Black Holes: The Membrane Paradigm treats a black hole as an object completely described by the properties of its surface. The surface is regarded as a membrane of fluid endowed with familiar physical properties such as electrical conductivity, viscosity, temperature, entropy, and so on. The values of these physical properties are simple and are prescribed by general relativity. The interaction of the black hole with the external universe is described in the book by the familiar laws of physics for such a fluid. The strength of this approach is that if you are familiar with only the nonrelativistic laws of physics, you can understand the behavior of black holes using all your intuition from the nonrelativistic laws. The formalism is exact outside the black hole, so that you can even do quantitative calculations for complex astrophysical situations.
The book represents a collaborative effort—its eight separately authored chapters are based on ...
