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Black Hole War My Battle with Stephen Hawking
 
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Black Hole War My Battle with Stephen Hawking (Hardcover)

by Leonard Susskind (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
RRP: £27.99
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 480 pages
  • Publisher: Little Brown and Company (1 Jul 2008)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0316016403
  • ISBN-13: 978-0316016407
  • Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 15.2 x 4.1 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 47,666 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in these categories:

    #23 in  Books > Science & Nature > Physics > Applied Physics > Astrophysics
    #36 in  Books > Science & Nature > Physics > Quantum Physics > Relativistic Quantum Mechanics
    #41 in  Books > Science & Nature > Physics > Theoretical Physics

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A popularisation which mostly works, 22 Jul 2008
By Nigel Seel (Andover, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)      
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.
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8 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars The history is ultimately written by the winners, 20 Jul 2008
By Lubos Motl (Cambridge, MA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
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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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant..., 11 Feb 2009
This is a really excellent book, Susskind patiently explains his theory as it takes shape over years, and in terms a layman can understand. I was left, entertained as well as knowing far more about the nature of our universe. Science really is more exciting than fiction, and Susskind really can explain his subject in the simplest of terms.
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