Frank Tipler is a crackpot. At one point in his life, he did very good technical work in general relativity; he was the first to prove theorems that closed timelike curves could not be constructed in local regions of spacetime without either violating the weak energy condition or creating a singularity. But alas, since then he has pretty much gone off the deep end, and more recently has become known for arguments for Christianity based on fundamental physics. If you closely at those arguments (h/t wolfgang), you find things like this:
If life is to guide the entire universe, it must be co-extensive with the entire universe. We can say that life must have become OMNIPRESENT in the universe by the end of time. But the very act of guiding the universe to eliminate event horizons – an infinite number of nudges – causes the entropy and hence the complexity of the universe to increase without limit. Therefore, if life is to continue guiding the universe – which it must, if the laws of physics are to remain consistent – then the knowledge of the universe possessed by life must also increase without limit, becoming both perfect and infinite at the final singularity. Life must become OMNISCIENT at the final singularity. The collapse of the universe will have provided available energy, which goes to infinity as the final singularity is approached, and this available energy will have become entirely under life’s control. The rate of use of this available energy – power – will diverge to infinity as the final singularity is approached. In other words, life at the final singularity will have become OMNIPOTENT. The final singularity is not in time but outside of time. On the boundary of space and time, as described in detail by Hawking and Ellis [6]. So we can say that the final singularity – the Omega Point – is TRANSCENDANT to space, time and matter.
All of the signs of classic crackpottery are present; the vague and misplaced appeal to technical terminology, the spelling mistakes and capital letters, the random use of “must” and “therefore” when no actual argument has been given. Two paragraphs later, we get:
Science is not restricted merely to describing only what happens inside the material universe, any more than science is restricted to describing events below the orbit of the Moon, as claimed by the opponents of Galileo. Like Galileo, I am convinced that the only scientific approach is to assume that the laws of terrestrial physics hold everywhere and without exception – unless and until an experiment shows that these laws have a limited range of application.
Compares self with Galileo! 40 points! There is really no indication that the person who wrote this was once writing perfectly sensible scientific papers.
Perhaps you will not be surprised to find that Tipler has now jumped into global-warming denialism. In just a few short paragraphs, we are treated to the following gems of insight (helpfully paraphrased):
People say that anthropogenic global warming is now firmly established, but that’s what they said about Ptolemaic astronomy! Therefore, I am like Copernicus.
A scientific theory is only truly scientific if it makes predictions “that the average person can check for himself.” (Not making this up.)
You know what causes global warming? Sunspots!
Sure, you can see data published that makes it look like the globe actually is warming. But that data is probably just fabricated. It snowed here last week!
If the government stopped funding science entirely, we wouldn’t have these problems.
You know who I remind myself of? Galileo.
Stillman Drake, the world’s leading Galileo scholar, demonstrates in his book “Galileo: A Very Short Introduction” (Oxford University Press, 2001) that it was not theologians, but rather his fellow physicists (then called “natural philosophers”), who manipulated the Inquisition into trying and convicting Galileo. The “out-of-the-mainsteam” Galileo had the gall to prove the consensus view, the Aristotlean theory, wrong by devising simple experiments that anyone could do. Galileo’s fellow scientists first tried to refute him by argument from authority. They failed. Then these “scientists” tried calling Galileo names, but this made no impression on the average person, who could see with his own eyes that Galileo was right. Finally, Galileo’s fellow “scientists” called in the Inquisition to silence him.
One could go on, but what’s the point? Well, perhaps there are two points worth making.
First, Frank Tipler is probably very “intelligent” by any of the standard measures of IQ and so forth. In science, we tend to valorize (to the point of fetishizing) a certain kind of ability to abstractly manipulate symbols and concepts — related to, although not exactly the same as, the cult of genius. (It’s not just being smart that is valorized, but a certain kind of smart.) The truth is, such an ability is great, but tends to be completely uncorrelated with other useful qualities like intellectual honesty and good judgment. People don’t become crackpots because they’re stupid; they become crackpots because they turn their smarts to crazy purposes.
