The rest sounds a bit easier, but a lot weirder. Feed some information into the first black hole, encoded in a quantum particle. As it falls beyond the event horizon—the point beyond which not even light can escape—the information is rapidly smeared throughout the black hole and scrambled seemingly beyond recall.

But have patience—if you’ve linked the two black holes in the right way, after a short wait the quantum information will pop out of the second one, fully refocused into readable form. To get there, it will have traveled through a shortcut in space-time that links the two objects—a wormhole.

That, at least, is what physicists have predicted. Now a group led by Sepehr Nezami of the California Institute of Technology has suggested how to actually perform this extraordinary experiment—and it is beginning to work with collaborators to put the idea to the test.