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JoshuaZ 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.