Listening to Leonard Susskind

In college, I had a roommate who came off an acid trip babbling endlessly about "the universal hologram." When she became obsessed with repeatedly washing down the walls of our room with bleach, I chalked it up to post-trip craziness. But maybe I should have paid closer attention: Theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind has proposed a holographic principle that might just be crazy enough to be true, according to Jesse Cohen, who reviews Susskind's latest book today.

In "The Black Hole War: My Battle With Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics," Susskind not only discusses the holographic principle and string theory, the book is also "a gregarious narrative of intellectual brinkmanship."

In this interview with rock musician and physicist Brian Cox, Susskind shows his amiability while discussing string theory over wine.

If you like Susskind's style, you can sit in on his continuing education class in quantum mechanics; Stanford has put the series of all nine lectures online.

-- Carolyn Kellogg