In March 1974, Stephen Hawking publishes in Nature a paper of barely two pages titled "Black hole explosions?" that revolutionizes theoretical physics: combining general relativity, thermodynamics, and quantum mechanics, he shows that black holes are not entirely black, but emit thermal radiation continuously. The mechanism, now known as Hawking radiation, arises from quantum vacuum fluctuations near the event horizon: particle-antiparticle pairs constantly form, and occasionally one falls into the black hole while the other escapes, carrying away a tiny portion of the hole's mass-energy. This loss implies that black holes have a temperature inversely proportional to their mass and, therefore, that they can evaporate completely over astronomical timescales — the smallest ones, hypothetically formed in the early universe, could even have already evaporated in detectable explosions. The finding, built on Jacob Bekenstein's earlier work on black hole entropy, also gave rise to the famous information paradox: if a black hole evaporates completely, what happens to the information about everything that fell into it, given that quantum mechanics requires that information never be lost? This paradox remains unresolved by consensus half a century later and continues to be one of the central open problems in the search for a quantum theory of gravity.