Black Holes and Revelations

Today, I read an article in The New York Times about a shift in theories dealing with how black holes operate. Or perhaps more accurately, how they can be "read."

According to the article, it was once thought that any particles and the subsequent information about those particles would be lost forever, scrambled beyond recognition (save for particle charge, mass, etc.) before they were "spit out" again. However, physicists may have found a way to retrieve that information using "soft hair," their name for light particles shifting around on the surface of a black hole. When particles are pulled into the black hole, they shift around light particles trying to "escape" the immense gravitational pull. The article compares this shifting to the small notches in a record--the "shifts" can be read to retrieve information about what sort of particles were "sucked" into the black hole.