The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics | 
 enlarge | Author: Leonard Susskind
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Category: Book
List Price: $27.99
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Rating:  21 reviews
Sales Rank: 3281
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 480
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6 x 1.6
ISBN: 0316016403
Dewey Decimal Number: 530.12
EAN: 9780316016407
Publication Date: July 7, 2008
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Product Description
What happens when something is sucked into a black hole? Does it disappear? Three decades ago, a young physicist named Stephen Hawking claimed it did-and in doing so put at risk everything we know about physics and the fundamental laws of the universe. Most scientists didn't recognize the import of Hawking's claims, but Leonard Susskind and Gerard t'Hooft realized the threat, and responded with a counterattack that changed the course of physics. THE BLACK HOLE WAR is the thrilling story of their united effort to reconcile Hawking's revolutionary theories of black holes with their own sense of reality-effort that would eventually result in Hawking admitting he was wrong, paying up, and Susskind and t'Hooft realizing that our world is a hologram projected from the outer boundaries of space.
A brilliant book about modern physics, quantum mechanics, the fate of stars and the deep mysteries of black holes, Leonard Susskind's account of the Black Hole War is mind-bending and exhilarating reading.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 16 more reviews...
 A popularisation that mostly works July 22, 2008
Nigel Seel (Andover, UK)
55 out of 56 found this review helpful
Susskind describes the decades-long battle between the quantum mechanics community and the general relativists as to whether information is lost when objects pass through the event horizon of a black hole and the hole eventually evaporates. According to Prof. Hawking and the GR community, as nothing can ever reappear from inside an event horizon, the information is indeed totally lost.
Susskind and Gerard 't Hooft begged to differ. Loss of information would violate the basic time-reversibility of QM: Hawking's ideas would lead to universe-destroying phenomena (p. 23). Somehow, the information locked the wrong side of the event horizon must leak out via Hawking radiation. But how?
The resolution of this dilemma took many years of conjectures and refutations. Susskind takes us on a tour of entropy, holographic principles and physics at the Planck scale. And the adversarial plot keeps the reader turning the pages.
I am normally very dubious about popularisations. They proceed by raking up endless analogies which never quite fit together, so that by the end of the book, your mind is like that jig-saw puzzle you bought and could never fit together.
This book was never going to be the exception - the mathematics of quantum field theory, general relativity and string theory are just too arcane for popular culture concepts to cohere around. However, there are wonderful insights all the way through this book and we do end up learning something about the large scale map of the territory. Apparently even the experts find it hard to get the whole thing into one focus.
Susskind shines !! July 16, 2008
Wojciech Langer (Toronto, Ontario)
22 out of 29 found this review helpful
This is absolutely the greatest example of what popular science book about theoretical physics/cosmology should be !! Writing is so brilliant, witty, straightforward, direct and succinct, that regardless of education level, anybody can enjoy interesting content (history of science as well as author's personal story) of "The Black Hole War". Author uses analogies in the best possible way, comparable only to Brian Greene and Michio Kaku. Drawings are frequent, well selected, informative and easy to understand. He writes: "The real tools for understanding the quantum universe are abstract mathematics: infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces, projection operators, unitary matrices and a lot of other advanced principles that take a few years to learn. But let's see how we do in just a few pages". AND HE DELIVERES !! While this book could be a starter for anybody, I recommend it to all who know Kip Thorne's famous work. For reason unknown to me, important black hole "war" is not mentioned in "Black Holes & Time Warps" at all, therefore Susskind's work becomes great extension to BH history of science. Professor Susskind created a true masterpiece where he even acknowledges coexistence of science and faith by writing: "The British intellectual world seems to be big enough for both Dawkins and Polkinghorne". Nothing but big applaud for the author and his effort !!
highly recommend July 3, 2008
David W. Hiller (los angeles, ca usa)
20 out of 29 found this review helpful
highly recommended. very interesting read, even for those not familiar with the underlying physics. suskind is a talent writer, able to make esoteric concepts accessible to the lay-reader. he is also one of the vanguards of later 20th century physics. there is an on-going, vigorous debate swirling around the dark corners of our universe. for anyone with an interest in that debate, this is a must read.
A new rewiring of the brain of physicsts September 15, 2008
Jaume Puigbo Vila (Barcelona, Spain)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book tells the story of the "battle" between the author and Stephen Hawking regarding the latter claim that information is irretrievably lost in black holes.
This story is the extraordinary account of the paradigm shift that has occurred in physics in the last 25 years. Moreover, the book reads like a novel thanks to the various analogies and the anecdotes concerning the lives and personalities of the physicists involved. In summary, a very recommendable book for someone who wants to keep abreast of the advances in quantum gravity and cosmology, although the author discusses also the basic concepts of quantum mechanics and relativity.
Very strange things seem to happen in the vicinity of black holes and, as Susskind says, this needs rewiring of our brains, as we had to do before for relativity and quantum mechanics. When someone approaches and finally crosses a black hole horizon we have a similar situation as the famous Schroedinger's cat paradox. For the astronaut crossing the horizon, nothing happens (if the black hole is big enough so that he does not still notice the effect of the tidal forces). For the observer outside he deducts that the astronaut is fried to death. Believe it or not, this is not a contradiction in physics because the two of them will never be able to compare notes. Susskind calls this paradox black hole complementarity. The holographic principle and Maldacena's duality (well explained in an article in Scientific American not too long ago) are also part of the resolution of the battle for which Hawking finally conceded defeat in 2007.
Chapter 23 hints to a new duality that could indirectly provide experimental evidence for String Theory. Strings and hadrons behave in similar ways and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven is investigating the properties of the quark-gluon plasma which mirror, 20 orders of magnitude higher, the properties of fundamental strings. Quantum gravity in Anti de Sitter space would be similar to quantum chromodynamics. However, our universe is not an Anti de Sitter spacetime. In any case some light between the shadows is finally shining in quantum gravity.
THE BLACK HOLE WAR: MY BATTLE WITH STEPHEN HAWKING October 2, 2008
Leslie S. Kish
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
WELL WRITEN CHRONICLE OF A FAIRLY ARCANE SUBJECT. INTENDED FOR READERS WITH AN INEREST IN QUANTUM MECHAMICS, COSMOLOGY AND PHYICS IN GENERAL.
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