The Black Hole War:
My Battle with Stephen Hawking
to Make the World Safe
for Quantum Mechanics
by Leonard Susskind
Posted on 08/11/2008 8:50:53 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Susskind, a professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University, has written a book that's part insider history of science, focused on a period in the 1980s and 1990s when physicists were quarreling over the destructive capacity of black holes, and part primer on the science that explains the argument. As the subtitle makes obvious, the story contains an all-star cast of opinionated physicists: assorted Nobel laureates such as Richard Feynman, brilliant minds of the past such as Sir Isaac Newton, and, of course, Stephen Hawking, arguably the best-known theorist of black hole mechanics.
Hawking is partly famous for possessing a brilliant mind trapped in a disintegrating body. His 1988 best-seller, "A Brief History of Time," featured his photo on the cover, looking rather like a very savvy hobbit tucked into the bat-like wings of an enormous wheelchair. Susskind describes him as being as much a showman as a genius: "He is a physically tiny man - I doubt he weights 100 pounds - but his small body contains a prodigious intelligence and an equally outsized ego."
Susskind's irritation with Hawking derives from their opposite stands on the long-running black hole debate. It is, of course, the kind of argument that only physicists can really obsess about.
(Excerpt) Read more at startribune.com ...
The Black Hole War:
My Battle with Stephen Hawking
to Make the World Safe
for Quantum Mechanics
by Leonard Susskind
*not* about Susskind:
Meet the Indian who took on Stephen Hawking
Rediff.com | August 03, 2004 10:06 IST | Rediff.com
Posted on 08/02/2004 10:16:56 PM PDT by CarrotAndStick
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1183887/posts
Lost in Space by Sean Carroll
Which reminds me: wasn’t the world supposed to disappear into a black hole this weekend when some new test took place in Europe?
Which reminds me: wasn’t the world supposed to disappear into a black hole this weekend when some new test took place in Europe?
Pardon the double post. I hit the enter key, there was a flash of light, my body was disassembled and stretched into a singularity and then I was back here hitting the Enter key again.
Not yet, first test early in September.
IF—and this is a big if since the energy of the resulting searched for particle will be less than the energy routinely striking the earth in the form of cosmic rays—the experiment births a micro-blackhole, it will take a few weeks to swallow Geneva, during which time scientists can enjoy their recriminiations.
And thanks so much for this ping to Susskind’s book. ... More added to my impossible reading list!
OMG guys, stop being racist. Didn’t you know that you can’t mention “black hole” with out being accused of racism? Or is that only in Dallas? I can’t remember!
The world will end, this I know
for Art Bell has told me so.
It already has happened, but since information about it has disappeared, we can’t possibly know what we missed.
LOL!
BLACK hole? Don’t you mean “African-American Hole”?
Leave Jesse Jackson out of this! /sarc>
Penance: say three "Hail Obamas" and register with ACORN...
Cheers!
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