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

Susskind's book is a lot of fun. It's short on physics (which is a good thing for the layman) but long on personalities. It does include a lot of name dropping and some ingratiating attempts to include Susskind with the recent big boys of physics -- Feynmann, 't Hooft and Hawking -- but he does belong there as an original maverick (who was generally right). His amusing, laconic style, with irreverent detours, is engaging and pretty good for a physicist.

But the best part of the book is its description of the personalities involved and, untittingly, most revealing of Susskind's himself. The last chapter, entitled "Humility," is a gentle and wry criticism of the great Stephen Hawking, who was behind the curve and tried to claim it was he who figured out the conservation paradox of his own black hole writings. When, of course, it wasn't.

The most surprising thing about all of these reviews is that I haven't seen the one by Harriet Klausner yet. Where is she when you really need her?

This is a good book and the author does a great job of explaining the black hole information paradox. He also does a v.g. job of describing the personalities of those involved. The discussion of thought experiments in theoretical physics is also outstanding. What mars the book is the fact that the author is guilty of so many of the quirks that he often points out in his adversaries. It is amusing to see a lesser light take digs at such brilliant men as Hawking, Dyson and Penrose - clearly the author has more than a normal dose of chutzpah.
In light of all the recent attacks on string theory I think he must find it redeeming to be on the offensive....
Still, he does present some very salient arguments and even if you disagree with any of his conclusions it is a thought-provoking read - and I do want to believe that this was his chief motive in writing the book.

If you want a clear explanation of the basics of quantum mechanics and string theory, read this book. In addition to learning more than you ever thought possible about the physics of black holes, author Leonard Susskind provides clear definitions of the seemingly craziest new developments in theoretical physics, such as The Holographic Principle, Black Hole Complimentarity, and anti-de Sitter Space.

If you're interested in theoretical physics, you can't go wrong with this book.

Susskind mainly does well here. He takes the time to give a pretty good qualitative grounding in a number of important concepts. His extended discussion of entropy is particularly well done and does provide a good foundation for understanding the black hole information destruction question. He also does a good job at describing some of the basic underpinnings of string theory and membranes. However, he cannot resist making the political statement here and there and, while his physics may be sophisticated, those statements quickly indicate that his politics isn't.

His statements around global warming in particular reflect a willingness to accept assertions without any scientific rigor behind them. This reflects something that is a paradox with a lot of these popular physics books, particularly when they are written by members of the academy: it is often difficult to distinguish between the real scholarship, on the one hand, and the prevailing academic herd orthodoxy, on the other, in which many assertions are simply accepted without the requirement of evidence, much less proof.

This is a phenomenon that Lee Smolin discusses perceptively in his very good "The Trouble with Physics." While many may be tempted to dismiss Smolin, the arrogance that he describes is clearly detectable here.

Other issues include the writing, which is at best pedestrian (don't expect the literary gifts of a Brian Greene) and the insistent name dropping, apparently intended to remind the reader of his membership in the pantheon with Feynman and Hawking. Susskind's dismissive attitude towards religious scholarship (including a particularly insulting (and utterly gratuitous) passage regarding Talmudic scholars) is also troubling. This is particularly ironic as the similarities between the outer edges of physics and religion are notable: a claim by a small elite to be the only ones who truly understand the deep, central tenets; jargon and language not accessible to the layperson; the claim by the elite to be necessary to intermediate between laypeople and "the truth"; resistance of the subject matter to empirical or factual testing; factions; and lack of relevance to the "everyday" concerns of most people (while physics may claim relevance because it deals with a search for "deep truths" and "how things work" this is not that far, if it is different at all, from what religion claims). While modern physics is descended from a discipline that employed empirical testing of hypotheses, as Susskind himself admits, this is generally no longer possible (he notes that the Planck scale is unlikely to ever be tested due to the energy required and some predicted phenomena may take longer than the age of the universe to observe). But is modern physics still "science" simply because it is an offshoot of a scientific heritage? How long can it remain purely theoretical (i.e., ideas "proven" by how well they correlate with the predictions of other purely theoretical, but more "accepted", constructs) before it becomes a somewhat more mathematical version of religion or philosophy? These are not new ideas or thoughts, but you would think that they would give a knowledgeable physicist pause before he so cavalierly dismisses religion.

These forays into religion and humor don't help Susskind's credibility. A further example of this is a really bad (and again, totally out of the blue) New Jersey joke (about there being little to do in central New Jersey). Apparently he hasn't gotten the memo that, in 2008, there is nothing more cliched and tired than a New Jersey joke. Also, he apparently doesn't understand that, in Princeton, you are 1 hour away from Manhattan and also about 1 hour away from Atlantic City. That may not make central New Jersey as exciting or exotic as, say, Hong Kong, but for "excitement" and "culture" it sure as hell beats his home town of Palo Alto (and trust me, I know Palo Alto first hand).

However, these are relatively minor annoyances if you're there for the physics. This book is still reasonably useful and is worth the time to read. For instance, it compares very well with Hawking's attempts at popular physics writing. The book does share one of the flaws of so many of these books in the sense that the reader is gulled by the relatively easy early going to believe that he or she can understand the more abstract and advanced concepts by way of analogy, but of course this isn't possible and at some point, you just throw up your hands and realize that you're no longer going to be convinced of anything at a gut level -- you just have to accept it or not. In particular, I defy anyone who is not a physicist to really understand the death blow that was dealt to Hawking's information loss position by reading this book. It can't be done; the path is simply too complex and gnarled. The result is a feeling, to some extent, of being cheated by the belief that you'd come away from it understanding things a bit better.

In the end, the most valuable thing about the book was that it left some hope that the deeper mysteries of string theory and quantum gravity may, just may, be subject to indirect experimental testing by way of the tentative equivalencies he identifies between quantum theory and nuclear physics (e.g. gravitons and "glueballs") at the end of the book.

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.