Second, the superficially disconnected forms of crackpottery that lead on the one hand to proving Christianity using general relativity, and on the other to denying global warming, clearly emerge from a common source. The technique is to first decide what one wants to be true, and then come up with arguments that support it. This is a technique that can be used by anybody, for any purpose, and it’s why appeals to authority aren’t to be trusted, no matter how “intelligent” that authority seems to be.
Tipler isn’t completely crazy to want “average people” to be able to check claims for themselves. He’s mostly crazy, as by that standard we wouldn’t have much reason to believe in either general relativity or the Standard Model of particle physics, since the experimental tests relevant to those theories are pretty much out of reach for the average person. But the average person should be acquainted with the broad outlines of the scientific method and empirical reasoning, at least enough so that they try to separate crackpots from respectable scientists. Because nobody ever chooses to describe themselves as a crackpot. If you ask them, they’ll always explain that they are on the side of Galileo; and if you don’t agree, you’re no better than the Inquisition.
“general relativity (the same rarefied field that Profs. Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking developed)”
Now that is a gem =).
Hi, Sam Gralla. You wrote:
“”
“general relativity (the same rarefied field that Profs. Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking developed)”
Now that is a gem =).
“”
I see you’re taking after Sean Carroll in your mendacious “paraphras[ing]”. Below is the full sentence of what I actually said:
“”
Tipler is Professor of Mathematics and Physics (joint appointment) at Tulane University. His Ph.D. is in the field of global general relativity (the same rarefied field that Profs. Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking developed), and he is also an expert in particle physics and computer science.
“”
Sam, you cut out a word; global general relativity was developed by Penrose and Hawking. There’s a reason they call a conformal diagram a “Penrose diagram”. And Tipler has made contributions to this field, as Sean acknowledged at the start of his post.
I agree that Tipler has veered into crackpottery, but that’s no reason to mock or minimise the actual science that he’s done.
Frank Tipler is a sad case of a very smart person who’s mind has been overthrown by his obsessions and idiosyncrasies and who…
“As for Tipler’s Omega Point idea, note that one of the things he says everyone will get to do when we are all merged into One is that everyone can have sex with everyone they’ve ever wanted to do.”
…is obviously on to something. The man is clearly a genius! A prophet! Open your minds people and see!
Scarlett Johansson is going to have a very busy Omega Point.
For those wishing more there is always crank.net
Penrose and Hawking developed global geometry. It is not correct to say they developed global general relativity. The wikipedia link attests me this, click on it above if you don’t believe (as you shouldn’t, use your powers of critical thinking folks).
Penrose and Hawking developed global geometry. It is not correct to say they developed global general relativity.
Just what this thread needs, some pointless nit-picking over a non-existent distinction regarding an utterly peripheral issue. But despite the phrasing of the Wikipedia article, actual relativists, including Penrose himself, do use the term “global general relativity”. As in this article Penrose wrote entitled “Recent advances in global general relativity: A brief survey”.
I took Sam’s post to be suggesting that James Redford believed Penrose and Hawking had developed “general relativity” per se, which would be a dumb enough claim to deride as “a gem”. But that’s not what he said. He said plenty of things I find absurd, but talking about Tipler, Penrose, Hawking and their role in global general relativity isn’t one of them.
What can be more crackpot than billions of people believing that 2,000 years ago a being named God dropped off his only begotten son so that he could do a few magic tricks to a bunch of primitive tribes and then get tortured and killed to “save” them, then come back to life three days later for a quick bite before running off into some higher dimension.
With all the trolls, wackjobs, and just plain nasty people out there, I am amazed we have progressed as far as we have.
While I agree with your sentiments Sean, please refrain from all the name calling. A lot of your readers, while quite skeptical of claims like those of Tipler, prefer to sigh, shake their heads and move on, having read MANY MANY articles like those across the internet.
But please, while other readers may get excited and rejoice when they smell blood, there’s no reason not to be civil.
Anonymous, I’m very much in favor of civility in its place; but I don’t think this is it. There are plenty of people with whom I disagree, but who argue intelligently and in good faith, including many religious people, and I try to engage with them in good faith in return. But people who invoke baryon-number violation to explain the resurrection of Christ, and who twist the facts to deny the existence of global warming (with very real-world implications), and then compare themselves to Galileo and their opponents to the Inquisition, are not among them.
