Product Description
At the beginning of the 21st century, physics is being driven to very unfamiliar territory--the domain of the incredibly small and the incredibly heavy. The new world is a world in which both quantum mechanics and gravity are equally important. But mysteries remain. One of the biggest involved black holes. Famed physicist Stephen Hawking claimed that anything sucked in a black hole was lost forever. For three decades, Leonard Susskind and Hawking clashed over the answer to this problem. Finally, in 2004, Hawking conceded. THE BLACK HOLE WAR will explain the mind-blowing science that finally won out, and the emergence of a new paradigm that argues the world--this catalog, your home, your breakfast, you--is actually a hologram projected from the edges of space.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 40 reviews)

Great Book by Tim K (Chicago, IL USA)

5 Stars
October 24, 2009
I really enjoyed reading this book! Susskind loves physics and it shows. He is very enthusiastic when he talks about his "battle" with Stephen Hawking, along with string theory and other theoretical physics. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in learning about black hole physics in non-technical language. Or to anyone looking for a fun and interesting book!

Simplifies the unsimplifiable by Art

5 Stars
October 04, 2009
Dr. Susskind does a great job explaining, in non-mathematical terms, some very hard-to-grasp concepts. Read this one first, then Brian Green's "Fabric of the Cosmos," followed by Lisa Randall's "Warped Passages" for a thorough non-credit course in quantum mechanics.

Excellent and Entertaining by Vlad Vanek (Palos Verdes, CA)

5 Stars
September 30, 2009
Very well written and funny. The Black Hole War is very entertaining for both physicists (I am one of those cats - fusion plasma physics variety) and the general public. I enjoyed his recollections going back to early seventies, I remembered Dick Feynmann's lecture at Columbia - I was there as well, memories... Details of the black hole horizon / information / entropy issues are well presented and clear for anybody to understand. Todays cosmology and theoretical physics is so specialized that more books like this one by Prof. Susskind should be written. Thanks Leonard! Vlad Vanek

My son enjoyed this by Harold A. Fretheim (Juanita, WA)

4 Stars
September 16, 2009
I found this book a little dry at times but my son really enjoyed it. Of course, he is an engineering student at Georgia Tech with a 3.92 GPA (at one of the top ten engineering schools in the world) so maybe he is not to representative. But it does give you real insight into the kind of thinking that is going on in the world of physics today- there is far more excitement there than the general public realizes.

Top-notch popular physics by anonymous

5 Stars
September 07, 2009
This book is absolutely a classic of physics popularization. Susskind moves seamlessly from the development of his own ideas to lively descriptions of other physicists to clear and concise explanations of the physics ideas. His writing style is straightforward but rarely boring - in fact, I could hardly put this book down until I had finished it. The occasional clunkiness of the writing is eminently forgivable in a book this good. There is little of the David vs. Goliath theme here that one might naively expect. For good reason: Susskind is no David, but a giant in his own right who is just as well known among his theoretical physics crowd as is Hawking. What another reviewer saw as name-dropping, I saw as straightforward descriptions of the physicists with whom Susskind has worked and whose ideas were influential. It will help a great deal if the reader is already familiar to some extent with the concepts of entropy, quantum mechanics, and black holes. Susskind's explanations of these difficult topics are marvelously concise, but one can't expect to grasp the subtleties of a complex topic after one chapter. Nonetheless, I think the basic idea of information loss is understandable to anyone, making this book probably more understandable overall than, say, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. The final chapters (22 and 23 especially) got me bogged down in D-branes and anti-de-Sitter space. But even if one can't understand the details here, the message comes through clearly. This is a beautiful work of popularization that tells a compelling story of how science works: through disagreement and incremental progress to deeper understanding.

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