Andrew Strominger

think there are many equations that made it to headstones.

And they're really central equations and you put them together and you get a formula for the number of gigabytes in a black hole.

Now in Schwarzschild's description, the black hole is literally a hole in space and there's no place to store the gigabytes.

And it's not too hard to, and this really was Wheeler and Hawking, to come to the conclusion that if there isn't a sense in which a black hole can store some large number of gigabytes,

that quantum mechanics and gravity can't be consistent.

Oh, okay.

So when you say that, I should try to memorize them and answer each one in order just to answer them?

So Einstein's black hole is Schwarzschild's black hole.

They can't store information.

Stuff goes in there and it just keeps flying and it goes to the singularity and it's gone.

However, Einstein's theory is not exact.

It has corrections.

And string theory tells you what those corrections are.

And so you should be able to find some alternate way of describing the black hole that enables you

to understand where the gigabytes are stored.

So what Hawking and Bekenstein really did was they showed that physics is inconsistent unless a black hole can store a number of gigabytes proportional to its area divided by four times Newton's constant times Planck's constant.

Well, I was just before I came here writing an introduction to a paper, and the first sentence was the...

as yet imprecisely defined holographic principle.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So nobody knows exactly what it is, but roughly speaking, it says just what we were alluding to, that really all the information that is in some volume of space-time can be stored on the boundary of that region.