meta_pixel
Tapesearch Logo
Log in
Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

Lenny Susskind: Black Hole War My BATTLE w Stephen Hawking Made the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics (#094)

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

Brian Keating

Physics, Natural Sciences, Science

4.71.1K Ratings

🗓️ 19 November 2020

⏱️ 85 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics is a 2008 popular science book by American theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind. The book covers the black hole information paradox, and the related scientific dispute between Stephen Hawking and Susskind. Susskind is known for his work on string theory and wrote a previous popular science book, The Cosmic Landscape, in 2005. 00:00 Introduction 05:00 What has been lost due to COVID: congeniality and v 07:00 Imposter syndrome 10:00 HOW DID IT FEEL TO DISCOVER STRING THEORY? 15:00 SUSPICIOUS OF BIG BANG SINGULARITY 20:00 LENNY ON GOD! 25:00 Can you test Bell Inequalities near a Black Hole’s stretched horizon? 30:00 ENTROPY 2ND LAW…why it’s sacred to Lenny 35:00 What would be his advice to young Lenny? 40:00 What does he think about all the competing TOEs? 45:00 Three things would push him to believe the Multiverse 50:00 Does the String Landscape of vacua imply different physical laws in each ‘pocket universe?’ 55:00 What would he put in his ethical will? 60:00 What would he put on a billion year time capsule? 70:00 Who would Lenny have for coffee? 75:00 His favorite quote Hawking proposed that information is lost in black holes, and not preserved in Hawking radiation.[2] Susskind disagreed, arguing that Hawking’s conclusions violated one of the most basic scientific laws of the universe, the conservation of information. As Susskind depicts in his book, The Black Hole War was a “genuine scientific controversy” between scientists favoring an emphasis on the principles of relativity against those in favor of quantum mechanics. The debate led to the holographic principle, proposed by Gerard ‘t Hooft and refined by Susskind, which suggested that the information is in fact preserved, stored on the boundary of a system. Leonard Susskind (born 16 June 1940) is an American physicist, who is a professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University, and founding director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics. His research interests include string theory, quantum field theory, quantum statistical mechanics and quantum cosmology. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences,[and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an associate member of the faculty of Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and a distinguished professor of the Korea Institute for Advanced Study. Brian Keating’s most popular Youtube Videos: Eric Weinstein: https://youtu.be/YjsPb3kBGnk?sub_confirmation=1 Jim Simons: https://youtu.be/6fr8XOtbPqM?sub_confirmation=1 Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_confirmation=1 Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/V6dMM2-X6nk?sub_confirmation=1 Sarah Scoles: https://youtu.be/apVKobWigMw Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/nSAemRxzmXM Host Brian Keating: ‍♂️ Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating Instagram at  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic.

0:04.4

Five, four, three, two, one. on the impossible.

0:18.5

We are back live on the Into the Impossible podcast,

0:21.2

welcoming Lenny Suskin, who is a a good friend mentor to many of us so just reminder

0:25.8

we're gonna have come run vafa Lenny's friends come and vafa Barry Barish Ray Weiss is also coming

0:31.7

on that in the next week or so.

0:33.8

And we'll have on Shelly Glashow,

0:35.9

who is a fellow alum, a Bronx Science Lenny's alma mater.

0:38.9

We're just remarking how much fun it is to do talks in your pajamas,

0:42.4

but also missing out on the

0:44.3

with missing out on the pleasures of interacting with colleagues and especially

0:50.7

Lenny's colleague Stephen Hawking,

0:53.2

Lenny, I'm sorry, could you just say again,

0:55.5

what did Stephen mean to you personally as a FOIL?

0:58.3

He wasn't the easiest person to get along with.

1:00.4

I remember hearing that for many people but but he had this magical captivating

1:06.4

effect on all of science so much so that if you asked any person who's the most

1:11.7

famous scientist they would say someone like Stephen Hawking not me.

1:15.0

Well there were many aspects of Stephen Hawking.

1:18.0

First of all he was a great physicist. There's no question of that.

1:22.0

Maybe it was a little bit of a stretch to say that he was

1:25.2

Einstein or Newton, but he was a very, very, very important influence in physics.

...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Brian Keating, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Brian Keating and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.

Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.