Hawking now believes that the information that plunges into a black hole is actually encoded on the surface of the event horizon enclosing the black hole and is then imparted back to the particles that are emitted. Weirdly, this surface is two-dimensional yet seems to encode information about the three-dimensional space inside. It has led to the idea of the holographic universe: the whole of our three-dimensional universe is actually just the projection of information contained on a two-dimensional surface. Although Hawking conceded the bet, Thorne has stood his ground. He still believes that
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