James Redford writes:
You state that Prof. Frank J. Tipler “suggests that the Shroud of Turin is the key for figuring out how to save the universe from ultimate collapse …” That is incorrect.
And then he goes on to explain why I am incorrect here. I did not do a good job of explaining.
A bit down the page he writes:
You go on to state “… so that brilliant minds can build and sustain a computer simulation of our past lives, including consciousness and free will, thereby giving us immortality. Heaven is a virtual reality.”
I was trying to explain Tipler in a few words. James clarifies:
If by “brilliant minds” you mean superintelligent immortal minds, then that’s correct. In Biblical language, these would be the saints beheaded by the Beast government who take part in the First Resurrection. The general resurrection of the dead isn’t possible at the time of Jesus Christ’s Second Coming, since for almost all the dead their brains will be far too decomposed to be readable. Hence the Second Resurrection, which is the universal resurrection of the dead (both wicked and saint alike), must wait until enough computational resources come online within the universe, as eventually any desired amount of computational resources will be available, diverging to infinity.
Are there boundaries between science, revelation and imagination? I could never quite figure this out. James, I read the book in 2007. I had several discussions with members of the Shroud Science Group. When I was last in New Orleans I had hoped to meet up with Prof. Tipler. Unfortunately, he was out of town. I have a great deal of respect for him and I don’t doubt that he is brilliant. I just don’t buy his thesis.
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Hi, Episcopalian.
The only way to avoid the conclusion that the Omega Point exists is to reject the known laws of physics (i.e., the Second Law of Thermodynamics, general relativity, quantum mechanics, and the Standard Model of particle physics), and hence to reject empirical science: as these physical laws have been confirmed by every experiment to date. That is, there exists no rational reason for thinking that the Omega Point Theory is incorrect, and indeed, one must engage in extreme irrationality in order to argue against the Omega Point cosmology.
Additionally, we now have the quantum gravity Theory of Everything (TOE) correctly describing and unifying all the forces in physics: of which inherently produces the Omega Point cosmology. So here we have an additional high degree of assurance that the Omega Point cosmology is correct.
Prof. Frank J. Tipler’s Omega Point Theory has been peer-reviewed and published in a number of the world’s leading physics and science journals.[1] Even NASA itself has peer-reviewed his Omega Point Theory and found it correct according to the known laws of physics (see below). No refutation of it exists within the peer-reviewed scientific literature, or anywhere else for that matter.
Below are some of the peer-reviewed papers in science and physics journals wherein Prof. Tipler has published his Omega Point Theory:
* Frank J. Tipler, “Cosmological Limits on Computation”, International Journal of Theoretical Physics, Vol. 25, No. 6 (June 1986), pp. 617-661, doi:10.1007/BF00670475, bibcode: 1986IJTP…25..617T. (First paper on the Omega Point Theory.)
* Frank J. Tipler, “The Anthropic Principle: A Primer for Philosophers”, in Arthur Fine and Jarrett Leplin (Eds.), PSA 1988: Proceedings of the 1988 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers (East Lansing, Mich.: Philosophy of Science Association, 1989), pp. 27-48, ISBN 091758628X.
* Frank J. Tipler, “The Omega Point as Eschaton: Answers to Pannenberg’s Questions for Scientists”, Zygon: Journal of Religion & Science, Vol. 24, Issue 2 (June 1989), pp. 217-253, doi:10.1111/j.1467-9744.1989.tb01112.x. Republished as Chapter 7: “The Omega Point as Eschaton: Answers to Pannenberg’s Questions to Scientists” in Carol Rausch Albright and Joel Haugen (editors), Beginning with the End: God, Science, and Wolfhart Pannenberg (Chicago, Ill.: Open Court Publishing Company, 1997), pp. 156-194, ISBN 0812693256, LCCN 97000114.
* Frank J. Tipler, “The ultimate fate of life in universes which undergo inflation”, Physics Letters B, Vol. 286, Issues 1-2 (July 23, 1992), pp. 36-43, doi:10.1016/0370-2693(92)90155-W, bibcode: 1992PhLB..286…36T.
* Frank J. Tipler, “A New Condition Implying the Existence of a Constant Mean Curvature Foliation”, bibcode: 1993dgr2.conf..306T, in B. L. Hu and T. A. Jacobson (editors), Directions in General Relativity: Proceedings of the 1993 International Symposium, Maryland, Volume 2: Papers in Honor of Dieter Brill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 306-315, ISBN 0521452678, bibcode: 1993dgr2.conf…..H.
* Frank J. Tipler, “There Are No Limits To The Open Society”, Critical Rationalist, Vol. 3, No. 2 (September 23, 1998).
