Physicist Frank J. Tipler at TEDxBrussels: Physics Proves God Exists
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Unfortunately, most modern physicists have been all too willing to abandon the laws of physics if it produces results that they're uncomfortable with, i.e., in reference to religion. It's the antagonism for religion on the part of the scientific community which greatly held up the acceptance of the Big Bang (for some 40 years), due to said scientific community's displeasure with it confirming the traditional theological position of creatio ex nihilo, and also because no laws of physics can apply to the singularity itself (i.e., quite literally, the singularity is supernatural, in the sense that no form of physics can apply to it, since physical values are at infinity at the singularity, and so it is not possible to perform the arithmetical operations of addition or subtraction on them; and in the sense that the singularity is beyond creation, as it is not a part of spacetime, but rather is the boundary of space and time).
The originator of the Big Bang theory, circa 1930, was Roman Catholic priest and physicist Prof. Georges Lemaître; and it was enthusiastically endorsed by Pope Pius XII in 1951, long before the scientific community finally came to accept it.
Rabbi Moses Maimonides and Saint Thomas Aquinas, from their readings of biblical scripture, had both defined God as the Uncaused First Cause (which is equivalent to Aristotle's conception of God as the Unmoved Mover), and so the physics community was quite reluctant to confirm with the Big Bang that God exists per this traditional definition of God.
As regards physicists abandoning physical law due to their theological discomfort with the Big Bang, in an article by physicist and mathematician Prof. Frank J. Tipler he gives the following example involving no less than physicist Prof. Steven Weinberg:
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The most radical ideas are those that are perceived to support religion, specifically Judaism and Christianity. When I was a student at MIT in the late 1960s, I audited a course in cosmology from the physics Nobelist Steven Weinberg. He told his class that of the theories of cosmology, he preferred the Steady State Theory because "it *least* resembled the account in Genesis" (my emphasis). In his book *The First Three Minutes* (chapter 6), Weinberg explains his earlier rejection of the Big Bang Theory: "Our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough. It is always hard to realize that these numbers and equations we play with at our desks have something to do with the real world. Even worse, there often seems to be a general agreement that certain phenomena are just not fit subjects for respectable theoretical and experimental effort." [My emphasis--J. R.]
... But as [Weinberg] himself points out in his book, the Big Bang Theory was an automatic consequence of standard thermodynamics, standard gravity theory, and standard nuclear physics. All of the basic physics one needs for the Big Bang Theory was well established in the 1930s, some two decades before the theory was worked out. Weinberg rejected this standard physics not because he didn't take the equations of physics seriously, but because he did not like the religious implications of the laws of physics. ...
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For that and a number of other such examples, see:
Frank J. Tipler, "Refereed Journals: Do They Insure Quality or Enforce Orthodoxy?", Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design (PCID), Vols. 2.1 and 2.2 (January-June 2003). http://www.iscid.org/papers/Tipler_PeerReview_070103.pdf Also published as Chapter 7 in Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing, edited by William A. Dembski, "Foreword" by John Wilson (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2004).
Prof. Stephen Hawking reinforces what Weinberg and Tipler wrote about concerning the antagonism of the scientific community for religion, resulting in them abandoning good physics. In his book The Illustrated A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam Books, 1996), p. 62, Hawking wrote:
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Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention. (The Catholic Church, on the other hand, seized on the big bang model and in 1951 officially pronounced it to be in accordance with the Bible). There were therefore a number of attempts to avoid the conclusion that there had been a big bang.
""
On p. 179 of the same book, Hawking wrote "In real time, the universe has a beginning and an end at singularities that form a boundary to spacetime and at which the laws of science break down."
Agnostic and physicist Dr. Robert Jastrow, founding director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, wrote in his book God and the Astronomers (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1978), p. 113:
""
This religious faith of the scientist [that there is no First Cause] is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover. When that happens, the scientist has lost control. If he really examined the implications, he would be traumatized.
""
For more quotes by Robert Jastrow on this, see:
"Science and Discomfiting Discoveries" in John Ross Schroeder, Bill Bradford and Mario Seiglie, Life's Ultimate Question: Does God Exist? (United Church of God, 2000). http://www.ucg.org/booklets/GE/science-discovery.asp , http://www.gnmagazine.org/booklets/GE/GE.pdf
For more quotes by scientists along the above lines, see the below article:
Mariano, "In the Beginning ... Cosmology, Part I", Atheism is Dead, February 11, 2009. http://atheismisdead.blogspot.com/2009/02/in-beginning-cosmology-part-i-pre-big.html
Again, the only way to avoid the Omega Point cosmology is to resort to physical theories which have no experimental support and which violate the known laws of physics, such as with Prof. Stephen Hawking's paper on the black hole information issue which is dependent on the conjectured string theory-based anti-de Sitter space/conformal field theory correspondence (AdS/CFT correspondence). See S. W. Hawking, "Information loss in black holes", Physical Review D, Vol. 72, No. 8 (October 2005), Art. No. 084013; also at arXiv:hep-th/0507171, July 18, 2005. http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0507171
That is, Prof. Hawking's paper is based upon empirically unconfirmed physics which violate the known laws of physics. It's an impressive testament to the Omega Point Theory's correctness, as Hawking implicitly confirms that the known laws of physics require the universe to collapse in finite time. Hawking realizes that the black hole information issue must be resolved without violating unitarity, yet he's forced to abandon the known laws of physics in order to avoid unitarity violation without the universe collapsing.
