Black Hole War, or the Battle of the Black Hole
At the beginning of 2013, a new popular science book, published jointly with the Dynasty Humanitarian Foundation, was published in our publishing house. The purpose of the project Library of the Dynasty Foundation is to promote the publication of the best modern popular science books in the field of natural and human sciences. Thanks to this program, local readers could get acquainted with the works of such famous scientists and popularizers of science as Bill Bryson, Stephen Hawking, Michio Kaku, Brian Green, Jared Diamond and many other authors. Our previous book, released jointly with Dynasty, String Theory and Hidden Dimensions of the Universe by Steve Nadis and Shintan Yau, became a real bestseller, which was a great and pleasant surprise for us as publishers.
And today we want to tell you about the new edition, released as part of the Dynasty Library, the book Battle of the Black Hole. My battle with Stephen Hawking for peace, safe for quantum mechanics " (The Black Hole War) by the famous American scientist Leonard Susskind .
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This book is a bright, emotionally rich and popular chronicle of battles, which have just died down in advanced physics.
What happens when an object falls into a black hole? Does he disappear without a trace?
About thirty years ago, one of the leading researchers of the phenomenon of black holes, now the famous British physicist Stephen Hawking, said that this is exactly what is happening. But it turns out that such an answer threatens everything that we know about physics and the fundamental laws of the Universe. The author of this book, Leonard Susskind for many years argued with Stephen Hawking about the nature of black holes, until, finally, in 2004, he did not admit his mistake. The book, written by Susskind tells the fascinating story of this long-standing scientific confrontation, which radically changed the way physicists view the nature of reality. The new paradigm has led to the stunning conclusion that everything in our world is this book, your house, you yourself are just a kind of hologram projected from the edges of the Universe.
The book is dedicated to the intellectual battle around a single mental experiment. In 1976, Stephen Hawking thought about throwing a piece of information - a book, a computer, even just an elementary particle - into a black hole. Black holes, Hawking believed, are irretrievable traps, and for the outside world a fallen piece of information will be irreversibly lost. This seemingly innocent conclusion is not as harmless as it seems; it is capable of undermining and overthrowing the entire magnificent building of modern physics. Some terrible failure happened: the most fundamental law of nature, the law of conservation of information, was under threat. It was clear to those who followed the events: either Hawking is wrong, or the three-hundred-year-old stronghold of physics will fall.
But at first few people paid attention to it. For almost two decades, the discussion proceeded almost imperceptibly. Together with the Dutch physicist Gerard 't Hooft, Leonard Susskind together represented the whole army that fought on the same side of the intellectual front. Stephen Hawking with a small army of relativists was on the other side. Up until the early 1990s, most theoretical physicists, especially string theory experts, did not react to the threat that Hawking asserted, and then most of them considered his conclusions erroneous. In any case - while erroneous.
The battle with the black hole was a genuine scientific discussion, completely unlike the pseudo-debate around the “intelligent design theory” or the reality of global warming, where the false arguments invented by political manipulators to fool naive people do not reflect real scientific differences. On the contrary, the debate about black holes was real. Outstanding theoretical physicists could not agree on which physical principles to trust and which ones to refuse. Should Hawking follow with his conservative ideas about space-time, or follow 't Hooft and Susskind with their conservative views on quantum mechanics? Both points of view seemed to lead to only paradoxes and contradictions. Either space-time — the scene on which the laws of nature work — is not at all what we used to imagine it, or the great principles of increasing entropy and preserving information are erroneous. Millions of years of cognitive evolution and a couple of centuries of physical experience once again fooled us, confronting the need for a new mental flashing.
“The Battle of the Black Hole” is a triumph of the human mind and its remarkable ability to discover the laws of nature. This is a story about a world far more distant from our senses than quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity. Quantum gravity deals with objects that are one hundred billion billion times smaller than a proton. We never experimentally discovered such small objects, and probably never will, but human ingenuity allowed us to establish their existence, and surprisingly, objects with huge masses and sizes — black holes — serve as portals in their world.
