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Showing reviews 1-5 of 51
 A popularisation that mostly works July 22, 2008
Nigel Seel (Wells, UK)
118 out of 120 found this review helpful
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.
Susskind shines !! July 16, 2008
Wojciech Langer (Toronto, Ontario)
34 out of 42 found this review helpful
This is absolutely the greatest example of what popular science book about theoretical physics/cosmology should be !! Writing is so brilliant, witty, straightforward, direct and succinct, that regardless of education level, anybody can enjoy interesting content (history of science as well as author's personal story) of "The Black Hole War". Author uses analogies in the best possible way, comparable only to Brian Greene and Michio Kaku. Drawings are frequent, well selected, informative and easy to understand. He writes: "The real tools for understanding the quantum universe are abstract mathematics: infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces, projection operators, unitary matrices and a lot of other advanced principles that take a few years to learn. But let's see how we do in just a few pages". AND HE DELIVERES !! While this book could be a starter for anybody, I recommend it to all who know Kip Thorne's famous work. For reason unknown to me, important black hole "war" is not mentioned in "Black Holes & Time Warps" at all, therefore Susskind's work becomes great extension to BH history of science. Professor Susskind created a true masterpiece where he even acknowledges coexistence of science and faith by writing: "The British intellectual world seems to be big enough for both Dawkins and Polkinghorne". Nothing but big applaud for the author and his effort !!
If you are a fan of Black Hole theory... October 9, 2008
MikeK (Silicon Valley)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
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 September 15, 2008
Jaume Puigbo Vila (Barcelona, Spain)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
General Susskind's Memoir April 13, 2009
C. Asplund (Santa Barbara, CA, USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Excellent reading for those interested in the latest developments (~2008) in theoretical gravitational, high-energy, and string physics, straight from one of the field's most distinguished and original practitioners. Most valuable are his anecdotes from being on the front lines of this scientific debate, particularly his interactions with Hawking and 't Hooft. There are also many imaginative and graphic explanations of black hole physics, for example the "dumb hole" (or "acoustic black hole") analogy and the "Alice's airplane" description of de-localization near an event horizon. Though the black hole war may be over, others rage on. Perhaps Susskind will treat us to an account of some of those in the future...
Showing reviews 1-5 of 51
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