Review by Choice Review
As the world awaits the results from the collision experiments from the most advanced and powerful European particle accelerator (CERN), Susskind (Stanford Univ.), a renowned theoretical physicist, offers this important, timely book, which delves into the related and disturbingly dangerous subject of black holes. Here, he describes disagreements that he and his Dutch friend, Gerard d'Hooft, had with the famous British mathematician/physicist Stephen Hawking on his predictions regarding the interaction of objects with black holes. This book provides an anecdotal, highly readable discussion of the background to black holes and the consequences of their existence. It also gives a detailed explanation of the author's differences with the interpretations of Stephen Hawking. The physics is presented without recourse to equations, and personal stories enliven the entire discourse. Susskind references his analysis with discussions he had with several other physicists involved in elucidating this arcane area of physics, which deals with relativity, quantum physics, and black holes. Useful sketches and diagrams make the discussion easier to follow, especially for the nonscientist. Includes footnotes and a good index with a glossary of terms. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. N. Sadanand Central Connecticut State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
THIS is your universe on acid: 10 dimensions of space, seven of which we cannot see, filled almost entirely with dark matter and dark energy - invisible thought stuff that serves to make the cosmologists' equations come out right. The cosmologists are stuck, with the rest of us, in Dimensions 1 through 3, and we are all made from what Earthlings quaintly regard as ordinary particles, the tiny fraction of matter that radiates and reflects mysterious waves called light. Compounding the indignity, this afterthought of an existence may be only an illusion - a holographic projection of some two-dimensional flatland that stretches like a timpani skin across the very edge of space. Plato had it backward. It's the shadows on the wall that are real. At night when our brains are unplugged from our senses and error-correction is off, we dream furiously. And so it is with 21st-century physics. Undeterred by experimental data - it would take a particle accelerator as big as the galaxy to test some of the latest cosmological contrivances - theorists have found a new role as entertainers, scientific Scheherazades. Leonard Susskind, a professor of theoretical physics at Stanford, is one of the wiliest. Three years ago in "The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design," he spun a tale of a multitude of different universes - nooks and crannies of a transcendent multiverse, or "landscape," each ruled by a different physics. This is probably the most controversial interpretation of superstring theory (some of Susskind's colleagues absolutely hate the idea), but it has its appeal. With so many universes out there, the fact of our own existence need not inspire worship and awe. We just happen to occupy one of the niches where the laws are favorable to carbon-based life. In his new book, "The Black Hole War: My Battle With Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics," Susskind's cosmos gets even weirder. Black holes already seemed scary enough, with their ability to swallow everything, including light. For a while, we learn, physicists were faced with the possibility that these cosmic vortexes might also be eaters of order, sucking up and destroying information. Like the Echthroi, the evil demons of entropy in Madeleine L'Engle's novel "A Wind in the Door," black holes might be chomping their way through the universe, ploughing sense into nonsense. The story of how Susskind and a colleague, the Dutch physicist Gerard 't Hooft, disproved (or at least undermined) the theory begins in 1983 at a San Francisco mansion owned by, of all people, Werner Erhard, the New Age entrepreneur who had made his fortune with a profitable cult called EST. Erhard, we're told, was also a "physics groupie," and he presided over salons in which some of the world's great theorists came to butt minds. The trouble began when Stephen Hawking made an astonishing prediction about what happens when information - a book, a painting, a musical recording or any pattern of matter or energy - falls into a black hole. Earlier, Hawking had proved that black holes eventually evaporate - at which point, he now claimed, everything inside them disappears from the universe. That might not sound like such a big deal. Just find another copy of whatever was lost. But that, Susskind realized, was not the point. Among the fundamentals of physics is that information must always be conserved. Even if you throw a DVD into a wood chipper, it is possible in theory (important weasel words) to chase down the splinters and recover the songs. Burned books can be reassembled from the smoke and ashes. Physics, in other words, dictates that everything that happens must be reversible. And that means information cannot be allowed simply to vanish. Even worse, quantum mechanics predicts that empty space seethes with tiny "virtual black holes," popping in and out of existence and gobbling up bits. If Hawking was right, Susskind concluded, "the