Professor John D. Barrow - "The Infinite Book"

As you are all now aware I am back in the world of work. Every day I commute from my home on the Wirral to the head office of the Riverside Group near John Lennon Airport in East Liverpool. This allows me to keep up with my reading time. At the moment I am coming to the end of a fantastically itladian book - The Infinite Book by John D. Barrow.


Professor Barrow, together with Professor Frank J. Tipler wrote the hugely influential (and in some areas very controversial) book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. This amazing book suggests that this universe was hard-wired from the first few moments of the Big Bang to bring about the evolution of consciousness. Taking into account the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Physics (that the wave function needs the observation of a conscious being to collapse it into a physical point state) this is not at all surprising. Indeed, as John Wheeler suggested (see an earler post of mine) the act of observation brings into existence not just the present moment but events that took place billions of years ago.

Professor Barrow (an Englishman who teaches Maths and theoretical physics at Cambridge) takes as his theme for this 2005 book the concept of infinity. I initially bought the book to understand the maths and logic of Georg Cantor (something of profound importance if my glutamate-induced time dilation scenario is to work). However it was Professor Barrow's 'take' on the "Many-Worlds Interpretation that really excited me.

From page 159 onwards he discusses what he terms "The Infinite Replication Paradox". In simple terms that is that in the Multiverse there are trillions of 'clones' of each of us, all living subtly different lives to ourselves. For Professor Barrow, unaware of the interpretation of MWI that I take in ITLAD, considers that this multiplication of a person to be "worrying". Indeed he writes:

"Some cosmologists find the infinite replication paradox so unsavoury that a finite universe would be a welcome escape from its implications."

However ITLAD and CTF present evidence that not only such a scenario may be more than mere speculation but also that it is a profoundly positive set of circumstances because it implies that human consciousness may escape subjective death.

Interestingly enough on page 158 the Professor 'almost' discovers itlad for himself when he writes:

"When each of us dies there will always exist elsewhere an infinite number of copies of ourselves, possessing all the same memories and experiences of our past lives but who will live in the future. This succession will continue indefinitely into the future and so in some way each of us lives forever" (italics mine)

Now this is the suggestion of one of the world's leading theoretical physicists/mathematicians, not some flaky "New Ager". This is a prime example of just how potentially powerful ITLAD can become if it ever manages to break out into mainstream consciousness. This theory does have validity and does seem to make sense.

There is yet more itladian musings later in this enlightening book. I will place a post on these (and the implications his suggestions have for our argument of 'the world as a computer simulation').

I have emailed Professor Barrow and suggested that he check out our little corner of cyberspace here on the CTF Blogpage. I am hoping that he will like what he sees and maybe reply.