The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics
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What happens when something is sucked into a black hole? Does it disappear? Three decades ago, a young physicist named Stephen Hawking claimed that it did — and in doing so put at risk everything we know about the fundamental laws of the universe. 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 theories of black holes with their own sense of reality — an effort that would eventually result in Hawking admitting he was wrong and Susskind and 't Hooft realizing that our world is a hologram projected from the outer boundaries of space. The Barnes & Noble Review In ancient Greece, aspirants to the Elusinian Mysteries, seeking to partake of godlike knowledge into the workings of the cosmos, had to undergo the rigors of travel, fasting, ingestion of mind-altering substances, ritual chanting and dramatics, and a climactic orgy. Nowadays, those selfsame seekers have it easy, needing merely to purchase one of the many available mind-blowing books of popular science and dive into theophany-inducing explanations of reality's screwball quantum substrate. A vivid and fascinating case in point is Leonard Susskind's The Black Hole War, freshly available in paperback after its well-received 2008 hardcover debut. At the core of this stimulating volume is an arcane but easily statable controversy of nearly 30 years' duration: is information (in the technical, Shannonesque sense) utterly and forever destroyed by black-hole ingestion? This simple yet deep question, full of dramatic implications for all of physics, involves everything from string theory to brane theory to holographic models of the cosmos, all of which, plus much more, is laid out in Baedecker-lush detail by Susskind, whose window-pane prose and Holmesian logic foster epiphanies in the reader in nearly every chapter. Susskind is no dispassionate journalist but rather an insider and participant in this "war." Facing a mighty antagonist in the form of Stephen Hawking, Susskind chronicles their intellectual battles with zest and not a little arrogance of the victor (for the current consensus on the topic favors Susskind's camp). His ultimate description of Hawking as a tragic figure of diminished abilities, finally forced to concede defeat, should forever dispel the stereotype of scientists as ice-water-veined brainiacs. But Susskind never allows the emotional components of the battle to cloud his delivery of the facts and theories. He arrays the cliffhanger developments of three decades, along with just the right amount of backstory, in the deft manner of a novelist, proving himself a born storyteller whose unconventional troupe of players just happens to consist of gluons and photons against a scrim of Anti de Sitter Space. --Paul DiFilippo
Introduction 3Part I The Gathering Storm1 The First Shot 172 The Dark Star 253 Not Your Grandfather's Geometry 504 "Einstein, Don't Tell God What to Do" 765 Planck Invents a Better Yardstick 1116 In a Broadway Bar 1177 Energy and Entropy 1268 Wheeler's Boys, or How Much Information Can You Stuff in a Black Hole? 1439 Black Light 157Part II Surprise Attack10 How Stephen Lost His Bits and Didn't Know Where to Find Them 17911 The Dutch Resistance 19312 Who Cares? 20013 Stalemate 21114 Skirmish at Aspen 225Part III Counterattack15 The Battle of Santa Barbara 23316 Wait! Reverse the Rewiring 26517 Ahab in Cambridge 27118 The World as a Hologram 290Part IV Closing the Ring19 Weapon of Mass Deduction 30920 Alice's Airplane, or The Last Visible Propeller 35421 Counting Black Holes 36622 South America Wins the War 39523 Nuclear Physics? You're Kidding! 42224 Humility 433Epilogue 442Acknowledgments 449Glossary 451Index 457
