false 2161966 0316016403 9780316016407 119 45 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1256010994m/2161966.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2161966.The_Black_Hole_War_My_Battle_with_Stephen_Hawking_to_Make_the_World_Safe_for_Quantum_Mechanics 30080 Leonard Susskind 232 69 1 0 false Wed Jul 29 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Tue Jul 07 10:25:46 -0700 2009 Thu Jul 30 03:03:04 -0700 2009
The Black Hole War is a book that fears offending any reader by asking them to think for an entire chapter. Genuinely interesting yet shallow islands of physics are sprinkled in a vast sea of mundane travel stories, idle cultural speculations, and weakly veiled self-aggrandizement.

The central physical question of the book, the black hole information paradox, is a very fascinating issue that has led to powerful new ideas (such as the holographic principle) and offered new insights into old ones (such as information and entropy). Unfortunately, this "central physical question" is spread so thinly over the book's 400+ pages that potential readers will likely save much time and boredom by instead referring to the Wikipedia links above.

Two important caveats though:

1) I listened to this on audiobook on long runs and in the gym. Your experience may vary.

2) Leonard Susskind is an excellent lecturer and his free video lectures on everything from Hamiltonian mechanics to special relativity to quantum mechanics are some of the best available. So he can be a great communicator of physics when he tries.]]>