Can Information Escape a Black Hole? The Puzzle That Changed Physics – Netta Engelhardt

What if two of the most trusted theories in physics — general relativity and quantum mechanics — told completely different stories about the same object?

In this Perimeter Institute public lecture, MIT physicist Netta Engelhardt dives into one of the deepest puzzles in modern science: the black hole information paradox.

First posed by Stephen Hawking, the paradox challenges whether information that falls into a black hole is gone forever — a direct violation of quantum mechanics. But if nothing can escape a black hole (not even light), how can that information get out?

With clarity, humour, and compelling visuals, Engelhardt unpacks the tension between gravity and quantum theory, introduces the surprising role of entanglement, and explains how recent breakthroughs have shown that information does escape — just in an extremely scrambled form.

This is a story about the limits of knowledge, the beauty of paradoxes, and how thinking deeply — and differently — might bring us closer to the fundamental truths of the cosmos.

About the Speaker:
Netta Engelhardt is a theoretical physicist at MIT working at the frontier of quantum gravity, particularly the relationship between black holes and quantum information. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton and is known for contributions to the AdS/CFT correspondence and modern approaches to black hole entropy and information recovery.

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Perimeter Institute (charitable registration number 88981 4323 RR0001) is the world’s largest independent research hub devoted to theoretical physics, created to foster breakthroughs in the fundamental understanding of our universe, from the smallest particles to the entire cosmo