The Physics of God and the Quantum Gravity Theory of Everything

[trish]

I saw and enjoyed them very much Martin.

me too

[martin48]

One of course knows by now that one will never dissuade Jamie from her pursuit of celestial silliness.

But I do have some respect for Frank Tipler. Some years ago I read some really nicely argued technical papers by him on causality violation and topology. It is strange to me how someone of Frank's abilities can just sort of casually slip off into never-never-land. It doesn't require much a of dip into his book The Physics of Immortality to see that he has completely metamorphosed into a crackpot. Reading it is like watching a Big Al Yankovc parody of modern cosmology. Its amusing to see how ideas with which one is quite familiar are twisted, misinterpreted and misapplied in such maddeningly misguided ways. Part of the job of a theoretical physicist is to seek out the unsuspected twists and paradoxes hidden in modern theory and figure out how to correctly resolve resolve them. It can be fun and instructive. Unfortunately most of Tipler's paradoxes come about through misapplied logic rather than misapplied physics. Admittedly less fun. Less instructive.

Unfortunately, I know in my own profession of a few academics who went of the "rails" - Eric Laithwaite (inventor the is linear electric motor) spent his latter days in believing that little green men from Mars helped spiders walk on ceilings; Arthur Bailey (amplifier design) believed that you could locate faults in complex electronics by holding a pendulum over the circuit diagram. It's an occupational hazard for academics

Old Professors never die, they just lose their faculties

[trish]

When I get too old to think clearly, I hope someone encourages me to retire and take up political punditry.

[Prospero]

Odd because his partner in writing the book on the Anthropic Principle, John Barrow, is a very serious and respected scientists. I've met him and read several of his books.

[trish]

The publication date of the Anthropic Principle with Barrow and Wheeler is 1988. The time of his paper on causality violation was 1977. The book on the omega point was published first by Double Day (not a scientific publisher) in 1994. I hear he is now dabbling in the art of denying global warming (actually blaming it on Sun Spots).

[robertlouis]

When I get too old to think clearly, I hope someone encourages me to retire and take up political punditry.

LMAO. Post of the month.

[Jamie Michelle]

I am still bemused as to why the clearly very intelligent regular contributors to this board like Trish and Stavros devote quite so much time to debating the ludicrous fallacies of Jamie's work - bad grammar, gratuitous insults and all.

Bad grammar? You must be daft. Say what you will about me: call me a genius, say that I am freakishly intelligent, or what have you. Call me a malformed freak of nature with ungodly high IQ. But one thing that makes no sense whatsoever is to say that I have bad grammar.

[Jamie Michelle]

I am still bemused as to why the clearly very intelligent regular contributors to this board like Trish and Stavros devote quite so much time to debating the ludicrous fallacies of Jamie's work - bad grammar, gratuitous insults and all.

The late, great science writer Martin Gardner who wrote for the Scientific American for many years together with producing many books debunking fake science had this to say of Frank Tipler's magnum opus referred to regularly by Jamie in a collection of his essays The Night is Large; " I consider this the funniest crank work by a reputable physicist written in this century."

This is the beginning of his review of another book on which Tipler collaborated with the Templeton prize winning British scientist John D Barrow (the prize is awarded annually to those who've done the most to bridge the gulf between science and religion) , published in the NY Review of books in 1986. I have a hard copy but can only post the opening section of the review here.

he Anthropic Cosmological Principle
by John D. Barrow, by Frank J. Tipler, with a foreword by John A. Wheeler
Oxford University Press (Clarendon Press), 706 pp., $29.95

It has been observed that cosmologists are often wrong but seldom uncertain, and the authors of this long, fascinating, exasperating book are no exceptions. They are John Barrow, astronomer at the University of Sussex, and Frank Tipler, Tulane University mathematical physicist. Physicist John Wheeler provides an enthusiastic foreword. No one can plow through this well-written, painstakingly researched tome without absorbing vast chunks of information about QM (quantum mechanics), the latest cosmic models, and the history of philosophical views that bear on the book’s main arguments.

Just what is this “anthropic principle” that has become so fashionable among a minority of cosmologists, and is arousing such passionate controversy? As the authors make clear in their introduction, there is not one principle but four. Each is more speculative than the previous one, with the fourth blasting the authors out of science altogether into clouds of metaphysics and fantasy.

The simplest of the four is called (the authors are fond of acronyms) WAP, or the Weak Anthropic Principle. Although it goes back to Protagoras’s famous declaration that “man is the measure of all things,” its modern cosmological form seems first to have been stated by the physicist Robert Dicke in the late 1950s. As Barrow and Tipler readily admit, it is a trivial tautology, totally noncontroversial. It merely proclaims that because we exist the universe must be so constructed as to allow us to have evolved. The laws of nature clearly must be such as to permit, if not actually force, the formation of CHON (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen), the four elements essential to life as we know it.

Does this mean that all life must be carbon based? Although the authors believe this, it does not follow from WAP. Even if there is noncarbon life elsewhere in the universe, the fact that we are carbon imposes a variety of tight restraints on the universe and its past. For example, the cosmos has to be about 15 billion years old. Why? Because, the authors argue, elements necessary to organic molecules are cooked inside stars. If the universe were much younger, those elements would not be available and we wouldn’t be here. If the universe were much older, all the suns would have burned out, and we wouldn’t be here either.



