Biography

I was born and raised in Andalusia, a small farming town in southern Alabama. At the age of five, while in kindergarten, I became fascinated by the work of Alabama only famous physicist, the rocket scientist Werner von Braun, and decided then that I wanted to be an astrophysicist. With this goal, I obtained by undergraduate degree in physics in 1969 at M.I.T., where I first learned of the Many-Worlds of quantum mechanics, and of the Singularity Theorems of Stephan Hawking and Roger Penrose. In 1976, I obtained a Ph.D. in physics for my proof, using the techniques of Hawking and Penrose, that creating a time machine would necessarily result in singularities in the laboratory. I was hired in 1979, as a post-doc by John A. Wheeler, the great physicist best known for his work on black hole theory, to extend my 1978 proof that in general relativity, time is not relative: a unique rest frame exists. I became Professor of Mathematical Physics in 1981 at Tulane University, where I have been ever since, working to draw the full implications of my earlier work: that quantum mechanics and general relativity require that the Cosmological Singularity - the Uncaused First Cause - consists of Three Persons but one Cause. I have now written up these results for a popular audience, and the book is The Physics of Christianity.

CURRICULUM VITAE

Name: FRANK J. TIPLER
Rank: Professor
Departments: Mathematics and Physics (joint appointment)

EDUCATION:
S.B. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1965-1969
Ph.D. University of Maryland, 1969-1976

BOOKS:
1. Essays in General Relativity: A Festschrift for Abraham H. Taub, (Academic Press, New York, 1980).
2. l'Homme et le Cosmos, in French with J.D. Barrow and M.-O. Monchicourt, afterward by Hubert Reeves (Imago-Radio France, Paris, 1984).
3. The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, with J.D. Barrow (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1986; paperback 1988; paperback reissued 1996). Approximate total copies in print worldwide as of January 1997: 40,000.
4. The Physics of Immortality, published by Doubleday in the USA in September 1994 (paperback edition by Anchor Books in September 1995), and by Macmillan in the UK in January 1995 (paperback edition in March 1996). The book has also appeared in German translation with the title Die Physik der Unsterblichkeit by Piper Verlag in March 1994 (German paperback edition by Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag [dtv] in September 1995). In Italian translation with the title Fisica dell' Immortalità, by Mondadori Editore in November 1995. In Dutch translation with the title De Fysica van de Onsterfelijkheid, by Bosch & Keuning in March 1996. In Spanish translation with the title La Física de la Inmortalidad, by Alianza Universidad in May 1996.
5. The Physics of Christianity, published by Doubleday in the USA in May 2007. It is currently being translated in German (to be published by Piper Verlag) and Italian (to be published by Mondadori Editore).

PAPERS:
58 papers in refereed journals, including 2 (single authored) papers in Physical Review Letters, 8 papers in Nature (6 of these single authored), and 1 (single authored) in Science. The papers which I personally consider the most important are
1. Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation, Physical Review D9, 2203-2206 (1974).
2. Causality Violation in Asymptotically Flat Spacetimes, Physical Review Letters, 37, 879-882 (1976).
3. Energy Conditions and Spacetime Singularities, Physical Review, D17, 2521-2528 (1978).
4. General Relativity and Conjugate Ordinary Differential Equations, Journal of Differential Equations, 30, 165-174 (1978).
5. General Relativity, Thermodynamics, and the Poincaré Cycle, Nature 280, 203-205 (1979).
6. Extraterrestrial Intelligent Beings Do Not Exist, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, 21, 267-28 (1980).
7. Interpreting the Wave Function of the Universe, Physics Reports, 137, 231-275 (1986).
8. Traveling to the Other Side of the Universe, Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 49, 313-318 (1996).
9. How Far Out Must We Go to Get Into the Hubble Flow? Astrophysical Journal 511, 546-549 (1999).
10. Intelligent Life in Cosmology, International Journal of Astrobiology 2, 141-148 (2003).
11. Structure of the World from Pure Numbers, Reports on Progress in Physics 68, 897-964 (2005).
12. The Star of Bethlehem: a Type Ia/Ic Supernova in the Andromeda Galaxy? Observatory 125, 168-173 (2005).

APPOINTMENTS AT OTHER UNIVERSITIES:
Postdoc (Math, UC Berkeley) with Abraham H. Taub, himself a postdoc of John von Neumann
Postdoc (Astrophysics, Oxford) with Dennis Sciama, the student of Paul Dirac, and the dissertation professor of S. W. Hawking and the current Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees, PRS.
Postdoc (Physics, UT Austin) with John A Wheeler, the dissertation professor of R. P. Feynman.