Leonard Susskind – författare

This is the inside account of the battle over the true nature of black holes—with nothing less than our understanding of the entire universe at stake.

What happens when something is sucked into a black hole? Does it disappear? Three decades ago, a young physicist named Stephen Hawking claimed that it did—and in doing so, put at risk everything we know about the fundamental laws of the universe. Leonard Susskind and Gerard ’t Hooft realized the threat and responded with a counterattack that changed the course of physics.

The Black Hole War is the thrilling story of their united effort to reconcile Hawking’s theories of black holes with their own sense of reality, an effort that would eventually result in Hawking admitting he was wrong and Susskind and ’t Hooft realizing that our world is a hologram projected from the outer boundaries of space. A brilliant book about the deepest mysteries of modern physics, The Black Hole War is mind-bending and exhilarating reading.

The latest volume in the New York Times–bestselling physics series explains Einstein’s masterpiece: the general theory of relativity     “Excellent.” —Physics Today He taught us classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, and special relativity. Now, physicist Leonard Susskind, assisted by André Cabannes, returns to tackle Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Starting from the equivalence principle and covering the necessary mathematics of Riemannian spaces and tensor calculus, Susskind and Cabannes explain the link between gravity and geometry. They delve into black holes, establish Einstein field equations, and solve them to describe gravity waves. The authors provide vivid explanations that, to borrow a phrase from Einstein himself, are as simple as possible (but no simpler).   An approachable yet rigorous introduction to one of the most important topics in physics, General Relativity is a must-read for anyone who wants a deeper knowledge of the universe’s real structure.   

These three lectures cover a certain aspect of complexity and black holes, namely the relation to the second law of thermodynamics. The first lecture describes the meaning of quantum complexity, the analogy between entropy and complexity, and the second law of complexity. Lecture two reviews the connection between the second law of complexity and the interior of black holes. Prof. L. Susskind discusses how firewalls are related to periods of non-increasing complexity which typically only occur after an exponentially long time. The final lecture is about the thermodynamics of complexity, and “uncomplexity” as a resource for doing computational work. The author explains the remarkable power of “one clean qubit,” in both computational terms and in space-time terms.

This book is intended for graduate students and researchers who want to take the first steps towards the mysteries of black holes and their complexity.