As soon as I finish writing this short piece of text, I'm going to delete the document that contains it from my computer.

The question is when I erase these 320,000 bits of information, where did they go?

Thermodynamics tells us that matter and energy can never be destroyed.

Only transferred.

Well, this goes for information to when I erase something from my computer, it's not destroyed but transferred into heat.

That's why laptops get hot.

That's why computers need fans to cool them down.

This law.

That information can never be destroyed holds true everywhere in the universe except one place, black holes in the 19 seventies Stephen Hawking showed us that black holes actually radiate superhot energy from their event horizons.

The place where everything even light is irrevocably doomed.

This meant crucially that black holes get smaller and smaller and evaporate over time, eventually disappearing altogether.

This is like the universe.

Erasing its own word document.

Except for what we've already said, can never be destroyed.

Information looks like here actually is and the information paradox was born.

Scientists have a love hate relationship with paradoxes.

Over the years, many have tried to solve the information paradox and we'll talk about a few here.

But first Jacob Benkenstein knowing that he could never actually read the information inside a black hole, Benkenstein resolved to figure out how much hidden information otherwise known as entropy a given black hole actually contained.

Now you'd imagine that the amount of entropy in the black hole would equal the volume of that black hole.

Like the amount of coffee in a coffee mug equals the volume of that mug.

But Benkenstein found that in the case of black holes the amount of hidden information inside is not equal to the volume but the area of the event horizons surface.

That's pretty crazy.

This means that when information approaches a black hole it gets plastered onto the event horizon surface like dots on a super hot basketball.

But there's a problem here and I think it's time to bring Matthew McConaughey into the equation at the end of the movie interstellar spoilers, Matthew McConaughey goes into a black hole when he hits the event horizon.

He seems to be fine.

Well there's nothing really surprising about that.

We know that eventually McConaughey is gonna get ripped to shreds by the intense gravity of the black hole eventually being smushed into the singularity.

But we sort of know that when you cross the event horizon of a large black hole, you probably wouldn't feel anything like the film shows.

But how does this square with what we just said that all information approaching a black hole gets hot glue gun to its event horizon.

The answer is here, this is a stereo graham.

You might remember them from grade school, a two D.

Image that when looked at for long enough reveals a hidden picture that seems to rise off the plane otherwise known as a hologram notice that the three D.

Info appears highly scrambled in two D.

This is what's happening to Matthew McConaughey when he travels past the event horizon of a black hole.

Everything that happens inside the black hole is essentially a hologram of the information encoded on its two D surface, McConaughey would move past the event horizon, feeling all right, alright, alright.

But an observer from outside would see him incinerated and spread across the surface as particles.

The crazy thing is that both perspectives would be correct.

According to physicist Leonard Susskind, this may be the case for the entire universe.

The three dimensional space we live in and move in every day maybe in effect a hologram of a lower dimensional universe, albeit a perfect hollering.

This is called the holographic principle.

It doesn't mean that the universe is a dream or an illusion or anything like that, but it is as genuinely revolutionary an idea as relativity was to Newtonian physics.

We don't know why it works, but every time we try to quantify the amount of information in an enclosed space, it's always equal to the surface area of that space.

I guess it just goes to show that once again the universe is not intuitive to the human mind, but that doesn't mean once again, but we can't figure it out.

Mm hmm.

Hey, everybody thanks for watching and thank you to the Patreon patrons.

There's 64 of you out there and I was bowled over by the support for this channel.

You can all consider yourself as part of a special Nerd writer club now and I have a lot of really cool things planned for you, Google hangouts treats you have no, you have no idea, it's gonna be fun.

First things first, I'm going to collect all of your email so that I can send out a weekly or bi weekly newsletter, the Patreon patrons where you can hear about what's going to come up.

If you want to be a Patreon Patreon for the nerd writer, you can pledge as little as $1 to this channel.

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As always, I'm going to be in comments talking about the holographic principle.