The physics of immortality Book

I bought this purely for the purpose of seeing how Tipler, a theoretical physicist, was going to construct a mathematically-based proof that the end of the universe will consist of God resurrecting all the souls of those who have ever lived and taking them on an eternity-trip to Heaven, replete with memories, milk, and stardust cookies'and then freely stealing his ideas where applicable in order to incorporate them into my own half-baked conjecture about this infinite wad of Silly Puttyâ„¢ we call existence. And that is, indeed, what the well-intentioned author endeavors to prove, backed by some serious mathematical noodling: for notwithstanding that the milk and cookies bit above was unnecessarily snide, my reading has yet led me to the conclusion that this Theodicy will transpire at the winding-down of the universe due to beatific entropy, the blessed conservation of matter, and, in a fit of inspired quiddity, the holy hand grenade'for as we approach the Omega Point of a contracting universe (and this state of contraction may be manipulable by ultra-advanced science and its aggregate of artificial intelligence, if the universe refuses to play along) its state will progress to that of infinite entropy and infinite information, transferred to ever-higher energy states and supra-complex algorithms via the ungodly energy levels siphoned from gravitational shear and such. The speculation about this Big Crunch and what it portends for our past-lived human lives'encoded information at its most basic level'once we approach the Omega Point and a cosmic waveform of infinite information, trailing an AI-augmented human science expanding its scope in exponential fashion, is actually quite interesting; it is the attempts to shoehorn such theoretical workings into soteriological loafers that force Tipler to strain, with his analogies, contemplations, and numbers, towards making God's promise of immortality workable, nay, reasonable, within the physical constraints of a universe/multiverse bound by the laws of physics. God is, in essence, the Omega Point, capable of operating through reversed time to set the salvational scenario for that endpoint's status and retro-enacting the miraculous through the vestiges of accelerated spacetime.

It all seems appropriately and wonderfully wackadoo'another reviewer makes the believable claim that Tipler is nuts. Brilliant, interesting, compelling, but nuts. This book comes across as a genius's urgent need to heal the pain of the Holocaust by resurrecting the dead in the grandest thought-experiment of all time. But I'll be damned if I don't appreciate another fellow taking the time and effort to put his own private visions into understandable prose and formulae, taking them to the absolute limit while holding fast to his convictions, and then making them available for the inevitable scorn and mockery that will attend to them'as, apparently, it does to people like Esteban. Attaboy, Tipler!