HAWKING vs SUSSKIND

It's a fun time to be alive! As if reading my mind ("no such thing as too many programs and books about cosmology"), TVO's Big Ideas program today was the the 2011 Sackler Public Lecture at the University of Toronto given by Leonard Susskind on June 28, 2011. In the lecture, he described in simplified terms (yes, we need that!) the idea of the universe being a giant hologram. If this sounds familiar, note Brian Greene's ending remarks here ("imagine reality as a hologram").

Leonard Susskind and Stephen Hawking disagreed about what would happen to the information and matter stored in a black hole when it evaporates. Since I hadn't given ANY thought to a black hole evaporating (some physicists argue that black holes themselves may not even exist), this is all new and exciting to me. Not to writers at Wikipedia, though. I have a LOT of catching up to do re: theories in cosmology. See these and other articles at Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Susskind

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox

Image taken from Wikipedia (source: NASA)