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

We found 26 Reddit comments about The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics
Author of "The Cosmic Landscape".
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26 Reddit comments about The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics:

u/waffle299 · 62 pointsr/askscience

In the book The Black Hole War, Stephen Hawking made a deliberately provocative comment in a small physics symposium that, if Professor Hawking was right, would shake the foundations of quantum physics to the ground. Leonard Susskind disagreed with Hawking's position, but was unable to demonstrate it mathematically.

It would take him ten years to do so, involving him with many other physicists and leading to several startling discoveries about the nature of black holes, time and space, leading to the holographic principle. Ten years of furious, brilliant research by multiple luminaries in the field, all touched off by a single, insightful question by Professor Hawking.

Susskind's book is quite accessible and well worth a read. Readers will get to see how physics is done, at least at the social and professional level. Plus, for a while and through Susskind, one gets to hang around a quiet social gathering of some of the most brilliant physicists the world has seen.

u/NobblyNobody · 22 pointsr/Physics

Hawking admitted he was wrong and paid off the bet, Len Susskind wrote a book on 'The Black Hole War' that covers it all pretty well, slightly iffy quality vid of a talk on the subject from himself here.

I don't think you could really call it settled necessarily, as far as I understand it there is currently another (continuing?) debate surrounding the 'firewall paradox'. I guess this article sums it up ok.

u/luminiferousethan_ · 13 pointsr/cosmology
u/casperdellarosa · 7 pointsr/news

I deeply respect Hawking, but he often makes mistakes due to the fact that he has to do the calculations in his head. Read Leonard Susskind's http://www.amazon.com/The-Black-Hole-War-Mechanics/dp/0316016411 for an example of when Hawking incorrectly asserted that black holes violate the second law of thermodynamics.

u/The_Serious_Account · 7 pointsr/AskScienceDiscussion

While I think you're right, there's still some debate in the physics community about whether the particle becomes entangled with the black hole. It assumes information is preserved in black holes, which goes into the question of the black hole information paradox.

Susskind wrote an entire book on that exact subject called The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics. While Hawking did concede and agree with Susskind, not everyone did and it's still an active area of debate and research.

Edit: For some very closely related discussion read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewall_(physics)

u/DopeWeasel · 6 pointsr/Physics

For those who haven't read this, there's quite a bit of insight into various arguments between Hawking, Susskind and others surrounding the nature of black holes. Great read!

The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0316016411/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_ba6IDbV4BJ2DK

u/angryobbo · 5 pointsr/Physics

Ah, Leonard Susskind is a boss.
I'd recommend giving The Black Hole War a read if you haven't already.

u/mattymillhouse · 5 pointsr/suggestmeabook

Some of my favorites:

Brian Greene -- The Fabric of the Cosmos, The Elegant Universe, and The Hidden Reality. Greene is, to my mind, very similar to Hawking in his ability to take complex subjects and make them understandable for the physics layman.

Hawking -- I see you've read A Brief History of Time, but Hawking has a couple of other books that are great. The Grand Design, The Universe in a Nutshell, and A Briefer History of Time.

Same thing applies to Brian Cox. Here's his Amazon page.

Leonard Susskind -- The Black Hole Wars. Here's the basic idea behind this book. One of the basic tenets of physics is that "information" is never lost. Stephen Hawking delivered a presentation that apparently showed that when matter falls into a black hole, information is lost. This set the physics world on edge. Susskind (and his partner Gerard T'Hooft) set out to prove Hawking wrong. Spoilers: they do so. And in doing so, they apparently proved that what we see as 3 dimensions is probably similar to those 2-D stickers that project a hologram. It's called the Holographic Principle.

Lee Smolin -- The Trouble with Physics. If you read the aforementioned books and/or keep up with physics through pop science sources, you'll probably recognize that string theory is pretty dang popular. Smolin's book is a criticism of string theory. He's also got a book that's on my to-read list called Three Roads to Quantum Gravity.

