Sun 24 Aug 2008
Just as certain films are vastly more entertaining than the books that inspired them (e.g., Blade Runner, based on Phillip Dick’s dreary Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), so are some book reviews. I would never dream of reading The Black Hole Wars, the new book by the physicist Leonard Susskind. He is a relentlessly self-aggrandizing, pompous, tedious proselytizer for string theory and its absurd spinoff landscape theory, which postulates that our universe is only one of zillions of others out there. Susskind is the kind of scientist who gives science a bad name, and he’s almost as bad a writer as scientist. If he isn’t being arrogant and grandiose, he’s trying to be whimsical and jokey, which is worse. For the sake of readers, the publishing world should declare a moratorium on whimsical-jokey books by physicists.
In Black Hole Wars, he tells the story of the provocative suggestion by Stephen Hawking (whose Brief History kicked off the whimsical-jokey-books-by-physicists trend) that black holes destroy information. Susskind claims to have disproved Hawking’s theory with another theory, having something to do with holographs, that sounds even more extravagantly silly than the landscape. Don’t bother reading Susskind’s book. But check out the review in today’s New York Times by my friend and Bloggingheads.tv colleague George Johnson. In just a fraction of the time that it would take to plow through Black Hole Wars, George’s one-page essay will give you infinitely more pleasure and insight.
Rather than ham-handedly insulting his targets, as I do, George prefers irony, often so subtle that the recipient may not even know he’s been skewered. Here’s how he ends his review:
“How [Susskind’s theory] all fits together is still pretty murky. ‘Getting our collective head around the holographic principle is probably the biggest challenge that we physicists have had since the discovery of quantum mechanics,’ Susskind admits. He speculates at one point that our big bang of a universe is some kind of ‘inside-out black hole’ — one that spews everything outward instead of sucking it in. But wait. Maybe it just looks that way because time is moving backward! Or — who knows? — maybe our universe is really a 3-D projection of a 4-D world falling through some hyperdimensional gullet! Toward the end of the book Susskind quotes Hawking: ‘We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the universe.’ Maybe. But not without a lot more data.”
8 Responses to “ The Book Stinks, but the Review’s Great! ”
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August 28th, 2008 at 10:00 am[...] The Book Stinks, but the Review’s Great! August 24th, 2008 by John Horgan [...]
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Pingback from Not Even Wrong » Blog Archive » The Black Hole War
August 29th, 2008 at 8:56 pm[...] Update: Some links to reviews. Paul Davies, Sean Carroll, George Johnson. See here for a review of the Johnson review by John Horgan. [...]
August 25th, 2008 at 10:16 am
If a theory is so evidently bankrupt and “murky”, even apart from its irreducible separation from reality, then why is only that kind of totally abstract theory exclusively supported not only at all the most prestigious faculties and labs of official science, but also by various private initiatives, including those of politically right, “believing” origin particularly attached to “positive” values? There is always a rich “benefactor” ready to provide any more-than-comfortable environment for any such “holographic” bullshit (in addition to its already generous “regular” support by public funds in all their “advanced-study” temples), without any positive result, year after year, decade after decade… And never any support for something different, explicitly problem-solving…
And now all of it dominates more than ever in a world completely consumed by the deep, catastrophically growing crisis of its “human dimensions” and already being visibly destroyed by the proportionally raising anti-civilisation elements of barbarian domination by brute force. The end of war, you say? Is it another “original theory” conflicting with “experimental data”? It’s evident that a world like this can only be saved by a new, powerful advance of its truly intellectual, efficient-knowledge-based development having nothing to do with the dominating destructive imitations of official “science”, all its equally fraudulent breeds including. But no, the big masters of this landscape niche do not want anything realistic, reasonable and problem-solving: they want only the continuing destruction of knowledge, intelligence and civilisation, by their real actions and preference.