Contrast that ad libitum approach to doing physics with that of Prof. Frank J. Tipler, who bases his Omega Point/Feynman-Weinberg-DeWitt quantum gravity/Standard Model Theory of Everything (TOE) strictly on the known laws of physics, and that of Prof. David Deutsch (inventor of the quantum computer, being the first person to mathematically describe the workings of such a device, and winner of the Institute of Physics' 1998 Paul Dirac Medal and Prize for his work). They both believe we have to take the known laws of physics seriously as true explanations of how the world works, unless said physics are experimentally, or otherwise, refuted.
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Those Wikipedia passages aren't talking about General Relativity's validity at the Planck scale, they're talking about the validity of quantum field theories (e.g., the Standard Model of particle physics) at the Planck scale.
Again, General Relativity is perfectly valid all the way up to the singularity, which is infinitely smaller than the Planck scale. No possible form of physics applies to the singularity, as physical values are at infinity at the singularity, and hence it's not possible for perform the arithmetical operations of addition and subtraction.
As Charles W. Misner, Kip S. Thorne and John Archibald Wheeler wrote in their book Gravitation (1973), which is the most highly respected textbook on General Relativity, p. 934:
""
In fact, it was the proof of Penrose's (1965b) pioneering theorem on singularities that gave rise to global techniques for studying spacetime.
...
That singularities are very general phenomena, and cannot be wished away, has been known since 1965, thanks to the theorems on singularities proved by Penrose, Hawking, and Geroch. [For a full list of references, see Hawking and Penrose (1969) or Hawking and Ellis (1973).]
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In General Relativity, singularities are unavoidable with realistic energy conditions (i.e., given any universe with matter that can contain life), as the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems proved that per General Relativity the universe began in the Big Bang singularity (see, e.g., S. W. Hawking and R. Penrose, "The Singularities of Gravitational Collapse and Cosmology", Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A, Vol. 314, No. 1519 [January 27, 1970], pp. 529-548 http://www.webcitation.org/5uBzE1N4W ).
The Omega Point/Feynman-DeWitt-Weinberg quantum gravity/Standard Model Theory of Everything (TOE) is logically required if the known laws of physics (i.e., the Second Law of Thermodynamics, general relativity, quantum mechanics, and the Standard Model of particle physics) are correct. These said physical laws have been confirmed by every experiment to date, and hence the only way to avoid the Omega Point TOE is to reject empirical science.
You have not the slightest clue in the world as to what you're talking about. You just make up things as you go along and feign knowledge you do not have. Your comments on General Relativity being a prime example of this.
Prof. Lawrence Krauss in his review of Prof. Frank J. Tipler's book The Physics of Christianity ("More dangerous than nonsense," New Scientist, Issue 2603, May 12, 2007) doesn't give anyone any reason for thinking he (Krauss) is correct. Instead, Krauss repeatedly commits the logical fallacy of bare assertion.
Krauss gives no indication that he followed up on the endnotes in the book The Physics of Christianity and actually read Prof. Tipler's physics journal papers. All Krauss is going off of in said review is Tipler's mostly non-technical popular-audience book The Physics of Christianity without researching Tipler's technical papers in the physics journals. Krauss's review offers no actual lines of reasoning for Krauss's pronouncements. His readership is simply expected to imbibe what Krauss proclaims, even though it's clear that Krauss is merely critiquing a popular-audience book which does not attempt to present the rigorous technical details. Krauss's bare assertions and absence of reasoning in his review have no place in actual science.