The Battle of the Black Hole is also a chronicle of the discovery. The holographic principle is one of the most counterintuitive abstractions in all physics. He was the culmination of almost two decades of intellectual battles around the fate of information falling into a black hole. It was not a war between angry enemies; in fact, all the major participants in the battle were friends. But it was a brutal intellectual struggle of ideas, led by people who deeply respect each other, but have fundamental differences.
There is one widespread misunderstanding that should be dispelled. People often represent physicists, especially about theoretical physicists, as narrow-minded nerds, whose interests are alien to ordinary people and very boring. Nothing could be further from the truth. Great physicists are extremely charismatic people, with strong feelings and amazing ideas. When the general public is told about physicists, bypassing their human side, they miss something very important. When writing this book, the author tried to grasp the emotional side of the story as much as the scientific side.
Read the entire second chapter of the book - “The Dark Star”, which is an introduction to the physics of black holes - you can visit the “Elements” website .
Leonard Susskind (Leonard Susskind) is an American theoretical physicist, one of the founders of string theory, who now teaches at Stanford University.
He graduated from New York City College with a Master of Science degree in Physics in 1962, and received his Ph.D. in 1965 from Cornell University. Since 1979, Susskind is a professor of physics at Stanford University. In 1998, he was awarded the Sakurai Prize for innovative achievements in the field of hadron string models, lattice gauge theories, quantum chromodynamics, and dynamic symmetry breaking. Since 1999, Professor at the Korean Institute for Advanced Study.
Susskind made a significant contribution to the development of modern physics. Among his scientific achievements:
Alexander Sergeyev , a famous Russian scientific journalist and popularizer of science, worked on the Russian translation of The Black Hole War . Alexander worked for many years as a scientific editor and columnist in such publications as Vedomosti, Around the World, Radio Liberty, Science in Focus, and has authored a large number of publications and translator of several popular science books. At the moment, Alexander is conducting a series of programs called “World of Science” , which is aired on Mir TV channel.
And today we want to tell you about the new edition, released as part of the Dynasty Library, the book Battle of the Black Hole. My battle with Stephen Hawking for peace, safe for quantum mechanics " (The Black Hole War) by the famous American scientist Leonard Susskind .
')
This book is a bright, emotionally rich and popular chronicle of battles, which have just died down in advanced physics.
What happens when an object falls into a black hole? Does he disappear without a trace?
About thirty years ago, one of the leading researchers of the phenomenon of black holes, now the famous British physicist Stephen Hawking, said that this is exactly what is happening. But it turns out that such an answer threatens everything that we know about physics and the fundamental laws of the Universe. The author of this book, Leonard Susskind for many years argued with Stephen Hawking about the nature of black holes, until, finally, in 2004, he did not admit his mistake. The book, written by Susskind tells the fascinating story of this long-standing scientific confrontation, which radically changed the way physicists view the nature of reality. The new paradigm has led to the stunning conclusion that everything in our world is this book, your house, you yourself are just a kind of hologram projected from the edges of the Universe.
What is the history of the scientific debate that became the subject of the book?
The book is dedicated to the intellectual battle around a single mental experiment. In 1976, Stephen Hawking thought about throwing a piece of information - a book, a computer, even just an elementary particle - into a black hole. Black holes, Hawking believed, are irretrievable traps, and for the outside world a fallen piece of information will be irreversibly lost. This seemingly innocent conclusion is not as harmless as it seems; it is capable of undermining and overthrowing the entire magnificent building of modern physics. Some terrible failure happened: the most fundamental law of nature, the law of conservation of information, was under threat. It was clear to those who followed the events: either Hawking is wrong, or the three-hundred-year-old stronghold of physics will fall.
But at first few people paid attention to it. For almost two decades, the discussion proceeded almost imperceptibly. Together with the Dutch physicist Gerard 't Hooft, Leonard Susskind together represented the whole army that fought on the same side of the intellectual front. Stephen Hawking with a small army of relativists was on the other side. Up until the early 1990s, most theoretical physicists, especially string theory experts, did not react to the threat that Hawking asserted, and then most of them considered his conclusions erroneous. In any case - while erroneous.
