★★★★☆ Very cool ideas

The Holographic Universe

Leonard Susskind, James Lindesay

I enjoyed this quite a lot. The ideas from which The Holographic Universe begin come from the observation that the amount of information you can fit into a black hole depends on the square of its radius, rather than the cube. That is, the information content of a black hole is proportional not to its volume, which would have been the obvious guess, but to its surface area. This leads to the hypothesis that all the information on the state of a black hole is carried on its surface, not in its interior.

From there we get to the idea (supported by some other physical theory) that every event horizon has this property: that the information is not contained within it, but on its surface.

Noting that the boundary of the observable universe is, from our point of view, an event horizon, this leads to the idea of the Holographic Universe, and to an estimate of the total information content of the universe. It's a huge number, obviously, but finite.

My impression, in the ten years since I read this, is that the ideas are not accepted among other physicists. I still enjoyed it, though. For those of us willing to endure a little math, Leonard Susskind is one of the best physics popularizers around. His The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics series of YouTube lectures are terrific.

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