Our dear science journalists and writers won’t remain without job in any case: criticism or praise, destruction or creation, their paper won’t remain empty and will bear everything, as well as it seems the most “educated” and prosperous public, despite the popular optimistic assumption that “one cannot fool all the people all the time”. As a matter of fact, one can, even when the resulting destruction becomes absolutely dominating everywhere and explicitly visible to everybody. Words, words, words, their infinite, infinitely flexible fluxes fitting into any landscape and inundating any intelligence… One only cannot fool Nature and its objective development laws, including the one of the old saying, “one reaps as one has sown”. And the world-scale bitter fruits of intelligence destruction already arrive indeed in their quickly growing harvest…
“We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the universe” (Hawking quoted by Susskind). Well, at least one cannot say that they’re hiding from us what they really are… However, in view of real monkey’s results, one would rather doubt that its official-science breed is a particularly “advanced” one able to understand anything at all, starting already from a single elementary particle (let alone the whole universe!): the monkey may finally appear to be as average as its native planet and the star… No chance in the landscape of abstract possibilities, this lottery is a truly random one!
August 27th, 2008 at 10:21 am
A little news in The New York Times on Monday on the “Clever Corvid” theme of a couple months ago. Researchers at the University of Washington here in Seattle have released a study which claims that crows can remember individual human faces for months and will “scold” a human who has offended them in the past. I was not really impressed with the methodology this study used, but I am ready enough to accept the result.
Michio Kaku is now solidly established as the new Carl Sagan, at least on the Science Channel. On a recent program he discussed the meaning of work done in Vienna by Antoine Zeilinger concerning non-locality of entangled photons. The statement by Zeilinger that jumped out at me is that all information associated with the “sender” photon must be lost in the process of instantaneously transferring the info to the “receiver” photon (which in theory could be across the galaxy.
This kind of thing is certainly as exotic as the view that we are holographic projections of two-dimensional, maybe even one-dimensional information storage. If technology can provide a way to make a 100% accurate clone of me on Mars that is also entangled with the real me here in Seattle, then I could say: “Beam me up, Scotty,” and it would work.
Better yet, technicians wouldn’t have to worry about the moral problem of destroying the original “me” as nature will somehow take care of that messy problem.
I can also reduce myself dimensionally by arranging to fall into a black hole. I don’t even notice as I get smeared across its surface in a much more compact and efficient manner than my present existence. This is one solution to a lot of environmental problems that I create by being in my present form on the surface of our planet. Perhaps CERN will solve all problems of human impact on our “delicate” world any day now, when it turns the large hadron collider and produces the black hole that swallows us all.
Since all I am or hope to be is nothing but information (in the materialist view) it is comforting to know that this information can not be “lost” in any manner. Stephen Hawking tried to erase information but official physics wouldn’t have it.
August 28th, 2008 at 9:35 am
A bit off topic but since you brought it up, Mike, here in India most people know that crows you offended will remember you for months if not years. If you’re on a bicycle, they may follow you for a mile or more letting every crow in town know what a bad guy you are.
November 12th, 2008 at 11:31 pm
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December 6th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
Hey Nick is that a joke?
Is that really Horgan or you pretending to be Horgan?
I am surprised that a NY TIMES writer would howl like a fishmonger in Eliza Doolittle’s Covent Garden — stress because the Times is losing money?
Horgan sounds like Colin Bennett’s “Victorian Station Master” in a fit of apoplexy. Not that I think that Lenny is the Obama Hosanna of physics mind you.
PS I think the tone of allegedly Horgan’s writing, in contrast to L. Smolin in “The Trouble With Physics”, is inappropriate and does not do Lenny’s bold imaginative still emerging ideas justice. I will write a measured response to it in due course.
I use some of Lenny’s ideas here, but with a decidedly new twist in time of course.
Note that attacking Lenny Susskind is also an attack on G. t’Hooft who also introduced the hologram principle.
On Dec 6, 2008, at 5:09 PM, nick herbert wrote:
http://www.stevens.edu/csw/cgi-bin/blogs/csw/?p=177
Two Comcentric Reviews John Horgan and George Johnson
of Leonard Susskind’s Black Hole War
December 6th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
http://qedcorp.com/APS/SarfattiDICE2008v7.pdf
I meant to put this URL with the sentence
I use some of Lenny’s ideas here, but with a decidedly new twist in time of course.