|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Frequently Bought Together
Product Details
|
Product Description
Review
Entertaining...both lucid and enjoyable...Like the best teachers, Susskind makes it fun to learn. With a deft use of analogy and a flair for language, he tames the most ferocious concepts...He has come up with the best visual metaphor for the multidimensinality of string theory that I've yet come across, one that alone is worth the price of the book - Los Angeles Times 'Susskind is very down to earth, an easy-going and entertaining guide through the most exciting frontiers of theoretical physics' #NAME?
Book Description
At the beginning of the 21st century, physics is being driven to very unfamiliar territory--the domain of the incredibly small and the incredibly heavy. The new world is a world in which both quantum mechanics and gravity are equally important. But mysteries remain. One of the biggest involved black holes. Famed physicist Stephen Hawking claimed that anything sucked in a black hole was lost forever. For three decades, Leonard Susskind and Hawking clashed over the answer to this problem. Finally, in 2004, Hawking conceded.
THE BLACK HOLE WAR will explain the mind-blowing science that finally won out, and the emergence of a new paradigm that argues the world--this catalog, your home, your breakfast, you--is actually a hologram projected from the edges of space.
THE BLACK HOLE WAR will explain the mind-blowing science that finally won out, and the emergence of a new paradigm that argues the world--this catalog, your home, your breakfast, you--is actually a hologram projected from the edges of space.
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
General Relativity Meets Quantum Mechanics,
By
This review is from: The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics (Hardcover)
There is a lot of physics contained in this excellent book - modern, cutting-edge theoretical physics, that is. In 24 chapters and almost 450 pages, the author guides the reader through a maze of seemingly contradictory scientific arguments in order to resolve an important issue in the physics of black holes: whether information is forever lost to the universe after it has passed through a black hole's horizon. In essence, this implies a type of reconciliation between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Although this involves very abstract and difficult-to-grasp concepts, the author, one of the main adversaries in this so-called black hole war, gently guides the reader through the various issues, starting from first principles right up to the cutting-edge subject at hand. The book is amply illustrated with many diagrams, drawings, figures and pictures in order to help further clarify the already-lucid descriptions that are given in the text. But, in addition to all the technical issues, the author has included much of the human element in this war. Interpersonal matters, many personal anecdotes, people's backgrounds and even the odd joke all contribute towards illustrating that the main theme of this book is a truly human endeavor: to understand a bit more about our universe. The writing style is clear, authoritative, friendly, even chatty and very engaging; the 450 pages fly by amazingly quickly. Although science buffs are likely to be those who will enjoy this book the most, the writing style is such that its contents are easily accessible to a much broader readership.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not bad, but could be better,
This review is from: The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics (Hardcover)
I used to enjoy popular science books by inspiring writers such as Hawking, Penrose, ans Kaku, so I had big hopes for Leonard Susskind's "Black Hole War". The book itself was pretty good, but there were few things I was not crazy about. The book introduces new concepts on a very fundamental level, I understand that book was aimed at very wide audience, but if someone needs explaining exponent notation, or how 2-dimensional space is different than 3-dimmensional space, probably will not get much out of the intricacies of information loss in black hole. Another thing that set this book apart from other popular science books, was the fact that the book is as much about physics as it is about Leonard Sussking himself. That would not be necessarily bad, if it wasn't for quite opinionated statements about other physicist, especially Stephen Hawking. It reads sometimes like if there was really a 'war', then hostilities were on one side only. Too bad, expected more.
10 of 14 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
The history is ultimately written by the winners,
By
This review is from: The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics (Hardcover)
Leonard Susskind is not only a co-father of string theory, the holographic principle, and many other key concepts of physics but also one of the most original physicists of our era.He's been fighting against some superficially plausible but fundamentally wrong ideas for decades. During this ferocious fight, he had to discover many fascinating things about quantum gravity. The battle was about the preservation of the information by black holes. Using revolutionary but approximate results, Stephen Hawking has argued since the 1970s that the information is lost after a black hole evaporates. Leonard Susskind claimed that it was preserved: this preservation, also called unitarity, is one of the postulates of quantum mechanics and these postulates are and have to be completely universal. Susskind was right. We know many reasons why it is so, including recent results in string theory, and many of them are explained in the book. We also know loopholes that show that Hawking's old qualitative arguments are not quite correct even though his numerical results are numerically almost accurate. It took many years for Hawking to understand and admit that the information was preserved in the full theory and that physics makes sense. During those years, Susskind was a new "Ahab" waiting for Hawking's elusive concession. However, the book offers a lot of personal stories and emotions, too. Susskind talks about several well-known names of science such as Stephen Hawking, Gerard 't Hooft, Roger Penrose, and Richard Feynman. All of them, and others, have been players in this fascinating story. Although Susskind is arguably the least known to the general public among these fives names, every real physicist would tell you that he is indisputably the most qualified person among the five to explain how black holes actually work in this quantum world. Because as an outspoken son of a plumber, he is also close to the middle and working class and an articulate peer of Brian Greene and other great and charismatic science communicators, everyone who is interested in black holes, gravity, and quantum mechanics should read this book. The physics book market was recently flooded by a lot of trash written by crackpots similar to Peter Woit and Lee Smolin and it is time for the most intelligent readers to pull their heads out of the sand and see one of the great things that cutting-edge theoretical physics has actually achieved by 2008.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Want to see more reviews on this item?
|
Most recent customer reviews |
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
- Books > New & Used Textbooks > Sciences > Astronomy & Astrophysics
- Books > New & Used Textbooks > Sciences > Physics
- Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Astronomy > Astronomy
- Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Astronomy > Astrophysics & Space Science
- Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Astronomy > Cosmology
- Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Mathematics > Mathematical Physics
- Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Physics > Quantum Theory
- Books > Science > Astronomy > Astronomy
- Books > Science > Astronomy > Cosmology
- Books > Science > History & Philosophy > History of Science
- Books > Science > Mathematics > Mathematical Physics
- Books > Science > Physics > Astrophysics
- Books > Science > Physics > Cosmology
- Books > Science > Physics > Quantum Theory
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
