Leonard Susskind's "The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics"
I am reading Leonard Susskind's "The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics." A fascinating book.
Susskind is a physics professor at Stanford. I started watching some of his video lectures on classical mechanics, relativity, entanglements, etc. He has an extremely captivating style.
He has had a long standing battle with Hawking on what happens to information when objects fall into a blackhole. Hawking stated that it is lost, lost forever. Susskind and others including Nobel physicist Hooft did not agree since the basic principle of physics says information is preserved. They came up with this theory of holographic world which explains that the information is preserved in the surface of the horizon of the blackhole. If it is on horizon's surface it should be within the blackhole too since what is in the blackhole is projection of what is on the surface.
This whole debate is highly theoretical and hard to understand but fascinating nonetheless.
An excellent video of this discussion among giants in the field of theoretical physics can be seen at http://worldsciencefestival.com/videos/a_thin_sheet_of_reality_the_universe_as_a_hologram
This discussion seems to relate to Green's, Stokes' and Divergence theorems in multivariable calculus. For instance, Stokes' theorem says the integral of curl over a surface is equal to the line integral of the vector field over the boundary of the surface which gives circulation. The horizon can be considered as the boundary of a blackhole. Similarly, integral of divergence over volume of a solid is equal to the surface integral of normal component of the vector field over the surface which is the boundary of the solid. The latter gives the flux over a surface. Relationship between what happens in an object to what happens on the boundary is the most profound result of calculus This result applies to single variable calculus also - integral of a derivative of a function over a line is equal to the difference of the value of the function between the end points of the line. The end points are the boundary of the line. This is called Fundamental theorem of calculus. There is an equivalent theorem called Fundamental theorem of line integrals which applies to curves that lie in a 2D or a 3D space. Essentially, all these theorems of calculus are one and the same and can be expressed by what is known as Generalized Stokes' theorem.
Susskind is a physics professor at Stanford. I started watching some of his video lectures on classical mechanics, relativity, entanglements, etc. He has an extremely captivating style.
He has had a long standing battle with Hawking on what happens to information when objects fall into a blackhole. Hawking stated that it is lost, lost forever. Susskind and others including Nobel physicist Hooft did not agree since the basic principle of physics says information is preserved. They came up with this theory of holographic world which explains that the information is preserved in the surface of the horizon of the blackhole. If it is on horizon's surface it should be within the blackhole too since what is in the blackhole is projection of what is on the surface.
This whole debate is highly theoretical and hard to understand but fascinating nonetheless.
An excellent video of this discussion among giants in the field of theoretical physics can be seen at http://worldsciencefestival.com/videos/a_thin_sheet_of_reality_the_universe_as_a_hologram
This discussion seems to relate to Green's, Stokes' and Divergence theorems in multivariable calculus. For instance, Stokes' theorem says the integral of curl over a surface is equal to the line integral of the vector field over the boundary of the surface which gives circulation. The horizon can be considered as the boundary of a blackhole. Similarly, integral of divergence over volume of a solid is equal to the surface integral of normal component of the vector field over the surface which is the boundary of the solid. The latter gives the flux over a surface. Relationship between what happens in an object to what happens on the boundary is the most profound result of calculus This result applies to single variable calculus also - integral of a derivative of a function over a line is equal to the difference of the value of the function between the end points of the line. The end points are the boundary of the line. This is called Fundamental theorem of calculus. There is an equivalent theorem called Fundamental theorem of line integrals which applies to curves that lie in a 2D or a 3D space. Essentially, all these theorems of calculus are one and the same and can be expressed by what is known as Generalized Stokes' theorem.
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