The book by Leonard Susskind "Battle of a black hole"

How great it is sometimes to read high-quality books that feature complex scientific theories in a popular language. Of course, after such books one cannot say that you understand these theories, but it is useful to get at least a general idea of ​​them. One such remarkable book is The Battle of a Black Hole by theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind. The second title of the book is “My battle with Stephen Hawking for a world safe for quantum mechanics.”

The core of the book is a scientific dispute between the author and his supporters with Stephen Hogging (and his supporters) on the question of whether information that has fallen into a black hole disappears without a trace, or it can somehow be extracted from there (theoretically). Hawking believed that the information disappears, but it means that in this case one of the basic principles of quantum mechanics should stop working, which worried Susskind and his friend, Nobel Prize winner Gerard 't Hooft (I wonder what this apostrophe means at the beginning of the last name? ) Susskind tried to prove that information can be extracted (again, theoretically) by collecting the particles that form when a black hole evaporates. The most interesting thing is that this very evaporation of black holes was predicted and justified by the same Hawking back in 1974, and now this radiation bears his name.

Susskind tells how different theories appeared between the years (starting from 1983 and the 2000th), which interacted with each other, and which as a result helped answer the question posed, of course, in favor of the author of the book. The most remarkable thing in this whole story is that this dispute was purely scientific, did not outgrow the controversy and did not affect the relations between the two parties.

But for me the most interesting thing in this book was the description of the theories that have appeared over the past decades in quantum physics, the theory of black holes and some other fields. Susskind begins the book with a description of theories that are studied in school (at least they studied when I studied there) - Einstein's theory of relativity (special and general), quantum theory, talks about entropy from the point of view of information theory and thermodynamics, briefly mentions non-Euclidean geometry.
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I liked the book that on the one hand, the author tries to avoid formulas, explaining all the physics on fingers and analogies (while indicating where the analogy does not work), but at the same time, where necessary, some calculations are also necessary, however, completely ignoring the dimensions, because of which, during the reading, I had to recall, for example, what is the measure of entropy.

The author in this book talks about some of the theory already accepted in the scientific community, from which the head is spinning. From the very first pages, he warns that physicists have already gone through several changes of paradigms (in the words of Thomas Kuhn), which forced them to update the “firmware” of the brain (these are Susskind's words), and recently, thanks to the development of theoretical physics, there have been quite a few . What, for example, is the fact that, from the point of view of quantum theory, all information in three-dimensional space can be placed on a two-dimensional (closed?) Surface that covers this amount of space, i.e. what we see around ourselves could theoretically be a hologram, information for which is recorded somewhere far away on a two-dimensional surface. If it were not written by a physicist (and he writes that this theory is accepted and so far no errors were found in it), then I would treat this as a television nonsense about aliens and UFOs. I will quote from the book:

Putting it all together, we get the proof of a surprising fact: the maximum number of bits of information that can fit in any area of ​​space under any conditions is equal to the number of Planck pixels that can be placed on the area of ​​its boundary. Implicitly, this means that there is a “boundary description” of everything that happens within a region of space; the boundary surface is a two-dimensional hologram of a three-dimensional inner region.

In the last chapters of the book, Susskind talks about string theory, which Brian Green remarkably described in his book, The Elegant Universe. These are already very difficult chapters, if one could follow the logic of explanation to understand the physics of phenomena, then everything has to be taken for granted, or, more correctly, to take note, because the string theory itself is a creepy mathematicized theory , and it is from mathematics that its explanations of physics follow.
As a result, if you are interested in physics, then it is worth reading this book to expand your horizons. It was written in a very clear language (only the last chapters were hard for me), besides the description of physics, various stories from the author’s life are cited that are somehow related to the main theme of the book. As a niggle, you can say that there are a lot of typos in the book (inconsistent endings, etc.), but this does not affect the overall quality of the book.

Ps. Link to habrapos about the book from the publisher .