I read Tipler's book years ago, not long after it came out. It struck me then as woo, and I haven't changed my mind.
I agree with that very emphatically.
Tipler, in the book, plays up his MIT credentials and the many years that he has studied physics yadda yadda yadda. His general premise in the book is that any reader will not have a sufficient education to be able to comment critical on his "Omega point theory".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_J._Tipler
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Point
And then boards like Sciforums will host thread after thread after thread, wondering why the general public is often skeptical about science and why so many are damnable "deniers" ('heathens' in other words).
Big-shot professors often seem to think that when they write books for a general readership and not for their professional peers, professional standards don't apply. So what we often see are writers' own personal metaphysical (and in Tipler's case, theological) speculations, presented to the public as if they are the necessary implications of accepted physical theory.
Many (perhaps most) popular books with the word 'quantum' in their title seem to me to be largely drivel. (Mind 'collapses the wave function', so reality is whatever you make it.) Then there's all the 'fine-tuning' 'anthropic' arguments where physicists snuggle up with intelligent design. (Laypeople are supposedly idiots if they believe in ID, but since physics supposedly proves it, they would seem to be "deniers" if they don't believe. You just can't win...)
Tipler seems to believe that the universe is headed towards some cosmological end-state, the 'Omega Point'. He insists that physical theory proves this and if it isn't true, then physical theory isn't consistent. (I don't know how he justifies that one.) This is reality's goal and destination, the final and ultimate Eschaton, and that everything is being drawn towards it teleologically, through time. (I don't know how that is supposed to work physically, how does the future attract the past?) He seems to believe that intelligence in the universe necessarily increases as time goes on (I don't know why) and approaches infinity at the Omega Point. So his speculations kind of blend with all the currently trendy 'singularity' pseudoscience speculations there. Since increasing intelligence is supposedly associated with an increased sense of self, the infinite Omega Point consciousness must be the ultimate and supreme Person. God, in other words.
To many of us who don't have advanced educations in physics, this kind of stuff
IS physics. When laypeople look at the science shelves in bookstores much of what they see is this kind of thing. Either that, or reams of incomprehensible mathematical heiroglyphs that no layperson can possibly understand. The authors who condescend to write in English assure us that heiroglyphs and jargon prove with logical certainty that their sometimes outlandish metaphysical speculations must be correct.
And the public is left with the choice of whether or not to believe it.