Scientist

Leonard Susskind

1940- · quantum gravity, string theory, theoretical physics
American theoretical physicist, one of the founders of string theory. Made significant contributions to quantum theory of black holes, proposing the principle of complementarity and the holographic principle, resolving the information paradox.

Biography

Born in New York into a Jewish family. Initially studied to be a plumber, but then received an education at Columbia University. Worked at Stanford University, where he is a professor. Member of the US National Academy of Sciences. Also known as a science popularizer.

Key discoveries

💡 Susskind became famous for his 'battle with Hawking' over the issue of information preservation in black holes, which lasted for decades and ended with his viewpoint prevailing.
"He thought that if you don't deeply understand quantum mechanics, you just haven't thought about it long enough."
Concepts
spacetime curvatureentropy
Laws
holographic principle
Scientists
Jacob BekensteinKarl SchwarzschildJoseph WeberEmmy NoetherWilhelm WienLudwig BoltzmannKip ThorneCharles Bennett

Related articles

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Tiny Universes: Why Their Secrets Are Elusive
According to one physical hypothesis, our voluminous world might be a projection from a flat surface. From such a Universe, tiny closed bubbles — baby universes — sometimes pinch off. For a long time, they were thought to be empty, devoid of internal diversity. It turned out that the information inside them is scattered, like shards of a broken mirror.
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Hidden Wormholes in the Hydrogen Atom
Two water droplets tremble in sync — because they're connected by a straw. So it is with entangled particles: their unity may be held together by a microscopic wormhole.
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Lack of Information Accelerates the Universe
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The Perfect Mirror: Quantum Fields on a Donut and the Geometry Within
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How to Measure the Chaos of Spacetime Itself
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The Universe as a Hologram Woven from Quantum Threads
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Fractional Holographic Dark Energy: The Nonlocal Conductor of Cosmic Acceleration
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Mosaic on the Surface of a Black Hole
A black hole devours everything, even light. Yet it obeys the laws of physics: it possesses entropy — a measure of the hidden information an object 'remembers.' In the 1970s, Jacob Bekenstein and Stephen Hawking discovered a strange pattern: a black hole's entropy grows not with its volume, but…
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Three-Dimensional Gravity Seeks Its Reflection in the Mirror
The holographic principle is often compared to a hologram: all the information about a volume is encoded on a flat surface. In physics, this means that three-dimensional spacetime with gravity could be equivalent to a two-dimensional theory without gravity — a so-called conformal field theory (CFT).