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The Black Hole War: My battle with Stephen Hawking to make the world safe for quantum mechanics is Susskind’s second popular science book, published in 2008. The book is his most famous work and explains what he thinks would happen to the information and matter stored in a black hole when it evaporates. The book sparked from a debate that started in the year 1981. In 1981 there was a meeting of physicists to try and decode some of the mysteries about how particles of particular elemental compounds function. During this discussion Stephen Hawking stated that the information inside a black hole is lost forever as the black hole evaporates. It took 28 years for Leonard Susskind to formulate his theory that would prove Hawking wrong. He then published his theory in his book, The Black Hole War. Like The Cosmic Landscape, The Black Hole War is aimed at the lay reader. He writes: “The real tools for understanding the quantum universe are abstract mathematics: infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces, projection operators, unitary matrices and a lot of other advanced principles that take a few years to learn. But let’s see how we do in just a few pages”. Susskind, according to one review, himself “continually refers to Hawking being “wrong,” as if it were a done deal, rather than letting the reader enjoy the suspense of wondering who will win this war.”

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