Volume 1, Issue 1 
1st Quarter, 2006


The Physics of Immortality, Threats to Terran Society, & Self-Replicating Nanotechnology, and An Exchange Between Frank Tipler and Ray Kurzweil Regarding Ways to Avoid an End to the Universe

Frank Tipler, Ph.D. and Ray Kurzweil, Ph.D.

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The game dictates that you can't do it instantly. We have to realize we have to use the universe itself to transcend the life barrier. What TiplerI show is the standard general relativity. If you can control the rate of collapse of the universe, and there are mechanisms which are known to exist in general relativity to do precisely that, what you can do is transcend the light barrier by allowing, in this context alone, an infinite number of translations of data, moving only at light speed back and forth across the universe in finite proper time. That can be done. If you would like, I will show you the mathematics right after this lecture. I didn't want to go into the mathematics of that here. But it's very straightforward in general relativity. But what you have to do is use general relativity cleverly, rather than trying to find new laws. The laws of physics as we now understand them will allow us to transcend the light barrier, although not in the universal expansion phase. Only in the collapsing phase can it be transcended.

Ray Kurzweil: I have a comment. Some of the recent papers on wormholes suggest they are consistent with the laws of physics.

Frank Tipler: I know they are not because that theorem was proven by Bob Garrosh about 40 years ago. Unfortunately many of the younger people are not aware of global general relativity. I didn't prove it. He did.

Ray Kurzweil: What about inflation?

Frank Tipler: You don't need inflation. There is no mechanism for inflation in the standard model. You don't need it because standard models of physics, quantum mechanics allows you to get everything that inflation does automatically just using known physical law. Inflation involves a new field called the inflaton, which has never been seen in the laboratory. Using fields that have been seen in the laboratory, but using them more cleverly than has been done in the past, you can get all the observations easily explained and make some new predictions.

I give away, for example, a very simple experiment to test these things. An expert could do it inside of six months. The material cost would be less than $1,000. I went so far as to actually find where you could buy the necessary parts and put it in the paper. I've gone one step further than theorists generally go for experiments.

Ray Kurzweil: What about microwave technology?

Frank Tipler: Unfortunately, I'm not an expert in microwave technology. If you've ever done experiments and I know you have, it requires time to develop the necessary experimental techniques. I've estimated it taking five years to learn those techniques. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people exist out there who have those techniques at their fingertips.

Ray Kurzweil: What do you think of hidden-variable theories of quantum mechanics?

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