possibility.

Now Tipler also adopts the many worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics which in some respects might obviate the need to worry about this problem, but although one may be forced to adopt some form of this interpretation, it still seems like a shame that the me's that never existed in the past should have to be brought into existence to ensure the continuity of my person-hood. It is true that nature can be very wasteful - one only has to look at the way evolution operates or how many perfect seeds must be cast to ensure that some get sown etc. but I would like to see if such a strong Anthropic Principle might suggest that there are as yet some hidden physical laws yet to be found. The EPR effect allows "Information" to be passed between particle pairs over spacelike separations without actually violating relativity - perhaps this might also lead to the discovery of a similar effect between identical structures over timelike separations. This would be equivalent to a non-local field which is effectively modulated in some way by a complex structure and which could be detected by the said identically tuned structure in the future. i.e. one could "tune" the replicated me to pick up my memory from the original me that existed in the past. The same principle applies with radio waves which are picked up by tuned circuits in the receivers which give appropriate selectivity.

I am currently working on developing a mathematical theory which might describe such a process but clearly since the field is non-local, space derivatives cannot be included which makes wave equations difficult! Even David Bohm's Idea of a quantum potential(causal theory), which would have the required non-local properties does not seem to really show too much promise - I have tried looking into this but it has not proved very fruitful as yet. Moreover, I feel that the so called tuning might well depend on more global system variables of the structure(person). Perhaps plants and biological structures generally, grow not just because of stored genetic information but also because of information obtained from past similar plants with similar system structure variables - there would be no violation of relativity here and it reinforces an old idea concerning the existence of morphogenic fields.

If this Strong Anthropic principle holds, then I feel sure some form of past - future, non-local connection exists and if Tiplers book prompts researches like myself to try avenues to find it, then that alone will be a tribute to Tiplers efforts. I would highly recommend the book to scientists -especially with minds that are still open and who are not afraid to use possibly incorrect theory as a prompt to search into new areas(just how correct are any of our "good" theories anyway? - they are all only models that can be tested and refuted as Popper suggested of such a good theory). We should not forget that visionary work can be, and usually is a bridge to new discoveries.