Black holes, information, and locality

Abstract

Thirty years of a deepening information paradox suggest the need to revise our basic physical framework. Multiple indicators point toward reassessment of the principle of locality: lack of a precise definition in quantum gravity, behavior of high-energy scattering, hints from strings and AdS/CFT, conundrums of quantum cosmology, and finally lack of good alternative resolutions of the paradox. A plausible conjecture states that the non-perturbative dynamics of gravity is unitary but nonlocal. String theory may directly address these issues but so far important aspects remain elusive. If this viewpoint is correct, critical questions are to understand the "correspondence" limit where nonlocal physics reduces to local quantum field theory, and beyond, to unveil principles of an underlying nonlocal theory.

v2: minor updates to agree w/published version

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Cited by in corpus (17)

• Time Dependence of Hawking Radiation Entropy
• The gravitational S-matrix
• High-energy gravitational scattering and black hole resonances
• Nonlocality vs. complementarity: a conservative approach to the information problem
• The Born Rule Dies
• Quantitative approaches to information recovery from black holes
• Cosmological Measures without Volume Weighting
• Universal quantum mechanics
• GUP and the no-cloning theorem
• Qubit Transport Model for Unitary Black Hole Evaporation without Firewalls
• Symmetric-Bounce Quantum State of the Universe
• The Quantum Memory Matrix: A Unified Framework for the Black Hole Information Paradox
• Statistical Measures of Planck Scale Signal Correlations in Interferometers
• Agnesi Weighting for the Measure Problem of Cosmology
• Fuzzy spaces topology change as a possible solution to the black hole information loss paradox
• Spacetime Average Density (SAD) Cosmological Measures
• Quantum circuit simulation of black hole evaporation and Maxwell demon interpretation