We finally know why Stephen Hawking’s black hole equation works

We finally understand how black holes get their entropy. Physicists have been struggling to figure this out since the early 1970s, when Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein calculated how much entropy, or disorder, should be present in a black hole. Now, with a little help from quantum mechanics, researchers may have finally solved the problem.

“For a long time, people have thought that to solve this problem, you have to do all kinds of fancy things in string theory. But what we show is…