Bekenstein incorporated black hole entropy into a generalized second law—that the sum of the entropy outside black holes plus the newly proposed entropy of black holes must never decrease—and carefully considered processes that might violate it. To avoid violations, he found that he had to assume limitations on how close to the black hole’s horizon one could lower matter. Those ideas eventually evolved into a proposal for a bound on the entropy-to-energy ratio of matter confined to a region of given size.