Lovely. Interestingly, this feature of black holes that they allow you to see what is on the "far side" of the black hole as a result of gravitational lensing w

Lovely. Interestingly, this feature of black holes that they allow you to see what is on the "far side" of the black hole as a result of gravitational lensing was one of the heuristics used by Leonard Susskind to propose the holographic principle in his famous paper, "The World As A Hologram" https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9409089 https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9409089 Note especially Figure 2, Figure 3, Figure 4, used to justify that a two dimensional screen is enough to capture all the information. Obviously there is a lot more going on -- especially the black hole entropy formula which says that entropy growths with surface area not volume -- to motivate this idea, but I always thought those figures were particularly educational.