OK, I read S.Hawking's http://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0507171v2.pdf Phys.Rev.D72 (2005) 084013 but do not understand it. It supposedly shows "information is not lost during black hole formation+evaporation." This also was supposedly shown by J.Maldecena's "AdS-CFT correspondence" which I do understand (for a very poor value of "understand" -- I understand his top level argument plan). Neither tells me the answer to this: "Is Joe's lepton number preserved when he falls into a black hole and it later evaporates?" Neither convinces me they're right, either. In fact, if that exact verbatim paper had been written by me, not Hawking, I feel 100% confident Physical Review D would not have published it -- i.e. this is yet another example of the failure of the refereeing process in Science. Now here's a little thought experiment that suggests Hawking is wrong. Consider the big bang that created our universe. Did it generate lots of information from {little or none}? If so, we would seem to have a counterexample to Hawking's "physics is information-preserving (unitary)" claim. Another: the correct theory of quantum gravity is not known. If it is possible to create two such theories, both self-consistent, but one features black hole info loss, other doesn't, then I would conclude that the power of pure thought simply cannot tell us whether "info loss" happens. And I think that is the situation we are in, or anyhow neither Maldecena nor Hawking has ruled that out. Instead they each have worked within one partial quantum theory of gravity, and since not the same theory, evidently they disagree.