The Black Hole War

In The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics Leonard Susskind explains his arguments why information is never lost even if it falls into a black hole, and how he persuaded the rest of the physics community to agree with him.

It is well known that General Relativity and Quantum Theory don't get along very well. GR predicts black holes which can swallow anything, including information. Quantum theory says that information cannot be destroyed, only transformed. Hawking took the first point of view, Susskind the second, and this book describes some of the ingenious arguments he used to prove his point.

The book starts with an explanation of black holes and quantum theory and moves on to Susskind's explanation of his ideas, which do seem rather bizarre. The event horizon of a black hole acts as a hologram, giving a 2D representation of the3D interior of the black hole, so objects can seem to disappear at the singularity while their information is preserved at the horizon, later to be emitted as Hawking radiation. It's advanced stuff, but Susskind is very skillful in making it accessible to a wide readership using a minimum of technicalities and plenty of autobiographical material, such as the question of whether an American professor is allowed to walk on Cambridge lawns. Highly recommended.