Whereas Tipler gives detailed arguments for the existence of the Omega Point and the Feynman-Weinberg quantum gravity/Standard Model Theory of Everything which soundly refute Krauss's bare assertions. See:
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. http://math.tulane.edu/~tipler/theoryofeverything.pdf Also released as "Feynman-Weinberg Quantum Gravity and the Extended Standard Model as a Theory of Everything," arXiv:0704.3276, April 24, 2007. http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.3276
Quite ironically, Krauss has actually published a paper that greatly helped to strengthen Tipler's Omega Point Theory. See Profs. Lawrence M. Krauss and Michael S. Turner, "Geometry and Destiny" (General Relativity and Gravitation, Vol. 31, No. 10 [October 1999], pp. 1453-1459; also at arXiv:astro-ph/9904020, April 1, 1999 http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9904020 ), which demonstrates that there is no set of cosmological observations which can tell us whether the universe will expand forever or eventually collapse.
This isn't the first time that has happened to critics of Tipler's Omega Point Theory. In a previous paper published by Prof. George Ellis and Dr. David Coule criticizing Tipler's Omega Point Theory ("Life at the end of the universe?," General Relativity and Gravitation, Vol. 26, No. 7 [July 1994], pp. 731-739), Ellis and Coule gave an argument that the Bekenstein Bound violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics if the universe collapses without having event horizons eliminated. Unwittingly, Ellis and Coule thereby actually gave a powerful argument that the Omega Point is required by the laws of physics.
So when Tipler's critics actually do real physics instead of issuing bare assertions and mystically nebulous cavils (the latter in Ellis's case, since Ellis is a theist who takes a fideist position, of which his fideist Weltanschauung extends to other areas, as he thinks that physics cannot be capable of explaining human consciousness), they end up making Tipler's case stronger. I find that deliciously ironic. (Ironic though it is, it's the expected result, given that the Omega Point is required by the known laws of physics.)
The leading quantum physicist in the world, Prof. David Deutsch (inventor of the quantum computer, being the first person to mathematically describe the workings of such a device, and winner of the Institute of Physics' 1998 Paul Dirac Medal and Prize for his work), endorses the physics of the Omega Point cosmology in his book The Fabric of Reality (1997). For that, see:
David Deutsch, extracts from Chapter 14: "The Ends of the Universe" of The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes--and Its Implications (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1997); with additional comments by Frank J. Tipler. http://theophysics.chimehost.net/deutsch-ends-of-the-universe.html
Unlike Prof. Frank J. Tipler, Prof. Deutsch isn't an expert in theology. In the below two articles, one of the world's leading theologians, Prof. Wolfhart Pannenberg, defends the theology of the Omega Point:
Wolfhart Pannenberg, "Modern Cosmology: God and the Resurrection of the Dead," lecture given at Innsbruck Conference on Frank Tipler's book The Physics of Immortality, June 1997. http://theophysics.chimehost.net/pannenberg-modern-cosmology.html
Wolfhart Pannenberg, "God and resurrection--a reply to Sjoerd L. Bonting," Gamma, Vol. 10, No. 2 (April 2003), pp. 10-14. http://theophysics.host56.com/pannenberg-god-and-resurrection-reply-to-bonting.html
All those other quantum gravity theories (e.g., string theory, loop quantum gravity, twistor theory, etc.) share the common feature of violating the known laws of physics and having no experimental support whatsoever.
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Technically speaking, there is nothing that is not alive. All that exists, has ever existed, or will ever exist is God. God is the totality of existence, forever and all times.
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The Omega Point/Feynman-DeWitt-Weinberg quantum gravity/Standard Model Theory of Everything (TOE) is logically required if the known laws of physics (i.e., the Second Law of Thermodynamics, general relativity, quantum mechanics, and the Standard Model of particle physics) are correct. These said physical laws have been confirmed by every experiment to date, and hence the only way to avoid the Omega Point TOE is to reject empirical science.
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Nostromo
Brian Blessed can take a hike
You could look at it that way, or you could look at it that the scientific community didn't immediately throw out the alternatives before all the evidence was in.
Though it is nothing like the creation event described in the Bible, and there is no need or mention of a creator being.
That's just playing with semantics, and since we don't have a confirmed theory of everything yet, we don't know any of this for certain.
Traditional Abrahamic definition of God, there are many traditional definitions of God unlike yours. Besides, I don't remember the part of Genesis that describes God as a dimensionless singularity, from my recollection He was a he who spoke things into existence fully formed and manhandled clay to make people.
That's as much as I've got time for before work.
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jonmichael818
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Maybe you did not read close enough, so I will quote some more:
Right, according to General Relativity. Again incomplete when describing at or below the Planck scale. Not to mention once you get into the quantum world there are at least 12 different interpretations.
I will just address quantum mechanics and that alone will prove my point.
Quantum mechanics while it is confirmed by experiments, when applied to a cosmological framework it all depends on how someone interprets it. As I said before there are at least 12 different interpretations. See here:
-Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics
I think I have already addressed this, see above.
Your right it was not a technical paper, it was just a simple review. Thats because everybody (at least I thought) in the scientific community knows that, as Krauss said:
If you would like I can give you sources and references to support his statements.
