Fantasy writer Neil Gaiman tells the story of attending a gathering of great writers, scholars and thinkers, and wondering if he really belonged in that group. Next to him, another attendee also named Neil voiced similar doubts.

“I just look at all these people, and I think, what the heck am I doing here? They’ve made amazing things. I just went where I was sent.” To which Gaiman replied: “Yes. But you were the first man on the Moon. I think that counts for something.”

In that spirit, this month I presented to Pope Francis the attendees of our workshop Black Holes, Gravitational Waves, and Space-time Singularities. The scientists included 35 of the brightest in the field, in turn including a Nobel laureate. Two of them gave the Pope a copy of their work announcing the discovery of gravitational waves.

A major theme of the workshop was the exchange of information. Would information survive passage into a black hole, or would every kind of ordering be erased in that space-time singularity? The question has implications also for the singularity at the beginning of the Big Bang. What sort of theory would allow one to even answer that question? Will we ever have a workable theory of quantum gravity, to combine the insights of Einstein’s General Relativity (which works fine at astronomical scales) with the quantum physics that seems to operate at the tiniest scales?