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What actually happens if information is lost inside black holes? I'm watching a documentary and it said it would destroy our understanding of physics but I don't know why.

Even if everything that went in came out as the same hawking radiation, why does that change any of the fundamental laws of physics?

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  • $\begingroup$ All of the known laws of physics are reversible. Except for this one. $\endgroup$
    – Criticizing Israel not allowed
    Commented Jul 22, 2021 at 9:18
  • $\begingroup$ Possible duplicate: physics.stackexchange.com/q/651414/2451 $\endgroup$
    – Qmechanic ♦
    Commented Jul 22, 2021 at 9:43
  • $\begingroup$ @safesphere If I could gather up all the smoke particles, and the air particles the smoke particles have interacted with, and the lungs of the people who breathed the air, and so on... basically the entire planet Earth, if not the entire universe - and reverse all their velocities and charges and also flip the universe like a mirror - the book would unburn. And everything else would keep going backwards all the way to the Big Bang, in principle. (Though how do you reverse expansion of space? Cosmology may also have this problem) $\endgroup$
    – Criticizing Israel not allowed
    Commented Jul 22, 2021 at 12:24
  • $\begingroup$ @safesphere The probabilistic laws of thermodynamics! Unburning would require all the smoke particles and stuff to just coincidentally hit each other with the right velocities and positions to cause unburning. But, we can prepare that state by burning the book and then reversing the universe. $\endgroup$
    – Criticizing Israel not allowed
    Commented Jul 22, 2021 at 21:14
  • $\begingroup$ @safesphere If you like, you can consider that when we carefully flipped every particle in the universe, the entity doing the flipping increased massively in entropy, like Maxwell's demon. $\endgroup$
    – Criticizing Israel not allowed
    Commented Jul 23, 2021 at 7:06

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