The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics. By Leonard Susskind. Back Bay Books.
The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics
by Leonard Susskind
New York: Back Bay Books, 2008
When something is sucked into a black hole, is it lost forever?
Three decades ago, the American physicist Leonard Susskind and the British physicist Stephen Hawking began clashing over the answer to this question. Hawking insisted that anything that fell into a black hole disappeared. But Susskind and the Dutch physicist Gerard ‘t Hooft realized that if this was true, then everything we understand about the fundamental laws of nature would have to be tossed out.
The Black Hole War is the thrilling story of the epic contest that ensued — an illuminating, exhilarating exploration of modern physics, quantum improbabilities, and the fate of stars. To get Hawking finally to admit that he was wrong, Susskind and ‘t Hooft would push physics way beyond the weird: they would prove that everything in our physical world — this book, your house, yourself — is actually a hologram projected from the farthest realm of space.
Leonard Susskind is also the author of The Cosmic Landscape. He is the Felix Bloch Professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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