Quantum mechanics says information is never destroyed. Black holes seemed to shred it anyway. Physics spent thirty years fighting itself over a drain.
Documented
The bet, the radiation, the reversal
In 1974 Hawking showed black holes radiate and evaporate; in 1976 he argued the radiation is featureless heat, so the information about what fell in is destroyed, violating quantum unitarity. The 1997 bet with John Preskill made it formal. The counterattack came from 't Hooft, Susskind, and Maldacena's gauge-gravity correspondence, which showed black holes in string theory behave as ordinary quantum systems that preserve information. Hawking conceded in 2004 and paid Preskill a baseball encyclopedia, from which, he joked, information could be retrieved at will.
Assessment: Fully documented, start to finish, the cleanest win in theoretical physics' public record. What remains genuinely open, the firewall debates and the islands program of 2019 onward, is how the information escapes, not whether it does.
Stories
The drain in the sky
The public version is simpler and wrong in a productive way: black holes as cosmic shredders where things go to cease existing, a hole in the universe with no bottom and no exit. The folk picture made the paradox famous as a horror story about deletion, which is exactly the version Hawking's own popular books sold before he recanted.
Assessment: The shredder image is documented as popularization, not physics. Nothing in the modern account lets anything be deleted; the horror was a forty-year misunderstanding between two correct equations.
Interesting claims
The universe keeps receipts
The interesting claim, now mainstream-adjacent: if information is conserved absolutely, then everything that ever happened is in principle recoverable from the radiation, meaning the universe forgets nothing, ever. Some push further: the holographic principle that resolved the paradox implies the world is a projection, and the real drama happens on a boundary we cannot visit.
Assessment: Conservation of information is now the working position, but the recovery is in-principle only, beyond any conceivable technology, and the holographic reading is mathematics about gravity, not a license for mystical conclusions. The receipts exist; nobody will ever read them.
Sources and further reading
Hawking, Black Hole Explosions? (1974) and Breakdown of Predictability in Gravitational Collapse (1976)
Preskill, Do Black Holes Destroy Information? (1992), the bet's terms
Maldacena, The Large N Limit of Superconformal Field Theories (1997), AdS/CFT
Susskind, The Black Hole War (2008), the public account