 In the early 1970s, nonetheless, Bekenstein (1972, 1973, 1974) argued that the Second Law of thermodynamics requires one to assign a finite entropy to a black hole. His worry was that one could collapse any amount of highly entropic matter into a black hole—which, as we have emphasized, is an extremely simple object—leaving no trace of the original disorder associated with the high entropy of the original matter. This seems to violate the Second Law of thermodynamics, which asserts that the entropy (disorder) of a closed system—such as the exterior of an event horizon—can never decrease. Adding mass to a black hole, however, will increase its size, which led Bekenstein to suggest that the area of a black hole is a measure of its entropy. This conjecture received support in 1971 when Hawking proved that the surface area of a black hole, like the entropy of a closed system, can never decrease (Hawking 1971). Still, essentially no one took Bekenstein's proposals seriously at first, because all black holes manifestly have temperature absolute zero, as mentioned above, if it is even meaningful to ascribe temperatures to them in the first  place.[12] 