My Goodreads Rating: 1 of 5 stars
Light on “science” and heavy on “popular”, this is the kind of “popular science” that makes me cringe.
The Black Hole War is a book that fears offending any reader by asking them to think for an entire chapter. Genuinely interesting yet shallow islands of physics are sprinkled in a vast sea of mundane travel stories, idle cultural speculations, and weakly veiled self-aggrandizement.
The central physical question of the book, the black hole information paradox, is a very fascinating issue that has led to powerful new ideas (such as the holographic principle) and offered new insights into old ones (such as information and entropy). Unfortunately, this “central physical question” is spread so thinly over the book’s 400+ pages that potential readers will likely save much time and boredom by instead referring to the Wikipedia links above.
Two important caveats though:
1) I listened to this on audiobook on long runs and in the gym. Your experience may vary.
2) Leonard Susskind is an excellent lecturer and his free video lectures on everything from Hamiltonian mechanics to special relativity to quantum mechanics are some of the best available. So he can be a great communicator of physics when he tries.
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