Like cosmic hard drives, black holes pack troves of data into compact spaces. But ever since Stephen Hawking calculated in 1974 that these dense spheres of extreme gravity give off heat and fade away, the fate of their stored information has haunted physicists.
The problem is this: The laws of quantum mechanics insist that information about the past is never lost, including the record of whatever fell into a black hole. But Hawking's calculation contradicted this. He applied both quantum mechanics and Albert Einstein's theory of gravity to the space around a black hole and found that quantum jitters cause the black hole to emit radiation that's perfectly random, carrying no information. As this happens the black hole shrinks and eventually
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