Leonard Susskind (; born June 16, 1940) is an American theoretical physicist, professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University and founding director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics. His research interests are string theory, quantum field theory, quantum statistical mechanics and quantum cosmology. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an associate member of the faculty of Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and a distinguished professor of the Korea Institute for Advanced Study. Susskind is widely regarded as one of the fathers of string theory. He was the first to give a precise string-theoretic interpretation of the holographic principle in 1995 and the first to introduce the idea of the string theory landscape in 2003. Susskind was awarded the 1998 J. J. Sakurai Prize, the 2018 Oskar Klein Medal, and the Dirac Medal of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in 2023.
Early life and education Leonard Susskind was born in the South Bronx in New York City to a poor Jewish family whose father was a plumber. He began working as a plumber himself at the age of 16, taking over from his father who had become ill. Later, he enrolled in the City College of New York as an engineering student and had planned to study mechanical engineering but he changed his mind and later graduated with a B.S. in physics in 1962. In an interview in the Los Angeles Times, Susskind recalls a discussion with his father that changed his career path: "When I told my father I wanted to be a physicist, he said, 'Hell no, you ain't going to work in a drug store.' I said, 'No, not a pharmacist.' I said, 'Like Einstein.' He poked me in the chest with a piece of plumbing pipe. 'You ain't going to be no engineer,' he said. 'You're going to be Einstein.'" Susskind then studied at Cornell University under Peter A. Carruthers, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1965.
Career
Susskind was an assistant professor of physics, then an associate professor at Yeshiva University (1966–1970), after which he went for a year to the Tel Aviv University (1971–72), returning to Yeshiva to become a professor of physics (1970–1979). Since 1979 he has been professor of physics at Stanford University, and since 2000 has held the Felix Bloch professorship of physics. Susskind was awarded the 1998 J. J. Sakurai Prize for his "pioneering contributions to hadronic string models, lattice gauge theories, quantum chromodynamics, and dynamical symmetry breaking." Susskind's hallmark, according to colleagues, has been the application of "brilliant imagination and originality to the theoretical study of the nature of the elementary particles and forces that make up the physical world." In 2007, Susskind joined the faculty of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, as an associate member. He has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a distinguished professor at Korea Institute for Advanced Study.
Scientific career Susskind was one of at least three physicists, alongside Yoichiro Nambu and Holger Bech Nielsen, who independently discovered during or around 1970 that Gabriele Veneziano's dual resonance model of strong interactions could be described by a quantum mechanical model of oscillating strings, and was the first to propose the idea of the string theory landscape. Susskind has also made important contributions in the following areas of physics:
The independent discovery of the string theory model of particle physics The theory of quark confinement The development of Hamiltonian lattice gauge theory known as Kogut–Susskind fermions The theory of scaling violations in deep inelastic electroproduction The theory of symmetry breaking sometimes known as "technicolor theory" The second, yet independent, theory of cosmological baryogenesis (Andrei Sakharov's work was first, but was mostly unknown in the Western hemisphere) String theory of black hole entropy The principle of black hole complementarity The causal patch hypothesis The holographic principle M-theory, including development of the Banks–Fischler–Shenker–Susskind matrix string model Introduction of holographic entropy bounds in physical cosmology Cool horizons for entangled black holes The idea of an anthropic string theory landscape The census taker's hat Most recently, application of ideas from information and computation theory, such as the complexity equals action conjecture, to the physics and thermodynamics of black holes, and holographic theories in general.
Books Susskind is the author of several popular science books.
The Cosmic Landscape
The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design is Susskind's first popular science book, published by Little, Brown and Company on December 12, 2005. It is Susskind's attempt to bring his idea of the anthropic landscape of string theory to the general public. In the book, Susskind describes how the string theory landscape was an almost inevitable consequence of several factors, one of which was Steven Weinberg's prediction of the cosmological constant in 1987. The question addressed here is why our universe is fine-tuned for our existence. Susskind explains that Weinberg calculated that if the cosmological constant was just a little different, our universe would cease to exist.
The Black Hole War
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