Christopher Michael Langan
Christopher Michael Langan | |
|---|---|
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Philosophy, cosmology |
Christopher Michael Langan is an American autodidact and author known for developing the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU), a self-styled "theory of everything" linking mind and reality. He is listed in The Worldwide List of Dissident Scientists.
Langan received wide media attention after reportedly scoring extremely high on IQ tests, and has often been described in the popular press as one of the highest-scoring individuals on record. He developed the CTMU largely outside academia over several decades of independent study.
Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe
The CTMU is Langan's framework describing reality as a "self-configuring, self-processing language" (SCSPL) that evolves through a process he calls telic recursion. He presents it as a model in which the observing mind and the observed universe are aspects of a single logical structure, and argues that the framework provides the logical scaffolding for a theory of everything. Langan cites the participatory-universe ideas of physicist John A. Wheeler as a point of reference. He self-published an exposition of the model, The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe: A New Kind of Reality Theory, in 2002.
The CTMU lies outside the scientific mainstream and has not been developed or tested through the peer-reviewed physics literature; it is generally regarded by physicists and philosophers as a metaphysical rather than an empirical theory.