Black holes and scientific standoffs

For two decades, Stanford University physicist Leonard Susskind battled cosmologist Stephen Hawking over the behavior of black holes. Hawking said that when black holes eat their fill, they disappear, taking with them everything they consumed over their billions of years of existence. Susskind found this idea so disturbing that he publicly declared war -- a conflict he describes in his new book, "The Black Hole War." In a conversation before a recent appearance at the Los Angeles Public Library, Susskind recounted his long struggle to "make the world safe for quantum mechanics."

How did this war with Stephen Hawking come about?

I was a particle physicist when I was invited to an event at Werner Erhard's house in 1981. Erhard [founder of the est self-awareness movement] admired scientists and liked to listen to them debate. At one of his events, I met Stephen Hawking. Stephen discovered an amazing fact, which is that black holes evaporate. It's like a puddle of water out in the sun.

OK.

So the question is, What happens to the information trapped in the black hole? Stephen said it was lost forever. Stephen didn't just say it, he proved it. At least he convinced himself and everybody else mathematically that it was true.

And you felt that was wrong.

It violates one of the fundamental principles of physics, which says nothing is ever lost completely. You may say, "How can you say information isn't lost? I can erase information on my computer." But every time a bit of information is erased, we know it doesn't disappear. It goes out into the environment. It may be horribly scrambled and confused, but it never really gets lost. It's just converted into a different form.

In your book, you compare Stephen Hawking to the White Whale and yourself to Ahab.

I obsessed over this. This was never a matter of personal animosity. But he couldn't see how damaging this would be to the rest of physics. And he didn't see what a great resolution might come out of it if thought about in the right way. I love the man, but I wanted to grab him by the neck and shake him a little bit. Stephen would just smile and say, "I'm right and you're wrong."

That's a pretty heady debate for someone who started out as a plumber.

I was from a poor Jewish family in the South Bronx. My father was a plumber, but when I was 16 he got sick and I had to take over. Being a plumber in the South Bronx wasn't fun.

When did physics come along?