The ‘Black Hole War’ of the title was not a Star Wars-inspired integalactic battle. Instead, it was a the moniker of a deep rift that developed between the theories of general relativity (Hawking) and quantum mechanics (Susskind).

In 1983, Hawking showed that black holes do not last forever – they evaporate, much like water. Thus any information that was associated with the particles that slipped into the black hole, such as spin, would disappear. But this could not be reconciled with a fundamental law in quantum mechanics, that this kind of ‘information’ can never be lost.

The story of the resulting race contains many well known and narcissistic theoretical physicists. And with the aid of lots of sketches and graphs, Susskind’s explanations are almost comprehensible – which, for this topic, is as good as it is going to get.