"Black holes have the universe's most inscrutable poker faces. ...When you've seen one black hole with a given mass, charge, and spin (though you've learned these thing indirectly, through their effect on surrounding gas and stars...) you've definitely seen them all. ...black holes contain the highest possible ...a measure of the number of rearrangements of an object's internal constituents that have no effect on its appearance. ...Black holes have a monopoly on maximal disorder. ...As matter takes the plunge across a black hole's ravenous , not only does the black hole's entropy increase, but its size increases as well. ...the amount of entropy ...tells us something about space itself: the maximum entropy that can be crammed into a region of space—any region of space, anywhere, anytime—is equal to the entropy contained within a black hole whose size equals the region in question."