* Frank J. Tipler, “Ultrarelativistic Rockets and the Ultimate Future of the Universe”, NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Workshop Proceedings, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, January 1999, pp. 111-119; an invited paper in the proceedings of a conference held at and sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center, Cleveland, Ohio, August 12-14, 1998; doi:2060/19990023204. Document ID: 19990023204. Report Number: E-11429; NAS 1.55:208694; NASA/CP-1999-208694.
* Frank J. Tipler, Jessica Graber, Matthew McGinley, Joshua Nichols-Barrer and Christopher Staecker, “Closed Universes With Black Holes But No Event Horizons As a Solution to the Black Hole Information Problem”, arXiv:gr-qc/0003082, March 20, 2000. Published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 379, Issue 2 (August 2007), pp. 629-640, doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2007.11895.x, bibcode: 2007MNRAS.379..629T.
* Frank J. Tipler, “The Ultimate Future of the Universe, Black Hole Event Horizon Topologies, Holography, and the Value of the Cosmological Constant”, arXiv:astro-ph/0104011, April 1, 2001. Published in J. Craig Wheeler and Hugo Martel (editors), Relativistic Astrophysics: 20th Texas Symposium, Austin, TX, 10-15 December 2000 (Melville, N.Y.: American Institute of Physics, 2001), pp. 769-772, ISBN 0735400261, LCCN 2001094694, which is AIP Conference Proceedings, Vol. 586 (October 15, 2001), doi:10.1063/1.1419654, bibcode: 2001AIPC..586…..W.
* Frank J. Tipler, “Intelligent life in cosmology”, International Journal of Astrobiology, Vol. 2, Issue 2 (April 2003), pp. 141-148, doi:10.1017/S1473550403001526, bibcode: 2003IJAsB…2..141T. Also at arXiv:0704.0058, March 31, 2007.
* F. J. Tipler, “The structure of the world from pure numbers”, Reports on Progress in Physics, Vol. 68, No. 4 (April 2005), pp. 897-964, doi:10.1088/0034-4885/68/4/R04, bibcode: 2005RPPh…68..897T. Also released as “Feynman-Weinberg Quantum Gravity and the Extended Standard Model as a Theory of Everything”, arXiv:0704.3276, April 24, 2007.
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, in which the above August 2007 paper was published, is one of the world’s leading peer-reviewed astrophysics journals.
Prof. Tipler’s paper “Ultrarelativistic Rockets and the Ultimate Future of the Universe” was an invited paper for a conference held at and sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center, so NASA itself has peer-reviewed Tipler’s Omega Point Theory (peer-review is a standard process for published proceedings papers; and again, Tipler’s said paper was an *invited* paper by NASA, as opposed to what are called “poster papers”).
Zygon is the world’s leading peer-reviewed academic journal on science and religion.
Out of 50 articles, Prof. Tipler’s 2005 Reports on Progress in Physics paper–which presents the Omega Point/Feynman-DeWitt-Weinberg quantum gravity/Standard Model Theory of Everything (TOE)–was selected as one of 12 for the “Highlights of 2005” accolade as “the very best articles published in Reports on Progress in Physics in 2005 [Vol. 68]. Articles were selected by the Editorial Board for their outstanding reviews of the field. They all received the highest praise from our international referees and a high number of downloads from the journal Website.” (See Richard Palmer, Publisher, “Highlights of 2005,” Reports on Progress in Physics website.)
Reports on Progress in Physics is the leading journal of the Institute of Physics, Britain’s main professional body for physicists. Further, Reports on Progress in Physics has a higher impact factor (according to Journal Citation Reports) than Physical Review Letters, which is the most prestigious American physics journal (one, incidently, which Prof. Tipler has been published in more than once). A journal’s impact factor reflects the importance the science community places in that journal in the sense of actually citing its papers in their own papers.
For much more on these matters, particularly see Prof. Tipler’s above 2005 Reports on Progress in Physics paper in addition to the following resources:
Theophysics: God Is the Ultimate Physicist (a website).
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Note:
1. While there is a lot that gets published in physics journals that is anti-reality and non-physical (such as string theory, which violates the known laws of physics and has no experimental support whatsoever), the reason such things are allowed to pass the peer-review process is because the paradigm of assumptions which such papers are speaking to has been made known, and within their operating paradigm none of the referees could find anything crucially wrong with said papers. That is, the paradigm itself may have nothing to do with reality, but the peer-reviewers could find nothing fundamentally wrong with such papers within the operating assumptions of that paradigm. Whereas, e.g., the operating paradigm of Prof. Tipler’s 2005 Reports on Progress in Physics paper is the known laws of physics, i.e., our actual physical reality which has been repeatedly confirmed by every experiment conducted to date. So the professional physicists charged with refereeing this paper could find nothing fundamentally wrong with it within its operating paradigm, i.e., the known laws of physics.