The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics is a 2008 popular science book by American theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind. The book covers the black hole information paradox, and the related scientific dispute between Stephen Hawking and Susskind. Susskind is known for his work on string theory and wrote a previous popular science book, The Cosmic Landscape, in 2005.


00:00 Introduction

05:00 What has been lost due to COVID: congeniality and v

07:00 Imposter syndrome 10:00 HOW DID IT FEEL TO DISCOVER STRING THEORY?

15:00 SUSPICIOUS OF BIG BANG SINGULARITY

20:00 LENNY ON GOD!

25:00 Can you test Bell Inequalities near a Black Hole’s stretched horizon?

30:00 ENTROPY 2ND LAW…why it’s sacred to Lenny

35:00 What would be his advice to young Lenny?

40:00 What does he think about all the competing TOEs?

45:00 Three things would push him to believe the Multiverse

50:00 Does the String Landscape of vacua imply different physical laws in each ‘pocket universe?’

55:00 What would he put in his ethical will?

60:00 What would he put on a billion year time capsule? 70:00 Who would Lenny have for coffee?

75:00 His favorite quote


Hawking proposed that information is lost in black holes, and not preserved in Hawking radiation.[2] Susskind disagreed, arguing that Hawking’s conclusions violated one of the most basic scientific laws of the universe, the conservation of information. As Susskind depicts in his book, The Black Hole War was a “genuine scientific controversy” between scientists favoring an emphasis on the principles of relativity against those in favor of quantum mechanics. The debate led to the holographic principle, proposed by Gerard ‘t Hooft and refined by Susskind, which suggested that the information is in fact preserved, stored on the boundary of a system. Leonard Susskind (born 16 June 1940) is an American physicist, who is a professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University, and founding director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics. His research interests include string theory, quantum field theory, quantum statistical mechanics and quantum cosmology. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences,[and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an associate member of the faculty of Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and a distinguished professor of the Korea Institute for Advanced Study.

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