Comments on: Susskind Quashes Hawking in Quarrel Over Quantum Quandary

By: Aman

Aman — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 04:42:01 +0000

It was a great introductory book. Some of you people who don’t think so can write your own and than we’ll see who’s better. Like Fennyman said, “FIX IT”. I would like to know a relationship between Quantum fluctuation and time field.

By: Brendan O'Dwyer

Brendan O'Dwyer — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 09:09:46 +0000

I never have favoured you greatly,clear Aristotle,with your studious eyes brow-bent to the earth,with your love of the hard smooth outline of stone,definite,precise..That which can be known,palpable to the hand or your methodic measurement,your method has known.But the exact definition remains what it always has been-an ideal,and a part of the hungry mind’s urge to know and possess,aloof and escaping the net. define me a bird.Have you got the electric,brief shimmer of wings,iridescent,antennae atrail,the swift,curving beak alert?What you define is a dead and glassy-eyed cage in a museum,without apulse of the spirit’s breathing.But the merit’s in striving;the meal’s joy is hunger.The struggle to make the unknown known is eternal;finiting the infinite kills it.When Plato,the thief of infinity,reached up to heaven with longing,snatched at its jewels,brought them to earth in his bosom,the instant he touched them the warm fire fled them,staying in heaven;left him with onyx and marble,a temple certainly,made lyric with his sighs of regret.But you,Aristotle,with your Macodonian zeal for mastery,you must conquer the whole known world and the best that one could say for you was that your logic seemed mere commonsense.You took the oriental splendour of riches and pronounced on them the irrevocable doom of a fossil museum.

By: Karl

Karl — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:59:18 +0000

I would suggest that beliefs have to be transcended, then all of this stuff becomes clear. By that I mean, believing in things such as matter and non-matter, energy, motion, etc. and rather recognizing and fully realizing that there in fact are no such things will make things a lot less confusing.

By: Michael Shapiro

Michael Shapiro — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 12:43:02 +0000

OMG, Mr. Drucker. I have been saying exactly what you said for years now. the fact that scientists have not postulated such a simple and elegant answer leads me to believe that you and I may just be ignorant… or brilliant!!

By: Jakob R, Drucker, P.E.

Jakob R, Drucker, P.E. — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 16:36:49 +0000

Just as there are BLACK HOLES perhaps there are WHITE HOLES where the matter is being emitted out of as the black hole evaporates. This alone would go along with the physics principle that matter is not destroyed but only changes form.

There is another possibility that the matter drawn into a black hole is re-introduced into another universe of dimension where the two are in conjunction with each other. That is matter funneled into our black hole is poured out into some other universe or dimension. There for we should be looking for a point or place in our universe where matter is being “created.”

I would like to hear back from others who have similar ideas.

By: barry

barry — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 04:39:57 +0000

Hello. I am currently reading “The Black Hole War”, and there are a a couple of questions I have, if anyone can help me in simple language. I understand a black hole to be basically spherical in space/time. From this, I would have thought that the horizon was a ‘larger sphere’ (obviously not in a physical sense, but only as a mathematical shape) surrounding the black hole. I think I understand that the information lost into a black hole is stored in the horizon, but the area in which the information is stored is only a quarter of the area of the ’spherical’ horizon, which is exactly the area of a flat circle with the same radius as the horizon ’sphere’. Am I correct in this idea?
Secondly, I understand that if anything entering the region of a black hole actually passes the horizon, there is no way out. What then is Hawking radiation? Is this coming only from outside the horizon’s radius? If not, and there actually is radiation coming from inside the horizon’s radius, how does it escape?
Thanks.

By: John Dunford

John Dunford — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 18:46:15 +0000

It will be fascinating to see what the LHC at CERN will reveal. By the way, Leonard Susskind has some great online video courses in physics. The trouble is, I’ve forgotten where they are.

