Dear Mr. Hu,
Your criticism has been previously raised by other people. I rewrite here my reply to them almost verbatim. Although "It From Bit or Bit From It" is the title of the Contest, one easily checks that topics like "How does nature (the universe and the things therein) "store" and "process" information?" and "How does understanding information help us understand physics, and vice-versa?" are fully taken into account in my Essay. On the other hand, it is historically well known and also stressed in the interesting Essay by Singleton, Vagenas, & Zhu, which looks to be complementary to my one, that (verbatim from the Essay by Singleton, Vagenas and Zhu) "much of the interest in the connection between information, i.e. "bits", and physical objects, i.e. "its", stems from the discovery that black holes have characteristics of thermodynamic systems having entropies and temperatures." In fact, if Hawking's original claim was correct, black holes should destroy bits of information. By showing the unitary evolution of black hole evaporation instead implies that bits of information are preserved. On the other hand, the worst consequence of destruction of bits of information by a physical process is that quantum mechanics breaks down. I have instead shown that quantum mechanics works in black hole evaporation and bits of information are in turn preserved in that process. I also think it is not a coincidence that the great scientist who coined the phrase "It from bit or Bit from It?" in the 1950s, i.e. John A. Wheeler, was the same scientist who popularized the term "black hole" in the 1960s. Also, attempts to solve the black hole information loss puzzle opened the road to various interesting physical ideas concerning information, like for example the Holographic Principle. Hence, by using your words, this precise, technical essay about a phenomenon limited to black holes is strongly connected with the broad universal theme of this contest. In order to have further details on this issue, I suggest you to read the pretty book by Leonard Susskind "The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics", Little, Brown and Company (2008). It is not simple to link the nature of information in a black hole to information in the rest of the universe. In any case, an important point is that, as it is supposed that there is a big number of black holes in the universe, the idea that black holes destroy information should lower the global information in the universe. A recent model of cosmology, proposed by Roger Penrose, i.e. The Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, looks to strongly depend on the condition that information should be indeed lost in black holes.
Sincerely,
Ch.