For the past 45 years, theoretical physicists have been wrestling with understanding the fate of information thrown into a black hole. The problem originates with a discovery of Stephen Hawking that, due to quantum mechanics, black holes evaporate into a cloud of radiation essentially devoid of any information they contained. This is the famous black hole information paradox which has been the driving force for decades of research towards a consistent unification of quantum mechanics and gravity. Just this past year, a number of exciting breakthroughs in understanding this paradox seem to have identified the crucial missing ingredient in Hawking's original analysis. These are so-called ''spacetime wormholes'' which are quantum fluctuations of the spacetime itself, and which have been shown to transcribe the information inside the black hole onto the emitted radiation. A surprising consequence of this development is the suggestion that one can learn about the inside of a black hole by analyzing only its emitted radiation and not have to actually jump into one!
