Leonard Susskind’s The Black Hole War tells one of the great intellectual dramas of the twentieth century: a decades long battle between Susskind and Stephen Hawking over whether information swallowed by a black hole is lost forever. The book is brilliant, combative, and honest. It is also, in one crucial respect, incomplete. Because the man who loaded the first round in that war was not a Stanford luminary or a Cambridge icon. He was an unflinching Israeli theorist named Jacob Bekenstein, and the weapon he forged was an equation scribbled in a Princeton doctoral thesis in 1972.

Bekenstein was born in Mexico City in 1947 to Polish Jewish parents who had emigrated from Europe. He grew up in the United States, studied at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, and arrived at Princeton to work under the legendary John Archibald Wheeler. It was Wheeler who posed the question that would define Bekenstein’s career: what happens to entropy when matter falls into a black hole? The prevailing answer was nothing. Black holes were understood as cosmic drains. Whatever fell in was gone, its information erased from the universe’s ledger.

Bekenstein disagreed. In his doctoral thesis he proposed something radical: that a black hole possesses entropy, and that this entropy is proportional to the area of its event horizon. The idea was elegant and unsettling. It meant black holes were not featureless voids but thermodynamic objects, each one carrying a precise record of everything it had consumed. The universe, Bekenstein........

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