Andrew Strominger

that can be made in mathematics and mathematical physics that are equivalent but might take years to understand that they're equivalent and might take the invention or discovery of whole new fields of mathematics to prove they're equivalent.

And this was one of those.

We found an alternate description

of certain black holes in string theory, which we could prove was equivalent.

And it was a description of the black hole as a hologram that can be thought of a holographic plate.

that could be thought of as sitting on the surface of the black hole, and the interior of the black hole itself sort of arises as a projection, or the near horizon region of the black hole arises as a projection.

of that holographic plate.

So the two descriptions were the hologram, the three-dimensional image, and the holographic plate.

And the hologram is what Einstein discovered and the holographic plate is what we discovered.

And this idea that you could describe things very, very concretely in string theory in these two different languages, of course, took off and was applied to many different contexts within string theory.

Well, there's really two Hawking problems.

They're very closely related.

One is, how does the black hole store the information?

And...

That is the one that we solved in some cases.

So it's sort of like, you know, your smartphone, how does it store its 64 gigabytes?

Well, you rip the cover off and you count the chips and there's 64 of them, each with a gigabyte, and you know there's 64 gigabytes.

But that does not solve the problem of how you get information in and out of your smartphone.

You have to understand a lot more about the Wi-Fi and the internet and the cellular.

And that problem of how the information gets in and out, you couldn't have explained how information gets in and out of an iPhone without first explaining