Will address below.
Notice this book was written before the Universe was observed to be flat.
I care about physics not theology.
How do they violate the known laws of physics?
Besides I thought Omega Point cosmology was supposed to have a closed universe, since it is thought to be flat, where does that leave Omega Point Cosmology?
-NASA.gov/shape of the universe
-NASA.gov/shape of the universe
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It would help you if you would read what I wrote. The physicists themselves explained their reason for rejecting the Big Bang cosmology was because of their discomfort with its theological implications. (Besides your reading problems, your guess as to their reasons is at at any rate incoherent, because the Big Bang cosmology was an unavoidable result of the standard physics of the time.)
Rabbi Moses Maimonides and Saint Thomas Aquinas, from their readings of biblical scripture, had both defined God as the Uncaused First Cause (which is equivalent to Aristotle's conception of God as the Unmoved Mover), and so the physics community was quite reluctant to confirm with the Big Bang that God exists per this traditional definition of God.
No possible laws of physics can apply to the singularity, since physical values are at infinity at the singularity, and hence it's not possible to perform the arithmetical operations of addition and subtraction upon those physical values in which to apply a physics equation to them. For the unavoidable existence of singularities one doesn't need a quantum gravity theory, all one needs is General Relativity (see the Penrose-Hawking Singularity Theorems).
However, we now have the Feynman-DeWitt-Weinberg quantum gravity/Standard Model Theory of Everything (TOE) correctly describing and unifying all the forces in physics: of which inherently produces the Omega Point cosmology. For the details of that, see Prof. Frank J. Tipler's following paper:
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. http://math.tulane.edu/~tipler/theoryofeverything.pdf Also released as "Feynman-Weinberg Quantum Gravity and the Extended Standard Model as a Theory of Everything", arXiv:0704.3276, April 24, 2007. http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.3276
Out of 50 articles, Prof. Tipler's above paper 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. http://www.webcitation.org/5o9VkK3eE )
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.
Tipler is Professor of Physics and Mathematics (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. His Omega Point cosmology has been peer-reviewed and published in a number of prestigious physics and science journals in addition to Reports on Progress in Physics, such as Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (one of the world's leading astrophysics journals), Physics Letters, the International Journal of Theoretical Physics, etc.
God is defined in the first chapter of the Gospel of John as the Logos, i.e., as logic itself. As well, God is therein defined as the original cause of everything, which itself is uncaused.
And the physics community is already on record as rejecting the Big Bang cosmology for so long because of their dislike of its religious implications.
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This is utter nonsense and not true! Unless of course you are referring to a time when the Big bang was not yet established as a theory.
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Maybe you did not read close enough, so I will quote some more:
Right, according to General Relativity. Again incomplete when describing at or below the Planck scale. Not to mention once you get into the quantum world there are at least 12 different interpretations.
At the Planck scale, there was a question as to whether standard quantum field theories would still be valid. There was never any question that General Relativity would still be valid, as it was already known that it must be if General Relativity is correct. The Wikipedia passages that you quote say nothing about General Relativity being invalid at the Planck scale, and if they had then they would be erroneous.
As Charles W. Misner, Kip S. Thorne and John Archibald Wheeler wrote in their book Gravitation (1973), which is the most highly respected textbook on General Relativity, p. 934:
""
In fact, it was the proof of Penrose's (1965b) pioneering theorem on singularities that gave rise to global techniques for studying spacetime.
...
That singularities are very general phenomena, and cannot be wished away, has been known since 1965, thanks to the theorems on singularities proved by Penrose, Hawking, and Geroch. [For a full list of references, see Hawking and Penrose (1969) or Hawking and Ellis (1973).]
""
The Omega Point cosmology itself isn't dependent upon any particular intepretation of quantum mechanics.
But in fact, there exists only one interpretation of quantum mechanics, and that is the many-worlds interpretation. All other so-called "interpretations" either make no attempt to actually explain quantum phenomena (such as the Statistical interpretation), or they are merely the many-worlds interpretation in denial (such as David Bohm's pilot-wave interpretation).
Anything that acts on reality is real and exists. Quite strange then that quantum phenomena behave exactly as if the other particles in the multiverse exist if in fact they don't exist. If the actual physical nature of the "wave functions" and "pilot waves" are not the other particles in the multiverse, then new physical entities with their own peculiar physics are being invoked: for if these aren't the other particles in the multiverse interacting with the particles in this universe, then we will do well to ask what is their actual physical nature? Pinball flippers, bumpers and ramps? What is their actual physical form, and why do they behave exactly as if the other particles in the multiverse exist?