The battle with the black hole was a genuine scientific discussion, completely unlike the pseudo-debate around the “intelligent design theory” or the reality of global warming, where the false arguments invented by political manipulators to fool naive people do not reflect real scientific differences. On the contrary, the debate about black holes was real. Outstanding theoretical physicists could not agree on which physical principles to trust and which ones to refuse. Should Hawking follow with his conservative ideas about space-time, or follow 't Hooft and Susskind with their conservative views on quantum mechanics? Both points of view seemed to lead to only paradoxes and contradictions. Either space-time — the scene on which the laws of nature work — is not at all what we used to imagine it, or the great principles of increasing entropy and preserving information are erroneous. Millions of years of cognitive evolution and a couple of centuries of physical experience once again fooled us, confronting the need for a new mental flashing.
“The Battle of the Black Hole” is a triumph of the human mind and its remarkable ability to discover the laws of nature. This is a story about a world far more distant from our senses than quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity. Quantum gravity deals with objects that are one hundred billion billion times smaller than a proton. We never experimentally discovered such small objects, and probably never will, but human ingenuity allowed us to establish their existence, and surprisingly, objects with huge masses and sizes — black holes — serve as portals in their world.
The Battle of the Black Hole is also a chronicle of the discovery. The holographic principle is one of the most counterintuitive abstractions in all physics. He was the culmination of almost two decades of intellectual battles around the fate of information falling into a black hole. It was not a war between angry enemies; in fact, all the major participants in the battle were friends. But it was a brutal intellectual struggle of ideas, led by people who deeply respect each other, but have fundamental differences.
There is one widespread misunderstanding that should be dispelled. People often represent physicists, especially about theoretical physicists, as narrow-minded nerds, whose interests are alien to ordinary people and very boring. Nothing could be further from the truth. Great physicists are extremely charismatic people, with strong feelings and amazing ideas. When the general public is told about physicists, bypassing their human side, they miss something very important. When writing this book, the author tried to grasp the emotional side of the story as much as the scientific side.
Read the entire second chapter of the book - “The Dark Star”, which is an introduction to the physics of black holes - you can visit the “Elements” website .
About the author of the book
Leonard Susskind (Leonard Susskind) is an American theoretical physicist, one of the founders of string theory, who now teaches at Stanford University.
He graduated from New York City College with a Master of Science degree in Physics in 1962, and received his Ph.D. in 1965 from Cornell University. Since 1979, Susskind is a professor of physics at Stanford University. In 1998, he was awarded the Sakurai Prize for innovative achievements in the field of hadron string models, lattice gauge theories, quantum chromodynamics, and dynamic symmetry breaking. Since 1999, Professor at the Korean Institute for Advanced Study.
Susskind made a significant contribution to the development of modern physics. Among his scientific achievements:
- an introduction to the hadron physics of a one-dimensional fundamental object - a string;
- contribution to quark confinement theory;
- development of gauge theory in terms of the Hamiltonian grid;
- contribution to the string description of black hole entropy;
- development of a matrix description of M-theory;
- contribution to the development of the holographic principle.
About the translator and scientific editor of the Russian edition
Alexander Sergeyev , a famous Russian scientific journalist and popularizer of science, worked on the Russian translation of The Black Hole War . Alexander worked for many years as a scientific editor and columnist in such publications as Vedomosti, Around the World, Radio Liberty, Science in Focus, and has authored a large number of publications and translator of several popular science books. At the moment, Alexander is conducting a series of programs called “World of Science” , which is aired on Mir TV channel.
Edition information
- Name: “Battle of a black hole. My battle with Stephen Hawking for peace, safe for quantum mechanics "
- Original: The Black Hole War For Quantum Mechanics
- By Leonard Susskind
- Translation: Alexander Sergeev
- ISBN: 978-5-459-01837-0
- Volume: 448 p.
- Book on piter.com
- Book on ozon.ru
- The book on the site elementy.ru
- Episode Channel Discovery, telling about the essence of the dispute, around which the action of the book unfolds
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/169271/
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