Description: Black holes are regions of space with gravity so strong that nothing can escape from them, not even light. This isn't science fiction - there's even a gigantic black hole at the center of our galaxy. It's hard to imagine a more effective way to irrevocably erase and destroy a computer's hard drive than to drop it into a nice big black hole.

But is the information on that drive really gone forever?

Paradoxically, there's a good chance that not only does the information come back, it comes back in the blink of an eye. This surprise return of the information is based on the same principles that might someday make reliable quantum computers a reality. In fact, engineers are already exploiting these principles to help distribute software and stream video over the internet. And that's where the tornadoes come in...


Patrick Hayden is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at McGill University, where he holds the Canada Research Chair in the Physics of Information. Prior to joining McGill in 2004, he spent three years as a Sherman Fairchild Prize Postdoctoral Fellow at the California Institute of Technology. He obtained his DPhil in Physics as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and a BSc in Mathematics and Physics from McGill. His current fascination with quantum information processing was foreshadowed early; as a high school student, he worked summers writing networking software and graphics code for an operating systems company with the curiously prescient, if premature, name "Quantum Software Systems".