Furthermore, all wave phenomena are nothing more than particle phenomena: there is no particle-wave duality. A wave is simply a collection of particles interacting with each other. It is the particles that actually exist; the wave is simply an action by particles interacting with each other. We see this with waves through, e.g., liquids: the individual molecules are jostled about via interacting with the other molecules. Likewise, a single photon in this universe behaves as a wave because it's interacting with the ocean of its parallel photons in the multiverse.
See also the leading quantum physicist in the world, Prof. David Deutsch (inventor of the quantum computer, being the first person to mathematically describe the workings of such a device), "Comment on Lockwood", British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 47, No. 2 (June 1996), pp. 222-228; also released as "Comment on '"Many Minds" Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics by Michael Lockwood'", 1996. http://web.archive.org/web/20070925.../people/david/Articles/CommentOnLockwood.html , http://www.webcitation.org/5wajACpeI
Quantum mechanics is strictly deterministic across the multiverse. If one does away with causation then one also does away with the possibility of explanation, as all explanation is predicated on explicating cause-and-effect relationships. So if by "interpretation" it is meant explanation, then Prof. Deutsch's point in his above paper about there actually only being one known interpretation of quantum mechanics is again found to be inescapable.
And as Prof. Deutsch writes in The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes--and Its Implications (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1997), Chapter 9: "Quantum Computers", pg. 217:
""
The argument of Chapter 2, applied to *any* interference phenomenon destroys the classical idea that there is only one universe. Logically, the possibility of complex quantum computations adds nothing to a case that is already unanswerable. But it does add psychological impact. With Shor's algorithm, the argument has been writ very large. To those who still cling to a single-universe world view, I issue this challenge: *explain how Shor's algorithm works*. I do not merely mean predict that it will work, which is merely a matter of solving a few uncontroversial equations. I mean provide an explanation. When Shor's algorithm has factorized a number, using 10^500 or so times the computational resources that can be seen to be present, where was that number factorized? There are only about 10^80 atoms in the entire visible universe. So if the visible universe were the extent of physical reality, physical reality would not even remotely contain the resources required to factorize such a large number. Who did factorize it, then? How, and where, was the computation performed?
""
See also the below paper by Prof. Tipler:
Frank J. Tipler, "Testing Many-Worlds Quantum Theory By Measuring Pattern Convergence Rates", arXiv:0809.4422, September 25, 2008. http://arxiv.org/abs/0809.4422
And most leading physicists do accept the Many-Worlds Interpretation as true. The political scientist L. David Raub conducted a poll of 72 leading quantum cosmologists and other quantum field theorists regarding their view on the truth of the Many-Worlds Interpretation. The possible answers were: (1) "Yes, I think the MWI is true"; (2) "No, I don't accept the MWI"; (3) "Maybe it's true, but I'm not yet convinced"; and (4) "I have no opinion one way or the other". The results of the poll were: 58% said yes; 18% said no; 13% said maybe; and 11% said no opinion. In the "yes" category were Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, and Murray Gell-Mann, while the "no" answers included Roger Penrose.
There are no sources that you could cite in support of that statement, since it's clear from Prof. Krauss's review that he is unaware of the fact that Prof. Tipler published the Feynman-DeWitt-Weinberg quantum gravity/Standard Model Theory of Everything (TOE) in Reports on Progress in Physics. Either that, or Krauss was being dishonest in not mentioning the paper.
Prof. Krauss isn't saying in his review that Prof. Tipler has published this paper which presents a proposed quantum gravity TOE, but that Krauss disagrees with it. Rather, Krauss is saying that Tipler's work on the quantum gravity TOE doesn't even exist. The best possible thing that could be said for Krauss's review is that it is appallingly sloppy, to the point of being ethically troubling (for the reason that Krauss ought to have looked at the footnotes of the book he is reviewing and saw Tipler's paper on this matter). The other option is that Krauss knew about this paper but was being intentionally dishonest.
Some have suggested that the universe's current acceleration of its expansion obviates the universe collapsing (and therefore obviates the Omega Point). But as Profs. Lawrence M. Krauss and Michael S. Turner point out in "Geometry and Destiny" (General Relativity and Gravitation, Vol. 31, No. 10 [October 1999], pp. 1453-1459; also at arXiv:astro-ph/9904020, April 1, 1999 http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9904020 ), there is no set of cosmological observations which can tell us whether the universe will expand forever or eventually collapse.
