I just finished Leonard Susskind’s book The Black Hole War, which is a fairly interesting book about the debate Susskind (and others) had with Stephen Hawking (and others) over whether information is lost once trapped inside black holes or whether it’s eventually released in the form of what they call Hawking radiation (which, if I understand correctly, is essentially black holes evaporating over millions or perhaps billions of years).

I say fairly interesting because although it starts off quite readable, it gets quite dense near the end, almost as though Susskind lost patience with his target audience about that point and started writing only for his more gifted readers/pupils (eg. not me).

The book was more fascinating than interesting, and not just for its physics.  Susskind calls the debate a war, but one has the sense that it was a war mostly manufactured in Susskind’s mind.  I’ve no doubt the topic of the debate was real, and I can easily see why Susskind was horrified at the notion of information being forever lost in a black hole, which would be in direct contradiction of the first law of thermodynamics (which states that information cannot be either lost of destroyed), and why he would be doubly horrified that this didn’t seem to bother Hawking any.  But I had a strong sense throughout that it was a war of which Hawking was largely oblivious.

Susskind seemed to have a complicated relationship with Hawking.  He respects Hawkings accomplishments as a physicist, but seems to resent Hawking’s celebrity status and fame (or perhaps is jealous of them) although he doesn’t dispute that Hawking deserves them.  I don’t blame Susskind for this; it probably is annoying to have someone like Hawking as competition.  It doesn’t matter what Susskind accomplishes in his life, he’ll never be as famous as Hawking.  And he can’t even really resent Hawking for it.  How can you resent a man who’s suffered from ALS his entire adult life?

In the end Susskind claims to have won the Black Hole War, Hawking apparently conceded the point after recent developments made it clear that information is both irretrievably captured by black holes and released by black holes in the kind of stunning sophistry that only physicists (and small children who insist on having their cake and eating it too) can exhibit.  Physicists call it complementarity (the idea that ideas having contradictory properties can be separately analyzed).  (Parents call it impossible).

Although I am interested in all this stuff, and mostly accept it, you can’t read it (at least I can’t) without wondering when somebody’s going to step up and point out that the emperor has no clothes.  Especially considering how often scientific theories have usurped their predecessors throughout history (ie. the atom gives way to subatomic particles which gives way to strings as the smallest possible indivisible objects, classical physics gives way to relativity which is usurped by quantum mechanics which gives way to string theory, and so on).

Physicists are like players in a game preoccupied by how the game is made rather than just being happy playing the game, like most of the rest of us.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Parents are visiting, not much time to blog. So until I return, here’s a little something to tide you over. I find myself watching it over and over again:

Just in case you haven’t seen it yet…