We will discuss how the diverse systems such as solitons, baryons and instantons on one hand and black holes and cosmological universes on the other store and process the quantum information in ways that are strikingly similar.  This similarity reveals a deep underlying connection between unitarity and entropy.  Among other things, this  sheds a very different light at the microscopic structure of non-perturbative objects in quantum field theory and gravity.  We discuss some observational consequences for particle physics and cosmology.