But this theory has an even steeper price. Suppose an observer is reading the Britannica volume as he plunges into the black hole. If the hole were big enough, he shouldn't experience anything unusual until he is crushed by the singularity. Meanwhile, the information would have to exist both on the pages and at the surface of the black hole, violating the notion that things take place at precise locations in space and time. If it's a very big black hole, to the best of our knowledge, we won't really notice it for a long time and can live long and productive lives.
Civilizations can rise and fall, all without being significantly affected by the infall.
And the phenomenon would not necessarily be limited to black holes. Information about everything happening in any large volume of space might be spread out, in two dimensions, on its surface. Some physicists compare this kind of universe to a hologram, in which a three-dimensional image is encoded on a flat surface. This is what I would like to know. Answering that, he said, may require radical new ideas about the very nature of space and time.