Black Hole War

Since I am not a physicist of any kind I don’t feel entitled to render any technical opinion with regard to Leonard Susskind’s latest, “The Black Hole War”, and his historical recounting of his debate with Stephen Hawking over the loss of information when it passes into a black hole.  I am also not a mathematician and am therefore unable to comment on the math that makes string theory, for instance, necessary to describe his side of the debate.  I am, however, an engineer and practically speaking the idea that as an object approaches a frontier it can never pass that frontier because with each step it moves it only divides its distance to the frontier in half.  Therefore the object will continue to get closer and closer into infinity and never make it to the frontier let alone past into it.  That has never made sense to me…the joke that an engineer can get close enough rings true.  Yet here we have a book that by my estimate is more accessible than Hawking’s (A Brief History of Time), as well as Woit’s counter argument to string theory (Not Even Wrong).  Susskind delivers a well written account of most of the basic physics necessary to understand his problem, as well as a few others.  He takes us through the years and many clues that were uncovered eventually leading Hawking to concede he was indeed wrong…apparently.   The war, by the way, was waged over a twenty year period but the only evidence that there was a war seems to be in Susskind’s mind.  Hawking’s concession comes at the end of the book, on page 445, if it’s a concession.  It seems Susskind spent the first 444 pages of the book teaching us physics so that we could understand when Hawking’s threw in the towel.  I did not learn enough to understand this defeat.  I did learn that the amount of money that it was worth to Hawking that he was right was exactly $1 U.S. dollar.   That came in the form of a wager he made with another physicist, but his concession left me flat.

This is a good book definitely written by a man who loves his work and can express concepts to the lay person on the order of Carl Sagan.  Black Holes are more understandable then anything I have read.  String theory is also well treated.  I recommend this book to the weekend physicist or perhaps grade school science teacher but I don’t think it presents anything close an understanding of the material to produce an explanation or to actually engage in a debate on the topic.  4-stars. 

Original Post on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/review/R2E1I7MILKPE44/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm