Nah, I never even started a PhD mostly due to financial circumstances. But I've since realised I kinda hated academia because of untreated ADHD lol. I may go back to it one day after I've got treatment sorted but I really doubt it, I found my passion in music instead.

I'll try and ELI5 haha. Think of a black hole like a battery, stuff falls in to charge it and then it discharges by tickling empty space into creating particles. The problem is that the particles it creates seem to be random, which means it acts like a big delete button for the stuff that fell inside. Due to quantum stuff, this shouldn't be possible, so some process could exist to encode the information about the original stuff onto the particles that leave the black hole. Importantly this doesn't actually mean the particles that leave have to be the same as what fell in, you just need to able to look at them and then reconstruct it. Kinda like if you scrambled a book in a way which makes it look random, but is actually a secret code that still has the whole story contained inside.

My research was to look for that information being written on the particles leaving the black hole, basically by comparing how space and time outside the black hole changes over time and seeing what it does to the tickling.