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In 1975, Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein showed that black holes should slowly radiate away energy, which poses a problem. From the no hair theorem, one would expect the Hawking radiation to be completely independent of the material entering the black hole. Nevertheless, if the material entering the black hole were a pure quantum state, the transformation of that state into the mixed state of Hawking radiation would destroy information about the original quantum state. This violates Liouville's theorem and presents a physical paradox.
Black hole information paradox - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This paradox was solved by Leonard Susskind using the holographic principle which in simple terms states that the black hole does not actually destroy information in violation of the laws of physics but rather that the information is actually stored in the center of the black hole and the hawking radiation is merely a representation of this information at the event horizon like the representation of a 3 dimensional object on a 2 dimensional plane in a hologram.
The holographic principle was inspired by black hole thermodynamics, which implies that the maximal entropy in any region scales with the radius squared, and not cubed as might be expected. In the case of a black hole, the insight was that the description of all the objects which have fallen in can be entirely contained in surface fluctuations of the event horizon. The holographic principle resolves the black hole information paradox within the framework of string theory.[3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle
But what is really interesting is that it is suggested that the same principle can be applied to the entire universe IE the universe is simply a two dimensional information structure painted on the cosmological horizon.
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