Nearly all of the information that falls into a black hole escapes back out, a controversial new study argues. The work suggests that black holes could one day be used as incredibly accurate quantum computers — if enormous theoretical and practical hurdles can first be overcome.

Seth Lloyd of MIT has used a controversial quantum model, which holds that under certain extreme circumstances, such as the intense gravitational field of a black hole, objects that would ordinarily have several options for their behaviour have only one. For example, a black hole could cause a coin thrown into it to always come up “heads”.

This allows information to escape from a black hole without any ambiguity about how to interpret it. The information escapes through a quantum process called entanglement.