Sinossi

Black holes are among the strangest denizens of the physicist's world. Jacob Bekenstein tells here the story of how the thermodynamics of a black hole was discovered by him and Stephen Hawking, following John A. Wheeler's question about what would happen if a cup of hot tea were dumped into a black hole. He further describes ramifications of these thermodynamics, such as the mysterious information paradox and the holographic bound, which have deeply influenced theoretical physics in the last twenty years. These subjects are just some of the many adventures in physics which the author has witnessed and participated in. He describes the genesis and development of some of them in this book.