Joao Magueijo -- Faster Than the Speed of Light. This is another physics book that cuts against the prevailing academic grain. Physics says that the speed of light is a universal speed limit. Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Magueijo's book is about his theory that the speed of light is, itself, variable, and it's been different speeds at different times in the universe's history. You may not end up agreeing with Magueijo, but the guy is smart, he's cocky, and he writes well.

u/KM1604 · 3 pointsr/Christianity

Time is technically a dimension, but it's a dimension which is only relative because we chose the speed of light to be our constant. It makes the math easier. The idea of multiple dimensions beyond the fourth is again exactly that - something to make the math easier. The more you study the various models for quantum mechanics or relativity, the more you realize that each model does one thing well...and that it does everything else poorly.

I understand that your premise is that you believe we can imagine the difference between n and n+1 dimensional experiences for values of n <= 3, and you want to expand that to n > 3 to include a model for God's experience with creation, but it just doesn't work that way. It's an interesting thing to do if you're writing a physics text for the greater population. It's like when Susskind wrote this book and included the bit about black holes being a hologram whose event horizon was determined by the amount of information unretrievable (since his whole point is that no info is lost), and that the surface area of the event horizon is equal to the number of bits of information contained in the black hole if you assume that the Planck length is the smallest surface area capable of containing the bit.

That leads to the model of the event horizon and black holes where the information is correctly encoded on the event horizon, and that as energy is given off by the black hole the event horizon decreases by a corresponding area to represent the information ejected by the radiation.

He then makes the fantastic leap of conjecturing that perhaps the entire observable universe is a giant black hole and we live inside it...which would make all of us holograms projected onto the inside of the black hole from our bits of information encoded on the event horizon...which to us is the boundaries of our known universe/singularity.

It's an interesting idea, but to take that idea (or the n+1 analogy of dimensional analysis you're doing with time) and apply it to the theology of a very real and non-theoretical God would be to misunderstand the limitations of our model, and to unjustly limit God to the rules and limits He placed on the observable universe.

You'll forgive me for ignoring the "symmetric bilinear form" but even the wikipedia article references it as a generalization and not to be correctly used without additional terms in any practical application...like explaining the nature of God.

u/adj-phil · 3 pointsr/videos

The Black Hole War by Leondard Susskind covers all this.

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Hole-War-Stephen-Mechanics/dp/0316016411

u/omanilovereddit · 3 pointsr/AskScienceDiscussion

This is the theory OP is looking for.

Or read this book :

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Hole-War-Stephen-Mechanics/dp/0316016411

u/HabeusCuppus · 3 pointsr/Futurology

This is closer to ELI15 (high school geometry) but should help you out I hope.

a good lay discussion of the holographic principle is included in leonard susskind's The Black Hole War

but I'll reproduce some of the explanation here: basically there is a principle in some string theories (and believed necessary to quantum gravity) that states that a total description of a volume (3 dimensional space) can be thought of as encoded on the surface of the volume of that space. This was first noted around 1978, so it's not a new theory.

A volume can't be more complicated than the amount of information (entropy) that can be written to the surface of the volume.

If a volume becomes too complex for its description to fit on its surface area, then the volume will grow until it does (see black holes).

In the strongest form of this principle, this isn't just a mathematical constraint on volume complexity but an actual property of reality: everything apparently going on within a volume is the result of a projection from the surface surrounding it, and properties of 3D space (such as being 3D) or having gravity are emergent in the way that "holographic" projections are in optical illusions, and only occur at low energies and macroscopic scales.

This was inspired by black hole thermodynamics which is why there is a lay discussion in the book I mentioned above.

u/ux500 · 2 pointsr/science

There is a fascinating book on all of this called "The Black Hole War" by Leonard Susskind. It is very accessible to non physicists and tells the story about what a black hole is and the struggle in the physics community to understand them.

http://www.amazon.com/Black-Hole-War-Stephen-Mechanics/dp/0316016411/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251142505&sr=8-1

u/jetoze · 2 pointsr/books

I really enjoyed The Black Hole War by Leonard Susskind.

u/roontish12 · 2 pointsr/askscience

This is exactly what this book is about.

u/polyscimajor · 2 pointsr/space

Leonard Susskind, as is mentioned, wrote a book that I strongly recommend The Black Hole Warin which he goes on to talk about A.) Hawking Radiation B.) Whether "Information" that goes into a black hole is permanently destroyed and for me, at lest, C.) he brought up the notion of the universe being a holographic image.