Yours sinc… sinc… sinc-something-or-other

Jim ‘Hemispheres’ Memorizatron
University of Neurones
Britain

By: andrey anderson

andrey anderson — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 02:09:13 +0000

fire up the supercollider and see if it has the answer

By: maze

maze — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 18:36:25 +0000

poor stephen hawking! leonard susskind kicked his …! no, just making fun…again! in fact he is one of the greatest! i saw him once (2002 or 3) live in munich talking about his book “universe in a nutshell” (is it called like this in the english edition?). very impressive…and funny! he ended with a joke about god stiching the universe with a needle like a balloon…what does this mean now????

By: romkeh

romkeh — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:16:38 +0000

my brain is going to explode sometime soon. i really can’t comprehend how these people can fathom such insanely ridiculous/awesome/intelligent theories.

By: maze

maze — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 13:23:57 +0000

possibly the “singularity” is a single string. luckily the information is stored in the event horizont! when earth will be sucked up by the lhc black hole a type 3 race could recover us from there! only have to put a sign on the moon where we are to be found! hahaha!!!!
btw: thank you mister susskind for your lecture on youtube!

By: Hech Baan

Hech Baan — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:38:42 +0000

@Kent: According to Hawking & Penrose there is no much difference between Black Hole and Big Bang singularities. Moreover, the Universe expanded not because of cosmic inflation & dark energy, e.g. Friedmann models expand without inflation or dark energy. All of this is described in General Relativity (Hawking, Ellis – The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time; Misner, Thorne, Wheeler – Gravitation):-)

My point is simple: there is no consistent theory describing black holes. GR predicts singularities; therefore black hole is not a real solution. We believe it is very close to the “real” solution, but without Quantum Gravity we are not 100% sure.

Agreed with your last point.

By: Kent

Kent — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 09:55:13 +0000

@Hech Baan: You don’t fully make sense but it might be wise at this stage to point out that there are big differences between the singularity at the Big Bang and the singularity of a black-hole. For example, the former has a much higher energy (in fact all the energy of the universe) and it expanded thanks to cosmic inflation & dark energy. All of this is described in General Relativity.

@Dan Pasternak: In string theory, another universe only has an effect on our universe via. some very weak force(s)/coupling(s). I think two reasonable criteria that object A & B exist in the same universe are: 1) object A must have the possibility of interacting with object B via. the four known fundamental forces, and 2) there must exist a possible path for which object A can reach object B. Both of these are not satisfied if object A & object B exist in different universes of a multiverse described by string theory.

I would like to add one further comment to both. Although lively discussion on matters of particle physics & cosmology is most welcomed, I remind you that the most intelligent men & women in the past 100 years have analysed these problems thoroughly as a full-time occupation. It is very improbable, although not impossible, that someone sitting at home reading articles on the internet or watching documentaries can out-do their best efforts.

By: Dan Pasternak

Dan Pasternak — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 19:05:23 +0000

Multi universe is ridiculous, from the logical stance. If they, the Multi universe, exit and they have impact on our universe, then they are part of our universe and all the multi universes, include our, is one universe. If the other universes have not any impact on our universes than from our logical point of view they are not exit.

String theory is ridiculous theory. If the vibration is the practices and the energy than the stings themselves what they are? Mass? Energy? They must be something. If so you must to develop theory that explain them and the processes that occur inside them .If so you receive two kinds of mass, energy. The one is result of their vibrations and the second the sting themselves .from the logical stance we have logical failure.

In my point view unit theory must be totally mathematical abstract and not image, like the sting ( theory), of some things that exit in our surrounding world.

By: Hech Baan

Hech Baan — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 07:18:38 +0000

[A black hole is what you get if you compress so much mass into a region of space that it collapses, under its own weight, to an infinitely small, dense, point called the “singularity.”]

This is what Einstein’s gravity theory tells us. But it means that the theory is not consistent, for it predicts black hole and Big Bang “singularities”. Therefore, we don’t have a consistent theory predicting black holes. Thus, we are not really sure what black hole is, are we?

By: Not Even Wrong » Blog Archive » This and That

Not Even Wrong » Blog Archive » This and That — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 20:46:17 +0000

[...] an interview with Susskind here about his latest book. About anthropics and the multiverse he claims …since I wrote “The [...]