What happens if you fall into a black hole? If you asked Albert Einstein that he told you that according to his general theory of relativity, you are going to fall down to the singularity point of a black hole, where space-time warps, and it seems that all the laws of physics stop making sense. Nothing can escape the singularity point.
Stephen Hawking took a near-classic approach to black holes that combined quantum theory and Einstein's theory of relativity, he showed that black holes emit a small amount of heat which will eventually evaporate the black hole. But still based on his theory when you're inside a black hole, you and your particles will be forever lost.
This is in violation of a basic principle of quantum mechanics which is called unitarity. It means that the present always has information about the past. How can black holes destroy information? This is known as the black hole information paradox and has made physicists uncomfortable for decades.
Of course, the black hole would scramble the data. It would be a lot worse than when you burn your body and turn to smoke and ashe, but even if you burn a book and still manage to collect all the ashes, the information is still present in the world, only in a different shape.
The key to understanding why the information is not destroyed is a process known as quantum entanglement. Every black hole emits some radiation. This radiation maintains a quantum mechanical connection to its place of origin when it was created. With separate measurements of the radiation and the black hole the information looks random, but when you look at them together, an entanglement between the black hole and its radiation will appear.
The degree of information entanglement is known as entanglement entropy. At the beginning of the life of a black hole, entanglement entropy is zero because it did not emit any radiation yet, but as the blackhole ages, the entropy increases.
Information can theoretically escape a black hole.
Physicists have shown in a series of groundbreaking articles that entanglement entropy of a black holes actually follows a flat curve. These calculations provide more clues to believe blackholes do spread the information, but the details of how this fact happened is yet to be understood.
This theory of course, gives the impression that spacetime itself may not be fundamental and possibly there is something even deeper. Space-time maybe made of something that is not space and time. There are pieces of this puzzle and perhaps there will be other pieces to find for many decades to come.
