A documentary about the universe and Stephen Hawkings role in understanding it. But behind the public face lies an argument that has been raging for almost 30 years.
In 1976 he published a paper in Physical Review D called, "The breakdown of predictability in gravitational collapse". In this paper, Hawking argued that it wasn't just the black hole that disappeared.
He said that all the information about everything that had ever been inside the black hole disappeared, too. In everyday life, we're used to losing information - but according to physics this isn't supposed to happen; according to physics, information is never really lost, it just gets harder to find.
The reason physicists cling on to the idea that information can't be lost is that it's their link with either the past or the future. If information is lost then science can never know the past or predict the future. There are limits to what science can know.
Since then the "information paradox" has come to be seen as one of the most fundamental and most difficult problems in physics.
The Hawking Paradox.
