For those faithful readers of this blog the title of this note may not come as a surprise . This has been my quest: coming from Communications Engineering to Black Hole Entropy via the Mexican-American-Israeli Jacobo Bekenstein, I want to know what Information is.
He does not know me, I never met him in person, but since he is famous I know about him.
Today though, the note has to do with my readings of a giant Theoretical Physics Professor. I subscribe to the Stanford University YouTube channel, where I follow his great lectures for the masses. Given that he is the plumber son, of a plumber from the Bronx, his story obviously draws the attention of this 60 year working class aspiring scientist.
I am reading the Black Hole Wars, by Leonard Susskind.
It is a great book, the one I would have liked to have written myself. So it goes; here are my thoughts about it.
I haven't finished the book, but already I can see some things. First that I was right, second that the story is not finished, so there is hope, and third that I may be in the story.
Susskind has been to one place I spent seven years of my life in. The Physics Department at UCSB, so far I don't see in the book, if he has been at CINVESTAV, if that is so, it may be partly my fault. Not that I didn't invite him, I only was a student there in the early seventies; but that I have not put into a refereed magazine any of my ideas relevant to his interests. That is my fault, and people that know me, feel that something is odd with me. I have a little of that unnerving disease that Grisha Perelman has; at least Grisha is still considering whether or not to go get the million dollars he deserves.
I know two others worse than me: Vinod Janghiani, and Augusto Sabbattini. Both Jim Hartle's students lost to intellectual black holes of their own making. There is one other that saved himself, Terry Sejnowski, now in San Diego. I guess we are like those virtual strings coming out of Polchinsky's D-Branes, and never making it out as Hawking Radiation.
That is it for today,
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