The apparently imminent discovery of the Higgs boson by scientists at CERN will have at least one quirky side effect that appears to have gone entirely unremarked until the appearance of this blog post — it threatens to inflict fatal collateral damage to the brilliant, eccentric and infuriating Omega Point Theory proposed by the physicist Frank Tipler.
Tipler, who is not a crackpot, once published a book called The Physics of Immortality, purporting, on the basis of orthodox physics plus some plausible auxiliary assumptions, to establish the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent and altruistic “being” who will one day resurrect everyone who has ever lived to eternal life.
The first step toward that startling conclusion is the assumption that our descendants will not allow all life to come to an end. This in turn will require them to control the evolution of the Universe so that it doesn’t collapse in anything that human beings perceive as a finite amount of time; Tipler argues that they’ll quite plausibly have the technology to do that. But all this future tinkering with the shape of the Universe has consequences that (in a very rough sense) radiate backward and forward through time. From this and some highly technical but more-or-less standard physics, Tipler manages to conclude the existence of an Omega Point — a place where (again speaking roughly) all the information in the Universe is stored. Writing in 1994, Tipler never considered the possibility that the Omega Pont might be located in Mountain View, California. Instead, he stressed that in its omniscience, it’s something very like God.
Not only is the Omega Point omniscient; it’s also ominipotent in the sense that the information located there will allow our descendants to perform feats like resurrecting every one of us from the dead, something that Tipler says they’re sure to do because the cost will be essentially zero. The Omega Point turns out to be not only very like some generic God; it’s very like the Christian God. And the similarities don’t stop there (read Tipler for more).
Alas, Tipler observes in the book that the Omega Point theory also makes a rather specific prediction about the mass of the Higgs boson — it has to be somewhere around 220 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), give or take 10 percent or so. He offers this as a clear test of the theory. And the theory, it seems, is about to fail spectacularly. It looks like the Higgs boson is about to come in at somewhere around 125 GeV.
Tipler’s book had a huge intellectual influence on me, not because of its primary content but because of a tangential remark that triggered my first vision of the Universe as a purely mathematical object, a vision I later learned had been fleshed out by physicists such as Max Tegmark at MIT. Readers of The Big Questions will know that I find this vision extremely satisfying for a great variety of reasons. It provides plausible (to me) answers to a variety of questions that I’d always considered unanswerable, such as “Why is there a Universe in the first place?” Unfortunately, unlike the Omega Point Theory, this is not a vision that can be put to the experimental test.
Tipler’s theory, however, is designed to be put to the test, and if it fails that test (as it’s apparently about to), we should view that as a triumph. Science progresses through predictions so precise that we can know when they’re wrong. Now on to the next theory!
If the prediction is within a factor of 2, that seems pretty good. Especially for something that is unlike anything that has ever been seen before.
Thats great – a theory so out of this world that it almost explains God – and yet it makes a specific, testable prediction about the mass of the Higgs Boson. The God particle has overthrown this particular, lesser God.
I’d be interested in your take on Stephen Barr’s, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith and how his philosophical view compares/contrasts with your own. Might generate some interesting discussion.
IsI quibble with Steve’s ‘imminent discovery’.Experimenters have ruled out more possibilities for the Higgs. Steve concludes that the discovery must therefore be close. This is — alas poor Yoram I knew him — bad reasoning. I just proved Thor does not live in my boss’s office. The discovery of Thor’s hidey-hole must be imminent.
Yes, I know many believe the Higgs MUST exist, but that is unproven, and unstated in Steve’s argument where it seems a necessary assumption.
Steve, it looks like Tipler’s prediction is not as firm as it seems; check out this interview he gave in 2002:
http://www.transhumanism.org/index.php/th/more/312/
He says that his prediction is based on estimates of the stability curve, so his prediction as of 2002 was 190. If estimates of the stability curve changed between 1994 and 2002, I’m guessing they also changed between then and now. I’m curious what Tipler’s prediction would be if revised by current data.
Ken B: There is not only negative but positive evidence for the Higgs at around 125 GeV. When nearby energy ranges were searched, aftereffects and spikes occured in the results, suggesting that something is near.
[Comments removed due to low probability of existence.
Comments to be restored if wave functions collapse differently than currently predicted.]
A few of the specific predictions of the Omega Point Theory had already been wrong, if I understand correctly. Due to WMAP’s discovery that the rate of expansion of the universe is accelerating, most cosmologists now believe it will expand forever, which rules out an Omega Point.
Although I never considered the theory to be more than an interesting but unlikely possibility, Tipler was a huge inflluence on my thought as well.
“…information located there will allow our ancestors to perform feats like…”
Should this read “descendents” instead of “ancestors,” or is this way more weird than it already seems?
@Todd: You are forgetting those faster than light neutrinos.
Todd: Good catch. I’m fixing this, even at the expense of Ken B’s cute followup.
It seems to me that many of Tipler’s “predictions” were not as firm as originally thought.
The Physics of Christianity picks up where The Physics of Immortality left off, and explains away some of the problems with PoI, such as the accelerating expanding universe.
All to be expected, of course. We aren’t doing science here; we are talking about Tipler’s religion.
Dustin: I’d somehow managed not to know he’d written a sequel. Thanks for the pointer.
“Why is there a Universe in the first place?”
I think that questions like this are not so much unanswerable as just invalid. The universe exists, by inspection. Being the sum total of existence, by definition, it would require something outside it — outside of existence — to create it, as religion holds. But whatever is outside of existence, doesn’t exist, again by definition.
So, to ask why the inverse exists is to presume and depend on something outside of it to create it, which is contradictory.
The universe doesn’t have a “why”, but it sure has a “how” and that’s what science properly explores, God Particle and all.
Steve, I am guessing Tipler’s theories may be real, close to what is going on in the cosmos. Tipler’s solution to the WMAP acceleration is his prediction that human conquest of antimatter (anti-baryons) will provide an energy source and the juice to power star ships to colonize the Hubble Volume. This will also threaten human existence on earth (bombs).
He also predicts that, for ages, most humans will be downloaded, along with AI’s, as ‘passengers’ on these zillions of mini star ships. Please remember that surveys like WMAP show the cosmic acceleration is not going anywhere near the speed of light, but someday, unless interupted, it will approach light, and then we have the Big Rip happening.
I do not think the set of competent physicists and the set of crackpots are necessarily mutually exclusive sets.
Regardless whether the 125 GeV signal or “excess” or whatever ultimately turns out to be the Higgs, a 220 GeV Higgs has already been definitively ruled out by the LHC experiments.
Matt Strassler’s blog has a chart that nicely summarizes where things stand with respect to the remaining windows for the Higgs which shows the LHC has ruled out everything between about 128 and 600 GeV.
http://profmattstrassler.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/higgssearch2011.png
I must disagree.
Tipler, is most definitely a crackpot.
Just because he has also done serious
physics does not mean he is not a crackpot.
They are not mutually exclusive.
Regarding the mathematical universe, Tegmark’s paper left me with a question: if the universe is a mathematical object, what do Gödel’s incompleteness theorems imply about physics? Does this mean that we can never fully explain the physics of our universe, or perhaps explain our origins?
Al V.:
Does this mean that we can never fully explain the physics of our universe, or perhaps explain our origins?
I don’t understand how you get from Godel to this.