The reason for that is because that is dependant on the actions of intelligent life. The known laws of physics provide the mechanism for the universe's collapse. As required by the Standard Model, the net baryon number was created in the early universe by baryogenesis via electroweak quantum tunneling. This necessarily forces the Higgs field to be in a vacuum state that is not its absolute vacuum, which is the cause of the positive cosmological constant. But if the baryons in the universe were to be annihilated by the inverse of baryogenesis, again via electroweak quantum tunneling (which is allowed in the Standard Model, as baryon number minus lepton number [B - L] is conserved), then this would force the Higgs field toward its absolute vacuum, cancelling the positive cosmological constant and thereby forcing the universe to collapse. Moreover, this process would provide the ideal form of energy resource and rocket propulsion during the colonization phase of the universe.
Obviously you care about theology, as you're the one who brought up Prof. David Deutsch's theological issues with the Omega Point cosmology. Yet unlike Prof. Tipler, Deutsch is not an expert in theology. Nor is Deutsch one of the world's leading theologians, which Prof. Wolfhart Pannenberg is.
The leading quantum physicist in the world, Prof. David Deutsch (inventor of the quantum computer, being the first person to mathematically describe the workings of such a device, and winner of the Institute of Physics' 1998 Paul Dirac Medal and Prize for his work), endorses the physics of the Omega Point cosmology in his book The Fabric of Reality (1997). For that, see:
David Deutsch, extracts from Chapter 14: "The Ends of the Universe" of The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes--and Its Implications (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1997); with additional comments by Frank J. Tipler. http://theophysics.chimehost.net/deutsch-ends-of-the-universe.html
One motivation for such new laws of physics which have no experimental support whatsoever is an attempt to avoid singularities, which are unavoidable in General Relativity (per the Penrose-Hawking Singularity Theorems).
Some have suggested that the universe's current acceleration of its expansion obviates the universe collapsing (and therefore obviates the Omega Point). But as Profs. Lawrence M. Krauss and Michael S. Turner point out in "Geometry and Destiny" (General Relativity and Gravitation, Vol. 31, No. 10 [October 1999], pp. 1453-1459; also at arXiv:astro-ph/9904020, April 1, 1999 http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9904020 ), there is no set of cosmological observations which can tell us whether the universe will expand forever or eventually collapse.
The reason for that is because that is dependant on the actions of intelligent life. The known laws of physics provide the mechanism for the universe's collapse. As required by the Standard Model, the net baryon number was created in the early universe by baryogenesis via electroweak quantum tunneling. This necessarily forces the Higgs field to be in a vacuum state that is not its absolute vacuum, which is the cause of the positive cosmological constant. But if the baryons in the universe were to be annihilated by the inverse of baryogenesis, again via electroweak quantum tunneling (which is allowed in the Standard Model, as baryon number minus lepton number [B - L] is conserved), then this would force the Higgs field toward its absolute vacuum, cancelling the positive cosmological constant and thereby forcing the universe to collapse. Moreover, this process would provide the ideal form of energy resource and rocket propulsion during the colonization phase of the universe.
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Unfortunately, most modern physicists have been all too willing to abandon the laws of physics if it produces results that they're uncomfortable with, i.e., in reference to religion. It's the antagonism for religion on the part of the scientific community which greatly held up the acceptance of the Big Bang (for some 40 years), due to said scientific community's displeasure with it confirming the traditional theological position of creatio ex nihilo, and also because no laws of physics can apply to the singularity itself (i.e., quite literally, the singularity is supernatural, in the sense that no form of physics can apply to it, since physical values are at infinity at the singularity, and so it is not possible to perform the arithmetical operations of addition or subtraction on them; and in the sense that the singularity is beyond creation, as it is not a part of spacetime, but rather is the boundary of space and time).
The originator of the Big Bang theory, circa 1930, was Roman Catholic priest and physicist Prof. Georges Lemaître; and it was enthusiastically endorsed by Pope Pius XII in 1951, long before the scientific community finally came to accept it.
Rabbi Moses Maimonides and Saint Thomas Aquinas, from their readings of biblical scripture, had both defined God as the Uncaused First Cause (which is equivalent to Aristotle's conception of God as the Unmoved Mover), and so the physics community was quite reluctant to confirm with the Big Bang that God exists per this traditional definition of God.
As regards physicists abandoning physical law due to their theological discomfort with the Big Bang, in an article by physicist and mathematician Prof. Frank J. Tipler he gives the following example involving no less than physicist Prof. Steven Weinberg:
""
The most radical ideas are those that are perceived to support religion, specifically Judaism and Christianity. When I was a student at MIT in the late 1960s, I audited a course in cosmology from the physics Nobelist Steven Weinberg. He told his class that of the theories of cosmology, he preferred the Steady State Theory because "it *least* resembled the account in Genesis" (my emphasis). In his book *The First Three Minutes* (chapter 6), Weinberg explains his earlier rejection of the Big Bang Theory: "Our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough. It is always hard to realize that these numbers and equations we play with at our desks have something to do with the real world. Even worse, there often seems to be a general agreement that certain phenomena are just not fit subjects for respectable theoretical and experimental effort." [My emphasis--J. R.]