He sets out to write the book for the populous at large, and I feel he succeed in that. The Book was a VERY excellent read for the subject at hand. I would strongly recommend it to anyone who frequents this sub reddit.

u/Akathos · 1 pointr/videos

Would the observer actually see anything? If he would see the probe, wouldn't that mean that black holes shouldn't be black because of the imprints of stars that fell into it (if it's a large enough hole of course, otherwise it would've been shredded to bits).

If the light waves of those stars are stretched to extremely low frequency radio waves, does that mean that the "imprint" of the probe on the black hole is invisible to us?

I recently read The Black Hole War by Leonard Susskind who states that the information of the probe (the bits of probe itself actually) did came out of the black hole in Hawking radiation? He also states that the horizon of a black hole (or the area one planck-length above it) is extremely hot...

Okay, this question is kind of messed up right now, so again: how is a black hole black if information comes back to the observer?

u/justaquestion223 · 1 pointr/askscience

If you're really interested in the subject, one of the best books on black holes I've ever read it, appropriately titled, The Black Hole War(My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics) by Leonard Susskind.

u/l27_0_0_1 · 1 pointr/movies

There's a cool popular science book that mentions that even in 90s-00s he was quite unwilling to accept the wrongness of one of his theories when it was proven to be false by a group of physicists.

u/REGULAR_POST · 1 pointr/space

I know I’m showing up a bit late, but I absolutely have to recommend The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics by Leonard Susskind:

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Hole-War-Stephen-Mechanics/dp/0316016411

I know it might sound like an overly-specific or technical book, and the title gives the impression that the author has a chip on his shoulder about Stephen Hawking, but I can assure you that neither of those things are the case!

The story of the “war” itself is really just about how Susskind and Hawking had a friendly scientific disagreement over whether it’s theoretically possible to retrieve something after it enters a black hole. They discussed it for years, and eventually it was Stephen Hawking who admitted he was wrong.

But the reason I’m mentioning the book is that it does an amazing job of explaining everything. Susskind knows that in order to write a story about the black hole war that people will actually find interesting, he has to explain black holes, gravity, light, and quantum physics in ways that normal people can understand. And he does!

The book isn’t amazing because it’s a story about someone who proved to Stephen Hawking that he was wrong. It’s amazing because when you’re finished with it, you’ll actually understand why he was wrong, and why it’s so important.

Other people have suggested some great books, and it’s never too late to go back to school, but if you want a book that will really spark your passion and motivation, I can’t recommend this book enough.

Now I’m all hyped and feel like I should read it again...

u/GarethNZ · 1 pointr/PhilosophyofScience

You all might enjoy:

The Black Hole War

Summary / Discussion

@Amazon

Although parts of the discussion on this thread need to differentiate with information in the 'real world' sense, and knowledge / inferred information.

u/CKoenig · 1 pointr/cosmology
u/JustDroppinBy · 1 pointr/trees

I'm going back to school right now to raise my GPA so that I can eventually become an astrophysicist. Never did much homework in high school... I can't take physics courses without the preliminary course credits first, so my best sources are books written by physicists and the only one I've got is this one. I'm almost finished with it, though, and looking for suggestions on what to read next. Any thoughts?

u/juuular · 1 pointr/changemyview

Given our current understanding of physics, eventually the universe will experience a heat death and all the stars and all the black holes will evaporate. Some of the crazier theories posit that empty space will spontaneously decay to a lower energy state and cause another Big Bang of sorts.

Good further links for the interested:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-EilZ4VY5Vs
https://www.amazon.com/Many-Worlds-One-Search-Universes/dp/0809067226
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0316016411/ref=pd_aw_fbt_14_img_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=1XND76JQYDEBCX9ZK05Y

u/DashingLeech · 1 pointr/space

For more details on the firewall paradox, I like Leonard Susskind's lectures, and especially his book, The Black Hole War, which is very accessible. He focuses on the holographic principle as the solution (falling observer sees no big change, outside observer sees them destroyed by firewall), but as far as I know this hasn't been fully resolved yet.