Has Stephen Hawking Just Solved a Huge Black-Hole Mystery?

Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts that the physical information about material gobbled up by a black hole is destroyed, but the laws of quantum mechanics stipulate that information is eternal. Hawking — working with Malcolm Perry, of the University of Cambridge in England, and Harvard University's Andrew Stromberg — has come up with a possible solution: The quantum-mechanical information about infalling particles doesn't actually make it inside the black hole. "I propo