... But as [Weinberg] himself points out in his book, the Big Bang Theory was an automatic consequence of standard thermodynamics, standard gravity theory, and standard nuclear physics. All of the basic physics one needs for the Big Bang Theory was well established in the 1930s, some two decades before the theory was worked out. Weinberg rejected this standard physics not because he didn't take the equations of physics seriously, but because he did not like the religious implications of the laws of physics. ...
""
For that and a number of other such examples, see:
Frank J. Tipler, "Refereed Journals: Do They Insure Quality or Enforce Orthodoxy?", Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design (PCID), Vols. 2.1 and 2.2 (January-June 2003). http://www.iscid.org/papers/Tipler_PeerReview_070103.pdf Also published as Chapter 7 in Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing, edited by William A. Dembski, "Foreword" by John Wilson (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2004).
Prof. Stephen Hawking reinforces what Weinberg and Tipler wrote about concerning the antagonism of the scientific community for religion, resulting in them abandoning good physics. In his book The Illustrated A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam Books, 1996), p. 62, Hawking wrote:
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Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention. (The Catholic Church, on the other hand, seized on the big bang model and in 1951 officially pronounced it to be in accordance with the Bible). There were therefore a number of attempts to avoid the conclusion that there had been a big bang.
""
On p. 179 of the same book, Hawking wrote "In real time, the universe has a beginning and an end at singularities that form a boundary to spacetime and at which the laws of science break down."
Agnostic and physicist Dr. Robert Jastrow, founding director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, wrote in his book God and the Astronomers (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1978), p. 113:
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This religious faith of the scientist [that there is no First Cause] is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover. When that happens, the scientist has lost control. If he really examined the implications, he would be traumatized.
""
For more quotes by Robert Jastrow on this, see:
"Science and Discomfiting Discoveries" in John Ross Schroeder, Bill Bradford and Mario Seiglie, Life's Ultimate Question: Does God Exist? (United Church of God, 2000). http://www.ucg.org/booklets/GE/science-discovery.asp , http://www.gnmagazine.org/booklets/GE/GE.pdf
For more quotes by scientists along the above lines, see the below article:
Mariano, "In the Beginning ... Cosmology, Part I", Atheism is Dead, February 11, 2009. http://atheismisdead.blogspot.com/2009/02/in-beginning-cosmology-part-i-pre-big.html
Again, the only way to avoid the Omega Point cosmology is to resort to physical theories which have no experimental support and which violate the known laws of physics, such as with Prof. Stephen Hawking's paper on the black hole information issue which is dependent on the conjectured string theory-based anti-de Sitter space/conformal field theory correspondence (AdS/CFT correspondence). See S. W. Hawking, "Information loss in black holes", Physical Review D, Vol. 72, No. 8 (October 2005), Art. No. 084013; also at arXiv:hep-th/0507171, July 18, 2005. http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0507171
That is, Prof. Hawking's paper is based upon empirically unconfirmed physics which violate the known laws of physics. It's an impressive testament to the Omega Point Theorem's correctness, as Hawking implicitly confirms that the known laws of physics require the universe to collapse in finite time. Hawking realizes that the black hole information issue must be resolved without violating unitarity, yet he's forced to abandon the known laws of physics in order to avoid unitarity violation without the universe collapsing.
Contrast that ad libitum approach to doing physics with that of Prof. Frank J. Tipler, who bases his Omega Point/Feynman-Weinberg-DeWitt quantum gravity/Standard Model Theory of Everything (TOE) strictly on the known laws of physics, and that of Prof. David Deutsch (inventor of the quantum computer, being the first person to mathematically describe the workings of such a device, and winner of the Institute of Physics' 1998 Paul Dirac Medal and Prize for his work). They both believe we have to take the known laws of physics seriously as true explanations of how the world works, unless said physics are experimentally, or otherwise, refuted.
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Wiccan_Child
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I agree with mzungu here, the Big Bang theory is universally accepted by the scientific community. It is not more controversial among physicists than evolution is among biologists or atomic theory is among chemists.
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jonmichael818
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Why is this so hard for you to understand, this is not a controversial subject. The physics community fully understands the limits of General Relativity at the planck scale. Maybe this will help:
If I am not mistaken it is fully dependent on the Many Worlds view.
I support the Many Worlds interpretation, but that does not mean it is the correct interpretation. The truth is we do not know which interpretation is true. Many Worlds is a very popular view, but the Copenhagen interpretation is considered the more standard interpretation.
