The Black Hole Wars

I listened to Leonard Susskind's The Black Hole Wars on CD in the car, meaning I probably didn't get half of what I was supposed to get, but on the other hand that I might have absorbed more (consciously or unconsciously) than I normally do when reading a book of popular science. The question of what the popular reader actually gets out of a book like this, which is really trying to communicate the content of the science as well as how the science is done, interests me a lot. Something like ten years ago I listened to The Origin of Species on tape while driving, and although again there was a lot that I missed (sometimes while struggling to maintain my alertness on I-5...) the experience of listening to Darwin's arguments "in their entirety" aloud was transformative, something like what I imagine it must have been like for citizens listening to philosophers in the agora. Susskind is attempting to convey the doing of science in the same way. It's a different kind of popular science from either Brian Greene, who as I see it is working to convey the beauty of the vision as a kind of done deal, a vision as it were of how everyone will see the universe working once string theory and its cosmologies have been proven out somehow; and different again from that of Not Even Wrong, whose argument derives from being "inside the argument" but not able to convey all of the things that make the string theorists wrong except at some point in a qualitative way (convincing as one reads long, convincing because of the philosophical holes the author seems to be illuminating in the Landscape theory, the basic weakness of the possibility that it might not be possible to ever verify or disprove the theory).