starkly depicted as inescapable voids.

Black holes have terrorized the popular imagination.

Anything and everything that falls into a black hole is lost forever.

Or so the story goes, according to Einstein's general theory of relativity.

This defining character of black holes came under scrutiny. according to Einstein's general theory of relativity.

This defining character of black holes came under scrutiny in the 1970s

with a surprising challenge posed by a young and brilliant

but ailing British physicist, Stephen Hawking.

Hawking realized that through a remarkable and subtle quantum process,

black holes could evaporate, eventually exploding entirely in a burst of radiation.

Even in this explosion, nothing can escape.

The black hole seemed to take everything it had consumed with it into oblivion, including

all quantum information. But where did it all go? I'm Jan 11, and this is the joy of why, a podcast

from Quantum Magazine, where my co-host, Steve Strogetz, and I take turns exploring some of the biggest

unanswered questions in math and science today.

Few understood the significance of Hawking's results initially, but one scientist immediately

recognized the crisis that would become known as the information loss

paradox. He is here with us today, the famed physicist Leonard Suskind, Lenny to anyone who

knows him. In today's episode, Lenny leads us through the Black Hole War as we ask,

is there a quantum escape hatch from black

holes? And will we ever know for sure? Lenny is a professor at Stanford University and the

founding director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics. He's widely regarded as

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