foundations of our subject were destroyed." Not everyone was quite so alarmed. But Hawking's information paradox, as it came to be called, opened an arena in which two great theories of physics general relativity, describing gravity, and quantum mechanics, describing everything else - duked it out. I was eager to learn how, in the end, Susskind and company showed that Hawking was probably wrong - that information is indeed conserved. But first I had to get through a 66-page crash course on relativity and quantum mechanics. Every book about contemporary physics seems to begin this way, which can be frustrating to anyone who reads more than one. (Imagine if every account of the 2008 presidential campaign had to begin with the roots of Athenian democracy and the heritage of the French Enlightenment.) Finally we get to the heart of the story, and it turns out to be a mind-bender. To make sense of Hawking's paradox one must consider how much information, measured in bits, the 1s and 0s of binary code, can fit inside a black hole. The amount, it turns out, does not depend on the black hole's volume, as one might expect, but on the area of its "horizon" the flat, funnel-like mouth of the cosmic rabbit hole. Susskind explains this dizzying notion about as clearly as is probably possible. Every time a bit falls into a black hole, its opening expands by one square Planck length - an area billions and billions of times smaller than a proton. It is because of this phenomenon, Susskind contends, that the information isn't lost. A description of everything that falls into a black hole, whether a book or an entire civilization, is recorded on the surface of its horizon and radiated back like imagery on a giant drive-in movie screen. As with a hologram, three dimensions are contained within two. Strangest of all, we learn, this holographic conjecture - elevated in the book, perhaps prematurely, to the holographic principle - may apply to the entire universe. Hence the notion of our own reality as an illusory projection of some flatlanders' membrane world. It's as though the pixilated people we see on television are real and the actors are only secondary manifestations. Or something like that. How this all fits together is still pretty murky. "Getting our collective head around the holographic principle is probably the biggest challenge that we physicists have had since the discovery of quantum mechanics," Susskind admits. He speculates at one point that our big bang of a universe is some kind of "inside-out black hole" - one that spews everything outward instead of sucking it in. But wait. Maybe it just looks that way because time is moving backward! Or who knows? - maybe our universe is really a 3-D projection of a 4-D world falling through some hyperdimensional gullet! Toward the end of the book Susskind quotes Hawking: "We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the universe." Maybe. But not without a lot more data. Perhaps our universe is an 'inside-out black hole' that spews everything outward instead of sucking it in. George Johnson is the author of "Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order." His most recent book is "The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Bets made over a beer between scientists rarely make the headlines, but in 2004 Stephen Hawking conceded that he'd lost a bet and that a view he had held for 30 years was wrong. According to Stanford physicist Susskind (The Cosmic Landscape), one of the leaders of the anti-Hawking camp, the argument was a simple one: if information falls into a black hole, is it lost forever? Hawking's theory that information is destroyed undermined everything scientists thought they knew about quantum physics. Susskind gives readers a course in black holes, quantum physics and string theory as he explains his belief that information cannot be destroyed. Along the way he introduces bizarre theories like the Holographic Principle (which he helped develop), claiming that the third dimension is an illusion and that energy and matter are just forms of information. Susskind also profiles two hot-shot South American physicists who helped deliver the coup de grace to Hawking's argument. Black hole and Hawking fans should go for this book, even if the great physicist was wrong. B&w illus. (July 7) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Beyond the flamboyant title and subtitle, this book presents an interesting view of today's physics as it moves into ever more abstract areas. Writing for the general public, Susskind (The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design), a distinguished Stanford University theorist, uses a relaxed and often humorous style of presentation. He is candid in admitting that string theory, which is at the heart of the newest physics, lacks experimental proof. Nevertheless, string theory and other approaches have succeeded in convincing nearly everybody that information is not lost via black hole radiation. The author's informal style certainly makes his book more digestible for nonspecialists, but at times he wanders so far afield that the discussion thread is lost. Tighter editing could have made the book shorter and more understandable. Recommended for college and large public libraries.--Jack W. Weigel, Ann Arbor, MI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
