The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics
by Leonard Susskind
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Book Summary Information
Author: Leonard SusskindEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-07-07
ISBN: 0316016403
Number of pages: 480
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Book Reviews of The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics
Book Review: The history is ultimately written by the winners
Summary: 5 Stars
Leonard Susskind is not only a co-father of string theory, the holographic principle, and many other key concepts of physics but also one of the most original physicists of our era.
He's been fighting against some superficially plausible but fundamentally wrong ideas for decades. During this ferocious fight, he had to discover many fascinating things about quantum gravity.
The battle was about the preservation of the information by black holes. Using revolutionary but approximate results, Stephen Hawking has argued since the 1970s that the information is lost after a black hole evaporates. Leonard Susskind claimed that it was preserved: this preservation, also called unitarity, is one of the postulates of quantum mechanics and these postulates are and have to be completely universal.
Susskind was right. We know many reasons why it is so, including recent results in string theory, and many of them are explained in the book. We also know loopholes that show that Hawking's old qualitative arguments are not quite correct even though his numerical results are numerically almost accurate.
It took many years for Hawking to understand and admit that the information was preserved in the full theory and that physics makes sense. During those years, Susskind was a new "Ahab" waiting for Hawking's elusive concession. However, the book offers a lot of personal stories and emotions, too. Susskind talks about several well-known names of science such as Stephen Hawking, Gerard 't Hooft, Roger Penrose, and Richard Feynman. All of them, and others, have been players in this fascinating story.
Although Susskind is arguably the least known to the general public among these fives names, every real physicist would tell you that he is indisputably the most qualified person among the five to explain how black holes actually work in this quantum world.
Because as an outspoken son of a plumber, he is also close to the middle and working class and an articulate peer of Brian Greene and other great and charismatic science communicators, everyone who is interested in black holes, gravity, and quantum mechanics should read this book.
The physics book market was recently flooded by a lot of trash written by crackpots similar to Peter Woit and Lee Smolin and it is time for the most intelligent readers to pull their heads out of the sand and see one of the great things that cutting-edge theoretical physics has actually achieved by 2008.
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