The Black Hole War: My Battle With Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics by Leonard Susskind

Author:Leonard Susskind [SUSSKIND, LEONARD]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science, Astronomy, SCI004000
ISBN: 9780316032698
Publisher: Hachette Digital, Inc.
Published: 2008-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

The paper that CGHS had written was an extremely elegant mathematical analysis of Hawking radiation, but somewhere in the analysis, they had made a mistake, claiming that Quantum Mechanics eliminated the singularity, and with it the horizon. Lárus and I, along with our colleague Jorge Russo, were among several people who pointed out the error. That made us experts on CGHS black holes. (There was even a particular version of the CGHS theory called the RST—Russo, Susskind, and Thorlacius—model.)

Now, the reason that John, Lárus, and I were sitting around after hours that Friday was that there was an upcoming conference devoted specifically to the puzzles and paradoxes of black holes. The conference was to take place a couple of weeks later in Santa Barbara, home to the Institute for Theoretical Physics (ITP) at UCSB.2 Just how good a physics institution was the ITP? The short answer is really good. By 1993 it had become an active center of black hole research.

James Hartle was the most senior of the black hole theorists on the UCSB faculty. Jim was a very distinguished elder statesman who had done groundbreaking work with Stephen Hawking on quantum gravity long before it had become popular. But there were four younger members in the physics department there who were all destined to play big roles in the Black Hole War. All four were in their midthirties and extremely active. You’ve already met Steve Giddings and Andy Strominger (the G and S of CGHS). Although both were friends of mine whose physics I admired, they proved to be very exasperating foes for the next two years. They often drove me to distraction with their stubborn attachment to wrongheaded ideas. Eventually, however, they more than redeemed themselves.

Gary Horowitz was the third of the young UCSB faculty. Gary is a General Relativity expert—a relativist—who was by then making a name for himself as a brilliant leader in the field. He had also worked closely with Hawking and knew as much about black holes as anyone. Finally, Joe Polchinski had recently migrated to Santa Barbara from the University of Texas. Joe and I had worked together on a number of research projects, and I knew him well. Although I always found him a very pleasant person, full of genuine good humor, I also was awed by his intellectual power and speed and his sheer brilliance. Since the earliest days of our friendship—Joe must have been about twenty-five, and I was forty—I had had no doubt that he was fated to become one of the greatest theoretical physicists of the era. I wasn’t disappointed.

These extraordinary young physicists worked closely together. Sometimes the subject was black holes, sometimes String Theory. The enormous talent of this small, close-knit group made them a very potent force in theoretical physics. It also made Santa Barbara one of the most exciting places (if not the most exciting place) for a theoretical physicist to hang out. There was no question that a conference in Santa Barbara devoted to the puzzles of black holes would be an important event.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.