Wigner's friend's black hole adventure: an argument for complementarity?

Fuente: arXiv
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Autor principal: Walleghem, Laurens
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Walleghem, Laurens
author_facet Walleghem, Laurens
contents At the heart of both black hole physics and Wigner's friend scenarios lies the question of unitarity. In Wigner's friend setups, sealed-lab measurements are modeled unitarily, probing the measurement problem. In black hole physics, the unitarity problem concerns information preservation in evaporation. We extend a recent analogy between these two puzzles exposed by Hausmann and Renner [arXiv:2504.03835v1] by constructing new paradoxes that merge black hole physics with extensions of the Wigner's friend scenario into a unified argument. This unified construction allows us to sharpen the cloning and firewall paradoxes, which leave room for a post-quantum theory to consistently describe the physics of black holes. We close this loophole, showing that no such theory exists if no observer can experimentally falsify quantum theory's predictions. We conclude by briefly highlighting subtleties in assumptions commonly used in black hole puzzles.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_05369
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Wigner's friend's black hole adventure: an argument for complementarity?
Walleghem, Laurens
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
Quantum Physics
At the heart of both black hole physics and Wigner's friend scenarios lies the question of unitarity. In Wigner's friend setups, sealed-lab measurements are modeled unitarily, probing the measurement problem. In black hole physics, the unitarity problem concerns information preservation in evaporation. We extend a recent analogy between these two puzzles exposed by Hausmann and Renner [arXiv:2504.03835v1] by constructing new paradoxes that merge black hole physics with extensions of the Wigner's friend scenario into a unified argument. This unified construction allows us to sharpen the cloning and firewall paradoxes, which leave room for a post-quantum theory to consistently describe the physics of black holes. We close this loophole, showing that no such theory exists if no observer can experimentally falsify quantum theory's predictions. We conclude by briefly highlighting subtleties in assumptions commonly used in black hole puzzles.
title Wigner's friend's black hole adventure: an argument for complementarity?
topic General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
Quantum Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05369