There is a place for respect, and a place for mockery, and Tipler is clearly in the latter camp.
Tresmal:
> Scarlett Johansson is going to have a very busy Omega Point.
I think this was covered in Futurama, though with Lucy Liu.
With a enormous computational resources at my disposal, simulating Scarlett Johansson isn’t the LAST thing I’d do. It’s somewhere around 37th. I have a list.
I throw this Web site into the mix, as it includes a piece by Tipler:
http://www.archivefreedom.org/
Humans are such incomplete and fragile creatures.
Heh, I can see Tipler made himself vulnerable but one idea is hard to just dump (albeit might not be true): it is hard to say, our minds could not run as abstractly given programs in the Platonic mindscape. As Jaron Lanier has pointed out, it is not even necessary for a strictly “AI” intelligence to be materially embodied, its “thoughts” and process simply exist just as well in the universe of mathematical possibility. I go further to say: a mind strictly formed as an AI-intelligible process (computational with no mysterian aspect) could not even know it was incarnate through a physical expression (like a brain or computer) or not (just the abstraction itself) because logical processes can’t make that distinction. (It’s the same one I explained above to little avail, concerning modal realism.)
PS: Down with decollusion!
15th years ago or so I happened to buy The Physics of Immortality at the Princeton University library . After reading it my comment was “this guy is totally crazy”. Now, I have not changed my mind, but I am much more tolerant. In the end, each of us is an enigmatic, transient aggregation of matter, temporarily provided with self-awareness, unable to understand our own origin and unable to modify our “null” final fate.
Shouldn’t then be all crazy? And is it so surprising if all kinds of “crackpotteries” have been devised by mankind during its long history to survive these otherwise unsurmuntable facts? The rationalistic view that as a physicist I obviously share, has only one distinctive advantage over the other approaches tried over the millennia by the mankind to understand the reality: it gives us the tools to master the world and to change our otherwise extremely painful “natural” condition. In other words , it works in practical terms. But, as the others, it provides us with no answers. Or, you may argue, more precisely bring us to the awareness that there is no answer: we know that we will never know.
The rationalistic view counterbalance this crude consciouness with a releaving feature, the awareness that we are part of the history of the mankind that is built upon the sum of the contributions of all our individual trajectories. So the sense of our life is not per se, but in the framework of the progress of our species in the centuries (and millennia); our individual legacy survives somehow in the uniterrupted flow of the history of the human community.
Anyhow, this is a very fragile scenario, not enough for many people as justification of their own existence; so I do not believe that we have to be sharp against people like Tipler, or like the Cristians or the Muslims who do not accept it. They do not want to accept the “null” final fate that instead we “believe” is unavoidable.
In this frame I would not call Tipler as a crackpot: as many people before (and after ) him, he is desperately trying to find a way out from our inescapable final destination, the death. Therefore, he is not a crackpot, he is a very human being, who shares the same istinctive horror of the dark after the life that likely was felt already by our ancestor millennia ago. And that will accompany us for ever.
This blog so often reminds me of the following quote…
“Great minds discuss ideas.
Mediocre minds discuss events.
Small minds discuss people.”
Oops, you’re all right–I didn’t see the word global. Apologies! That makes the sentence basically true. However, the marvelous quality of the sentence is not in its truth or falsehood, but rather in the way authority and mystique are invoked. Sean already said that Tipler once did respectable work, and yet became a total crackpot. (I mean, that he did respectable work is the only reason this post is interesting.) The (hilarious) defense is then to explain that not only was Tipler’s work respectable, it was related to REALLY NEAT work done by REALLY FAMOUS people. Maybe then he can’t be a crackpot =).
Fearless posting, Sean. I love it.
“There is a place for respect, and a place for mockery, and Tipler is clearly in the latter camp.”
I call bullshit.
The fact is that you didn’t embark on your ad hominem attack on Tipler until you stumbled upon his writing about global warming.
You certainly seemed civil enough in that old posting about Tipler’s 2007 book “The Physics of Christianity”.
