Tipler is the son of Frank Jennings Tipler Jr., a lawyer, and Anne Tipler, a homemaker. Tipler attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1965 through 1969, and he completed his bachelor of science degree in physics in 1969. Tipler entered graduate school, and in 1976 he earned his doctor of philosophy (Ph.D.) degree from the University of Maryland.   Source:

Tipler was next hired to a sequence of [[postdoctoral researcher]] positions at in physics at three universities, with the final one being at the [[University of Texas]], where he worked under [[John Archibald Wheeler]], [[Abraham Haskel Taub|Abraham Taub]], [[Rainer Kurt Sachs|Rainer Sachs]], and [[Dennis William Sciama|Dennis Sciama]]. Tipler became a faculty member in  [[mathematical physics]] in 1981 at Tulane University, where he has been a faculty member ever since.

The Omega Point

Frank Tipler uses the term Omega Point to describe what he maintains is the ultimate fate of the universe required by the laws of physics. Tipler identifies this concept as the Christian god and in later writing, infers correctness of Christian mythology from this concept. Tipler (1994) has summarized his theory as follows:

• The universe has finite spatial size and the topology of a three-sphere;
• There are no event horizons, implying the future c-boundary is a point, called the Omega Point;
• Sentient life must eventually engulf the entire universe and control it;
• The amount of information processed between now and the Omega Point is infinite;
• The amount of information stored in the universe asymptotically goes to infinity as the Omega Point is approached.

In his controversial 1994 book The Physics of Immortality, Tipler claims to provide a mechanism for immortality and the resurrection of the dead consistent with the known laws of physics via the use of computers which use the entire universe to compute on and which diverge to a state of infinite computational resources that Tipler terms the Omega Point and which he identifies with God. The line of argument is that the evolution of intelligent species will enable scientific progress to grow exponentially, eventually enabling control over the universe even on the largest possible scale. Tipler predicts that this process will culminate with an all-powerful intelligence whose computing speed and information storage will grow exponentially at a rate exceeding that of a proposed collapse of the universe, thus providing infinite "experiential time" which will be used to run computer simulations of all intelligent life that has ever lived in the history of our universe. This virtual reality emulation is what Tipler means by "the resurrection of the dead." In more recent works, Tipler says that the existence of the Omega Point is required to avoid the violation of the known laws of physics.

His 1986 book, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (with John D. Barrow) reviews the intellectual history of teleology, the large number of physical coincidences which allow sapient life to exist (see anthropic principle), and then investigates the ultimate fate of the universe. This was the first book to describe the Omega Point Theory. Tipler has also published his Omega Point Theory in a number of peer-reviewed scientific journals since 1986.

David Deutsch incorporates the concept of Tipler's Omega Point as a central feature of the fourth strand of his "four strands" concept of fundamental reality and identifies some aspects of Tipler's physics as being correct although Deutsch is highly critical of Tipler's Christian-compatible conclusions and exaggerated claims, which, according to Deutsch, have caused most scientists and philosophers to reject his theory out of hand.

Tipler's Omega Point theories have received criticism by physicists and skeptics. George Ellis, writing in the journal Nature, described Tipler's book on the Omega Point as "a masterpiece of pseudoscience ... the product of a fertile and creative imagination unhampered by the normal constraints of scientific and philosophical discipline", and Michael Shermer devoted a chapter of Why People Believe Weird Things to enumerating what he thought to be flaws in Tipler's thesis.

Tipler's 2007 book The Physics of Christianity analyzes the Omega Point Theory's pertinence to Christian theology. In the book, Tipler identifies the Omega Point as being the Judeo-Christian God, particularly as described by Christian theological tradition. In this book Tipler also analyzes how Jesus Christ could have performed the miracles attributed to him in the New Testament without violating any known laws of physics, even if one were to assume that we currently don't exist on a level of implementation in a computer simulation (in the case that we did then, obviously and as noted by Tipler, such miracles would be trivially easy to perform for the society which was running the simulation whilst it would still seem amazing from our perspective).

Tipler's writings on scientific peer review have been cited by William A. Dembski as having formed the basis of the process for "peer review" in the so-called intelligent design journal Progress in Complexity, Information and Design of the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design (now defunct), where both Tipler and Dembski served as fellows.

Quantum gravity and the Theory of Everything

In a 2005 Reports on Progress in Physics paper that was included as one of 12 papers in the journal's "Highlights of 2005", Tipler combines the Omega Point as a boundary condition with a version of the Feynman—Weinberg—DeWitt theory of quantum gravity along with an extended Standard Model of subatomic particles in order to form what he maintained is the correct Theory of Everything (TOE) describing and unifying all the forces in physics.

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