The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics

by Leonard Susskind

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0316016411
• ISBN13: 9780316016414
• Release Date: July 2009
• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 0.99 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Beating Hawking at physics like beating Michael Jordan at basketbal

This book contains the amazing story of how Stephen Hawking lost a bet over a matter of physics. For the very few who don't know, Hawking is to modern physics like Michael Jordan is to basketball. Hawking started his career by determining, contrary to over fifty years of popular wisdom, that Black Holes would radiate and eventually dissolve. As follow ups he authored the mega seller Brief History of Time and has generally been at the forefront of modern cosmology for the past thirty years. Oh and yeah, he also holds the very same academic chair at Oxford University once held by Isaac Newton. So it goes without saying that winning a bet against him over a matter of physics is...well...astounding. But that's the story this book tells. Though the physics itself is incredibly complicated, the basic dispute raged over what happens to matter once it disappears beyond the event horizon of a Black Hole. As suggested by the question, does the matter permanently disappear never to be able to interact with the rest of the universe? Or alternatively, is that matter somehow still preserved able...not now obviously, but eventually someday...to re-interact with this universe from which it once came? Amazingly the two main fields of physics, quantum physics and relativity, seemed to suggest two different answers. For its part relativity seemed to suggest, as wagered by Hawking, that yes indeed, the matter would be lost. On the other hand quantum physics held that such a loss was impossible and that eventually (in like a number of years equal to 1 with 68 zeros behind it) the information could someday re-emerge. For reasons having to do with the failure of his own cosmological models Hawking surrendered on the bet. Yet the likes of Paul Davies (a professor with the University of Adelaide in Australia) think that perhaps Hawking may have been premature and may yet prevail. In this way, the development would be similar to Einstein dying having considered his cosmological constant to be a failure when modern physics supports the notion that at least for his part, Einstein was right after all. Regardless, and this is something Susskind is quick to point out, Hawking can still claim bragging rights for starting a discussion that runs to the heart of the question of whether quantum or relativistic reality controls in physics. And regardless of your position on this issue, you will no doubt find this to be an enlightening and highly accessible book.

If you are a fan of Black Hole theory...

If you are a fan of Black Hole theory, you have to read this book. There is enough intrigue here to keep you turning the pages, and the physics primer on Black Holes, Quantum Mechanics and Relativity is very approachable. This is not an in-depth book on the physics of Black Holes - on the contrary, this is an enjoyable read for those who appreciate the topic and respect the brilliance of Leonard Susskind. This book tells the story that few of us have heard (from any side) - and shows us the human side of theoretical physics. I have had the pleasure of attending lectures at Stanford with Prof. Susskind for the past 4 yrs. now. While his wit and colorful commentary do come out in the book, you will only get a glimpse of why he has such a following amongst "quantum groupies" and academics alike. I highly recommend this book.

A new rewiring of the brain of physicsts

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 Schrödinger'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.

A popularisation that mostly works

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.

The history is ultimately written by the winners

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 the organized tw-ts who were blinded by these cranks managed to erase the first version of my review, despite its having 56 helpful votes, so I had to repost it. 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.