Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize For Science And Technology Selected by the Washington Post and New Scientist As One Of the Year's Best Books When something is sucked into a black hole, is it lost forever? Three decades ago, the American physicist Leonard Susskind and the British physicist Stephen Hawking began clashing over the answer to this question. Hawking insisted that anything that fell into a black hole disappeared. But Susskind and the Dutch physicist Gerard't Hooft realized that if this was true, then everything we understand about the fundamental laws of the universe would have to be tossed out. The Black Hole War is the thrilling story of the epic contest that ensued-an illuminating, exhilarating exploration of modern physics, quantum improbabilities, and the fate of stars. To get Hawking finally to admit he was wrong, Susskind and 't Hooft would push physics way beyond the weird: they would prove that everything in our physical world-this book, your house, yourself-is actually a hologram projected from the farthest realm of space. Book jacket.