lightreads: a partial image of a etymology tree for the Indo-European word 'leuk done in white neon on black'; in the lower left is (Default)
2010-01-21 02:04 pm
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The Black Hole War

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


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A cheerful, chatty, kind of goofy account of the author's battle with Hawking to prove that information is not permanently lost in black holes. Largely non-mathematical and easy to follow, even though I'm far less comfortable with quantum mechanics than general relativity. And I mostly didn't have my usual problem with popular physics books and their reliance on mind-bending physics revelations by analogy. I actually stopped reading and went "ha!" when Susskind explained to me why I've always thought the analogy of a ball on a rubber sheet to explain the relationship between gravity and mass doesn't work (it uses the effects of gravity to demonstrate gravity). Thank you! That has been bothering me for years.

Anyway. The last third slid over into the realm of obscuring what we're talking about by using analogies that are supposed to explain it, but it's not Susskind's fault. He's doing his best with some pretty freaking weird ideas, and there just isn't any way I'm going to be satisfied with what he says without the math, and it would take me years to get to the point where I could understand that, so I'll just complain about it a bit instead.

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lightreads: a partial image of a etymology tree for the Indo-European word 'leuk done in white neon on black'; in the lower left is (Default)
2006-07-29 01:15 pm
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Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?

Nonfiction. Recollections from the physicist, teacher, and Nobel Prize winner, somewhere in the hinterland between sketch biography and memoir. Chatty,comfortably first person, amusing. I suspect it's an unfortunate consequence of the books' geneses -- transcriptions of some of Feynman's oral retellings -- but he comes across as rather self-centered, out to show everybody how he thinks differently and his way is better. Also, I think if I had ever met him
in real life, I would have adored him at first breath and then strangled him within five minutes. A good time, though, particularly the first one, with some pricelessly funny anecdotes about the stranger side of life at Los Alamos in the years before the bomb.
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