The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics
by Leonard Susskind
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Book Summary Information
Author: Leonard SusskindEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-07-07
ISBN: 0316016403
Number of pages: 480
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Book Reviews of The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics
Book Review: The Universe is an alien place compared to where we live.
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is an easy read, though the topic is not an easy topic. While there is a little math, it's both easy math and totally ignorable. While the primary subject is physics, there are lots of human interest features and anecdotes. The story starts with black holes. Early in the story, Stephen Hawking makes the claim that when you drop stuff into a black hole, everything about it disappears forever. This is a violation of a basic principle of physics. If you work out what happens to something from the point of view of General Relativity, it turns out to be very different from what happens from the point of Quantum Mechanics.
The Black Hole War is a war of ideas, not armies or people. To win the war, one idea must become more convincing than others. The story takes you through how issues were settled all the way to the startling conclusion of how this apparent contradiction is resolved. In my opinion, the resolution is that the Universe is an alien place compared to where we live. Understandable, but not intuitive. But it's the only Universe we have. This book provides an easy way to learning something more about it.
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Summary of The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics
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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