TOE

Stumbled across something yesterday that piqued my interest … in the weird, unusual, seldom-traveled world of … physics. I thumbed through it and fell for it hard. Took out my wallet, forked over my money, drove home in my car, and began to read my new book.

Entitled, My Big TOE.

“Toe,” in this case (and for the uninitiated) is an acronym standing for, Theory Of Everything. It’s often referred to with the golden cliché of “holy grail” in physics as unification theory, a theory that connects the four forces of nature and the standard model of subatomic particles, simplified and standing pure in beauty.

Though he’s a physicist, that’s not quite what the author, Thomas Campbell, has in mind. His TOE explains – reality.

Oh, goody!

A bit of online research has revealed that his TOE involves reality fields, local and non-local computer simulations (run by his non-personal “God”), reincarnation, the linkage of the speed of light with the slimmest segment of time we can comprehend. I’m curious to see how he reconciles the after-death experience with quantum mechanics. I’m also interested to see how his theory compares to that of Frank Tipler’s, expounded in the book The Physics of Immortality, which I read two decades ago and only remember the “Omega Point” concept and the fact that we’ll all be resurrected because in the incomprehensible future technology will be so vast as to replicate each and every one of us.

This kinda stuff excites me. I’m that kinda guy.

A big part of all this is whether I can reconcile it to my Catholicism. No, reincarnation doesn’t fit with Catholic belief, obviously, but what else in Campbell’s TOE might?

And despite all my interest in kooky nutty stuff, my B.S.-detector is a finely honed instrument. The kooky nutty stuff I read I read for campy fun, nostalgia, fodder to spook my children with. I ain’t reading a thousand page physics text if the detector goes off the scale on page three.

But I’ll let you know, down the road.