The Black Hole War: My Battle With Stephen Hawking To Make The World Safe For Quantum Mechanics, Leonard Susskind, c. 2008

The Black Hole War: My Battle With Stephen hawking To Make The World Safe For Quantum Mechanics, Leonard Susskind, c. 2008. 530SUS.

Absolutely fascinating. Easy to read; great style; lots of humor; the type of article one might find in The New Yorker on a lucky day.

This is an incredibly interesting book. Any high school junior or senior interested in astronomy, chemistry, physics, or history of astronomy / physics should read this book.

Space-time, which we talked about yesterday in another book club selection, is talked about here again, page 56. Minkowski: "Henceforth (1908), space by itself and time byh itself are doomed to fade awway into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality." Minkowski's flat or uncurved version of space-time became known as Minkowski space.

The concept of world line. Even a "stationary" particle moves "through" time.

The new measure of world line distance: proper time.

The book's narrative is 446 pages long. The first 116 pages are devoted to a review of physics, which most folks reading this book could skip through very quickly, though the author really explains things very well and an effort should be made not to go through the first five chapters too quickly.

Parton Theory.

By 1972, physics at Columbia University (NYC) was in decline. The author was a professor at Yeshiva University's Belfer Graduate School of Science.

1968: John Wheeler coined the term black hole.

Wheeler had been Richard Feynman's thesis adviser.

About this time, Stephen Hawking was revolutionizing thee classical theory of black holes.