Copenhagen is just as popular if not more popular, though it is loosing favor it seems. Consider this:
Just to make this short, the fact that Tipler does not have a Nobel Prize for his supposed TOE is proof that it is not accepted as "THE" TOE!
Yes well Krauss wrote that paper before observational evidence showed that the universe was flat.
Thats nice but that is not the case, read this:
All evidence points to a flat eternally expanding universe.
I am sure he feels differently now that we have observational evidence to show that the universe is flat.
Or perhaps a motivation is that relativity breaks down and we need more understanding of high energy physics, and some theories that include singularities say that whenever a singularity takes place a new universe is born, see Lee Smolin's Fecund Universes.
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leftrightleftrightleft
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This is just proof of how biased science can be based on personal convictions.
He claims he found the Theory of Everything in 2005, yet no one seemed to take much notice of it. I am a layman when it comes to theoretical physics, but I'm willing to bet that if a scientist came out with a legitimate TOE, it would be plastered all over the cover of Scientific American, Discover, Science and other such magazines. I just read a book, published in 2009, which firmly stated that the Standard Model and Gravity have not been unified.
I also fail to understand how sentient life must engulf and control the entire universe. And even if this is true, it does not imply anthropocentrism in any way; sentience may have to go on forever, but their may be sentient creatures throughout the universe and we could get wiped out by an asteroid next week.
I also fail to understand how the Omega Point has any relation to the Judeo-Christian God. The Omega Point can just as easily describe some New Age "God", the Tao, Allah or Brahman. In fact, in many ways, what the Omega Point describes sounds much more like Brahman or the Tao than the God of the Old Testament.
I also fail to understand how his pure mathematics translates into reality. He seems to take equations and apply them to things with absolutely no physical basis. For example, how would "life" survive the universe's return to a singularity? When all matter is squeezed into a ball, the physical conditions would not allow carbon-based life forms to survive in any way, matter itself would be fused together, temperatures would reach trillions of degrees. How is he defining "life" or "sentience"?
He claims he found the Theory of Everything in 2005, yet no one seemed to take much notice of it. I am a layman when it comes to theoretical physics, but I'm willing to bet that if a scientist came out with a legitimate TOE, it would be plastered all over the cover of Scientific American, Discover, Science and other such magazines. I just read a book, published in 2009, which firmly stated that the Standard Model and Gravity have not been unified.
I also fail to understand how sentient life must engulf and control the entire universe. And even if this is true, it does not imply anthropocentrism in any way; sentience may have to go on forever, but their may be sentient creatures throughout the universe and we could get wiped out by an asteroid next week.
I also fail to understand how the Omega Point has any relation to the Judeo-Christian God. The Omega Point can just as easily describe some New Age "God", the Tao, Allah or Brahman. In fact, in many ways, what the Omega Point describes sounds much more like Brahman or the Tao than the God of the Old Testament.
I also fail to understand how his pure mathematics translates into reality. He seems to take equations and apply them to things with absolutely no physical basis. For example, how would "life" survive the universe's return to a singularity? When all matter is squeezed into a ball, the physical conditions would not allow carbon-based life forms to survive in any way, matter itself would be fused together, temperatures would reach trillions of degrees. How is he defining "life" or "sentience"?
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leftrightleftrightleft
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The Varieties of Crackpot Experience | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine
This is Discover Magazine. Please read the article.
James Redford is all over this Tipler stuff. A search of "Frank Tipler James Redford" gives forum after forum of him backing up Tipler's claims. Interestingly, he seems to be the only one that backs up such claims.
I'm kind of disappointed that he was on TED, usually TED is so great!
This is Discover Magazine. Please read the article.
James Redford is all over this Tipler stuff. A search of "Frank Tipler James Redford" gives forum after forum of him backing up Tipler's claims. Interestingly, he seems to be the only one that backs up such claims.
I'm kind of disappointed that he was on TED, usually TED is so great!
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jonmichael818
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Ya I have seen him all over the internet also.
Maybe Redford is Tipler, haha
Just kidding.
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Nostromo
Brian Blessed can take a hike
I'm inclined to go with badtim on this one, I don't think there's much chance of legitimate discussion here, he's just spamming the same links, quite possibly with the intention of just improving their ratings and (appear to) lend them some legitimacy.
IMHO, let this thread die (or derail it so badly it gets deleted not that I endorse breaking the rules intentionally).
IMHO, let this thread die (or derail it so badly it gets deleted
not that I endorse breaking the rules intentionally).
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There; It's done, now what was that about strings?I'm inclined to go with badtim on this one, I don't think there's much chance of legitimate discussion here, he's just spamming the same links, quite possibly with the intention of just improving their ratings and (appear to) lend them some legitimacy.
IMHO, let this thread die (or derail it so badly it gets deleted
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