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AndrewHickey comments on Holy Books (Or Rationalist Sequences) Don’t Implement Themselves - Less Wrong
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I believe so. His career path seems to go: 70s - studies with John Wheeler, makes some small but clever contributions to cosmology and relativistic physics.
80s - Co-writes widely praised book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle with John Barrow, first suggests Omega Point hypothesis
90s - Writes The Physics Of Immortality, laying out Omega Point hypothesis in much more detail and explicitly identifying Omega Point with God. People think this is clever but going a little far. Tipler's contract for a textbook on gravitation gets cancelled and the university at which he has tenure stop giving him pay-rises.
2000s - Writes The Physics Of Christianity, in which he suggests cloning Jesus from the Turin Shroud so we can learn how he annihilated baryons, becomes referee for creationist journals and occasional right-wing commentator, argues that Barack Obama is evil because the lumineferous aether is real and because of a bit of the film Starship Troopers.
The criticism of Obama was slightly more coherent than that. The Tribe paper in question really was an example of the common attempt for people to take ideas in math and physics and try to apply them as strong metaphors in other areas in ways that are really unhelpful and at best silly. In that regard, most of Tipler's criticism was straight on.
Yeah, except for two facts: Obama had no actual input into Tribe's paper. Tipler's physics in his paper is even less coherent than Tribe's.
Ok that's really...random. (Overused and underdefined word but that was the response my brain gave me).
The Tipler/Obama/aether connection seemed bizarre enough that I looked it up:
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/obama-vs-einstein/
Some quotes:
Einstein’s general relativity is just a special case of Newtonian gravity theory incorporating the ether
Hamilton-Jacobi theory is deterministic, hence quantum mechanics is equally deterministic
There was absolutely nothing revolutionary about twentieth century physics.
I agree on the "random" part.
Wow. While I'm unsurprised that Tipler would take issue with yet another poetical injection of something that superficially looks like quantum physics into yet another unrelated subject area, I'm more surprised that he'd express it in such a bizzare manner. There's a whole paragraph where he name-drops his academic genealogy. And then he acts like Obama is making these claims, when at best he contributed "analytic and research assistance", whatever that means.
I read The Physics of Immortality as an undergrad in '04 and was skeptical of his major claims. I'm disappointed by his downward spiral into crackpot territory.
That's nothing. Read the full paper - http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1271310 . Forty-five pages of the most gloriously wrong thinking you'll ever come across in your life.
But then he'll come out with a piece of utterly lucid reasoning on applying Bayes' theorem to the Born probabilities like http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0611245 . Very, very strange man.
I think this is a relevant rationality quote: http://lesswrong.com/lw/2ev/rationality_quotes_july_2010/28nw