WAP was invoked over and over again in earlier centuries by proponents of the design argument for God. It was WAPish to point out that if the earth were slightly closer to the sun, like Venus, water would boil away and carbon life would be impossible. If the earth were slightly farther from the sun, water would freeze and Earth would have the barren deserts of Mars. Theists liked to note that when water freezes it expands and floats on water, otherwise lakes and rivers would freeze to the bottom in winter and all their life be destroyed. If Earth did not have an ozone atmosphere, animals could not survive ultraviolet radiation. And so on. Hundreds of similar …

Notice that Martin Gardner never states any error on Prof. Frank J. Tipler's part. However, I do find the below exchange between Prof. Tipler and Gardner to be quite telling; it transpired from Gardner's review of Profs. John D. Barrow and Tipler's book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). Notice Gardner's two-word reply to Tipler.

Frank J. Tipler, reply by Martin Gardner, "The FAP Flop", New York Review of Books, Vol. 33, No. 19 (December 4, 1986). http://nybooks.com/articles/4946 , http://webcitation.org/67Fw7SAdg In reply to Martin Gardner, "WAP, SAP, PAP, & FAP", New York Review of Books, Vol. 33, No. 8 (May 8, 1986). http://nybooks.com/articles/5121

[Jamie Michelle]

Loveboof here is an extract from Jamie's paper that might help you with your query and will probably be shorter than any reply she gives. For someone who sees empires and states as mass murderers, her leniency with the Catholic Church is one of many contradictions, not the least of which is her inability to explain that academics are joined by the hip to the Beast, but why this pejorative view of academics does'nt seem to apply to Prof. Tipler. Etc etc. Enjoy

"[L]eniency with the Catholic Church"? When did this occur? You cite that as an example of "many contradictions" I have supposedly engaged in, thereby demonstrating that you do not know what the word "contradiction" means.

In actual fact, I rebuke all the major churches in my article.

Your problem is apparently that you have not read far enough into my article, otherwise you ought to see how silly your above statements are.

Regarding academia, I respect and have learned from many genuine academicians. I never said nor implied that all of academia is corrupt. You're letting your feavered imagination run wild. Obviously you've never studied economics, and hence don't know what a tendecy is in the sense of incentive. It doesn't mean that all actors will choose that course, it merely means that there are benefits for doing so and costs for not doing so, and hence that the behavior so incentivized will become more prevalent, ceteris paribus.

[Stavros]

"[L]eniency with the Catholic Church"? When did this occur? You cite that as an example of "many contradictions" I have supposedly engaged in, thereby demonstrating that you do not know what the word "contradiction" means.

In actual fact, I rebuke all the major churches in my article.

Your problem is apparently that you have not read far enough into my article, otherwise you ought to see how silly your above statements are.

Regarding academia, I respect and have learned from many genuine academicians. I never said nor implied that all of academia is corrupt. You're letting your feavered imagination run wild. Obviously you've never studied economics, and hence don't know what a tendecy is in the sense of incentive. It doesn't mean that all actors will choose that course, it merely means that there are benefits for doing so and costs for not doing so, and hence that the behavior so incentivized will become more prevalent, ceteris paribus.

I offer you your own texts:

Pope and Church Good
The originator of the Big Bang theory was Roman Catholic priest and physicist Prof. Georges Lemaître in 1927;56 and it was enthusiastically endorsed by Pope Pius XII in 1951, long before the scientific community finally came to accept it. Indeed, Lemaître relates that when he spoke with Albert Einstein regarding his Primaeval Atom Hypothesis, Einstein’s response to it was “Non, pas cela, cela suggère trop la création” (“No, not this—this too much suggests the creation”).
P29

Christian Religious Orders Good
It was the Christian religious orders which preserved and advanced European civilization through the tumultuous centuries of the Barbarian Invasions (ca. 300–900). With-out this salvatory and ameliorative role of the Christian church, there would be no Western civilization to speak of.
Note 72 p33-34

Church Not So Good
Unfortunately, the inversion of that organization popularly calling itself the Christian church occurred with the pagan Roman government’s takeover of said group under Constantine I, himself a lifelong pagan, bloodthirsty tyrant, and unrepentant murderer of his eldest son Crispus and his wife Fausta, to say nothing of all the plebeians he murdered. Since that time, the organizations commonly calling themselves “Christian” have been hostilely opposed to actually applying Jesus Christ’s teachings, since said teachings are incompatible with government and its frequent activities, e.g., taxes, war, the inversion of genuine moral understanding, the sowing of needless discord and strife among the populace (i.e., divide et impera), etc
P48-49

Churches Verily Not Good
However, in opposition to the Messiah’s teachings, all the governments of the world instill in their subjects fear and hatred of others, not only between the subjects of different governments but also among their own subjects. And regrettably, institutions calling themselves Christian churches often act as propaganda-founts of the government while vehemently rejecting Christ’s teachings, thereby worshiping the false god of government instead of worshiping God.
P55

Academics Persecute
Natural science as a discipline in the modern sense didn’t exist before the Scientific Revolution. The Scientific Revolution began with the publication of De revolutionibus orbium coelestium by clergyman Nicolaus Copernicus in 1543. Before then, what existed in the Western intellectual world (going all the way back to the ancient Greeks) was Aristotelianism, which maintained the verity of geocentrism predicated on philosophical premises. This lead to the persecution of Galileo Galilei, which was demanded by the Aristotelian academics of the time in order to protect their bailiwick; the pope and several of the churchmen were quite enthusiastic about Galileo’s observations confirming heliocentrism, but caved-in to the demands of the Aristotelian academics.
P33-34

Academics Grafted to the Hip of the State, therefore BAD
The great tyrannies of the 20th century were first and foremost an attempt to abolish Christianity. The reason for this governmental antagonism against Christianity is the same reason this temperament is so prevalent in current academia. Both academia and the corporate media in our present day are grafted to the hip of the state, and the natural tendency of the state is to tolerate no God before it.
P96