The black hole war: my battle with Stephen Hawking to make the world safe for quantum mechanics

Description

pt. 1. The gathering storm. -- The first shot -- The dark star -- Not your grandfather's geometry -- "Einstein, don't tell God what to do" -- Planck invents a better yardstick -- In a Broadway bar -- Energy and entropy -- Wheeler's boys, or how much information can you stuff in a black hole? -- Black light -- pt. 2. Surprise attack. -- How Stephen lost his bits and didn't know where to find them -- The Dutch resistance -- Who cares? -- Stalemate -- Skirmish at Aspen -- pt. 3. Counterattack. -- The Battle of Santa Barbara -- Wait! Reverse the rewiring -- Ahab in Cambridge -- The world as a hologram -- pt. 4. Closing the ring. -- Weapon of mass deduction -- Alice's airplane, or the last visible propeller -- Counting black holes -- South America wins the war -- Nuclear physics? You're kidding! -- Humility.;A mind-bending book about modern physics, quantum mechanics, the fate of stars and the deep mysteries of black holes. What happens when something is sucked into a black hole? Does it disappear? Three decades ago, a young physicist named Stephen Hawking claimed it did--and in doing so put at risk everything we know about physics and the fundamental laws of the universe. Most scientists didn't recognize the import of Hawking's claims, but Leonard Susskind and Gerard t'Hooft realized the threat, and responded with a counterattack that changed the course of physics. This is the story of their united effort to reconcile Hawking's revolutionary theories with their own sense of reality--effort that would eventually result in Hawking admitting he was wrong, paying up, and Susskind and t'Hooft realizing that our world is a hologram projected from the outer boundaries of space.--From publisher description.