Physics Colloquium

Black holes are well-known for their apparently mysterious ways of storing and processing information. These properties, however, are universal, as we argued recently.  Ordinary non-gravitational objects, when pushed to the limit of saturating the information storage capacity - maximal capacity compatible with unitarity - behave exactly as black holes. Their entropy becomes the area law, they exhibit information horizon, they evaporate but at the same time maintain information internally.  This is true for all known systems such as solitons, baryons, instantons and even for certain quantum neural-type networks. This universality allows us to understand the seemingly unrelated  phenomena, such as unitarization of gravity by black holes and confinement in QCD, in terms of physics of saturation.  It also allows to import a black hole way of information processing in condensed matter and atomic systems. Moreover, the same  phenomenon of saturation has equally striking implications for cosmology such as the exclusion of the de Sitter Universe.