It’s okay to write a book about how all humans will be resurrected by some super computer at the Omega Point. And then it’s okay to write a book about how that Omega Point is God the Father. Those ideas are nutty and we can all read the criticisms from other scientists like Lawrence Krauss (who mopped up the floor with Tipler in a debate).
Just don’t express skepticism about global warming, because THAT”S when Sean Carroll will start to engage in his (typical) ad hominem attacks.
Now I remember why I rarely come to this third rate blog anymore.
Sorry Joseph Brant, but I think Sean’s point was that there is a difference between eccentricity and dangerous eccentricity. So, believing whatever you like about the end of the universe is fine only until your opinion about said end starts harming others. Certainly there are a bunch of examples, religious wars, etc, that I won’t get in to.
Right now, here, in public discussions there is a concerted attempt by people to lend the aura of scientific scrutiny to global warming deniers. These people are endangering us.
So, while I’m Jewish I think Sean would be happy to indulge my overeager-graduate-student questions about GR and string cosmology … so long as I don’t get god involved. Which I wouldn’t.
Using your PhD (mendaciously) to mislead the less-scientifically literate about religion is a social ill. Using your PhD to mislead people about global warming is a social ill of global, cataclysmic proportions.
So, to dig in to your post a bit, perhaps we can say:
Thinking the some ‘omega point’ is god is fine;
using your scientific credentials to endorse this omega point idea publicly is questionable;
using your scientific credentials to ‘refute’ global warming is harmful.
(On point Sean?)
If we can’t rhetorically attack people deceiving the public, we should all go home.
I using religion to attack the science of global warming does a disservice to religious people (of all stripes) who believe in the intrinsic value of the living and the Earth.
I hope you think I’ve been civil about all this.
-Aaron
Joseph Brant I completely agree with your point :
“I call bullshit.
The fact is that you didn’t embark on your ad hominem attack on Tipler until you stumbled upon his writing about global warming.”
That is why I quoted another crackpot , namely J.Hansen beside whom J.Tipler looks like a model of mental sanity .
As the other poster says , Hansen is adequately described by the statement :
“Using your PhD (mendaciously) to mislead the less-scientifically literate about religion is a social ill. Using your PhD to mislead people about global warming is a social ill of global, cataclysmic proportions.”
Coal trains = concentration camp trains
Industry = criminals against mankind
Talk about halucinating crackpots … and we’ll stay only here in order to stay civil .
Anony Mouse Says:
January 7th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
This blog so often reminds me of the following quote…
“Great minds discuss ideas.
Mediocre minds discuss events.
Small minds discuss people.”
And so those who post those kinds of quotes to belittle anyone who isn’t up to their standards must be both microscopic and quite transparent.
From now on I will only discuss events in public forums, never people.
Certainly people and events are two entirely separate things.
Aaron– that was part of it, but not the whole thing. Honestly, I don’t think I was that respectful in my previous post about Tipler, in which I called him “crazy.” I must be losing my touch.
The harmless-eccentric/dangerous-lunatic distinction is an important one, but it doesn’t map directly onto the civil-discourse/mockery distinction. That is more closely related to the good-faith-disagreement/blatant-truth-twisting distinction. If someone believes that God loves them, or that climate models are unreliable, I will respond to them civilly. If someone argues that Jesus decayed into neutrinos before being resurrected, or that increases in global temperature are irrelevant if they can’t be detected by an average person musing about the weather, I see no point in civility. Those people are not seeking the truth, they’re trying to support a conclusion they’ve already reached. That’s the important distinction.
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BTW, there is an interesting relevant thread over at BackReaction about Dawkins’ The God Delusion and related subjects. My basic rebuttal of his idea is that the ultimate reality doesn’t need to be a complex being, a “mechanism” in any sense. It is mechanisms that need guiding ideas, not ideas (like that life should exist etc.) that need mechanism.
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Spelling mistakes and capital letters are signs of crackpottery ? That’s the silliest thing I ever heard. You can’t really expect anybody with a brain to read your text beyond that and still take it seriously, whether they agree with your position on Tipler or not.