Reprinting books from the New Science series

We are pleased to announce that the second editions of books have been published at the Peter publishing house: “The Battle of the Black Hole. My battle with Stephen Hawking for peace, safe for quantum mechanics ” - L. Susskind and “ String Theory and Hidden Dimensions of the Universe ” - Shintan Yau.

Black Hole War, or the Battle of the Black Hole

')
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 a response threatens everything 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 whole 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.

Table of contents
Excerpt

String Theory and Hidden Dimensions of the Universe

Mathematics is often called the language of science or, at least, the language of the natural sciences, and this is true: the laws of the physical world are more accurately expressed using mathematical equations than they are written or spoken. In addition, the idea of ​​mathematics as a language does not allow for a proper assessment of it in all its diversity, since it gives the erroneous impression that, with the exception of small corrections, everything that was truly important in mathematics has long been done.

In fact, this is not true. Despite the foundation created by scientists for hundreds or even thousands of years, mathematics is still a rapidly developing and living science. This is not a static body of knowledge - however, languages ​​also tend to change. Mathematics is a dynamic, evolving science, full of everyday insights and discoveries that compete with discoveries in other areas, although, of course, they do not attract attention as much as discovering a new elementary particle, finding a new planet, or synthesizing a new cancer drug. Moreover, if it were not for the periodic proofs of hypotheses formulated over centuries, information about discoveries in the field of mathematics would not have been covered at all by the press.

For those who appreciate the exceptional power of mathematics, it is not just a language, but an indisputable path to truth, the cornerstone on which the whole system of natural sciences rests. The strength of this discipline is not only in the ability to explain and reproduce physical realities: for mathematicians, mathematics itself is a reality. Geometric figures and spaces, the existence of which we prove, are just as real for us as the elementary particles of which, according to physics, any substance consists. We consider mathematical structures to be even more fundamental than natural particles, because they allow not only understanding the structure of particles, but also such phenomena of the surrounding world as features of a human face or symmetry of colors. Geometers most admire the power and beauty
abstract principles underlying the outlines and forms of objects around the world.

The book tells about the author's research in the field of mathematics. Particular emphasis is placed on discoveries that have helped scientists build a model of the universe. It is not certain that all the models described will ultimately be related to reality. But nevertheless their underlying
theories have undeniable beauty.

Table of contents
Excerpt

You can see all the books in the New Science series on the publisher's website . We have reduced the maximum prices for books, so we believe that knowledge is a value.