Little Atoms 229 – Road Trip 12 – Leonard Susskind

In this Road Trip podcast, Neil Denny pays a visit to Leonard Susskind in Palo Alto, California. Leonard Susskind has been the Felix Bloch Professor in theoretical physics at Stanford University since 1978. He is a member of the National Academy of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the recipient of numerous prizes including the science writing prize of the American Institute of Physics for a Scientific American article on black holes. He is the author of a number of books of popular science, including The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design and the book we look at in this interview, The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics. His contributions to physics include the discovery of string theory, and the holographic principle, both of which have completely changed the landscape of modern theoretical physics. Outside of physics, Susskind has been a lifelong advocate of progressive politics, something else we touch upon in this interview.