SMuK 2021 – scientific programme

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AGPhil: Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Physik

AGPhil 9: General Relativity and Black Holes

AGPhil 9.2: Talk

Thursday, September 2, 2021, 17:00–17:30, H7

Operational vs Descriptive Black Hole Complementarity — •Siddharth Muthukrishnan — Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA 15260 USA

To what extent does the black hole information paradox lead to violations of quantum mechanics? Black hole complementarity has emerged as an influential framework to prevent any such violations from being empirically problematic. I distinguish between an operational and a descriptive principle of black hole complementarity. Recent results applying quantum information theory and quantum computational complexity theory to black holes then imply that the operational principle is successful where the descriptive principle is not. Keeping this distinction in mind helps clarify why one seeks a solution to the information paradox, and what such a solution needs to explain. In particular, if the operational principle is accepted, then the black hole information paradox is no longer pressing.