Lessons from the Information Paradox

Abstract

We review recent progress on the information paradox. We explain why exponentially small correlations in the radiation emitted by a black hole are sufficient to resolve the original paradox put forward by Hawking. We then describe a refinement of the paradox that makes essential reference to the black-hole interior. This analysis leads to a broadly-applicable physical principle: in a theory of quantum gravity, a copy of all the information on a Cauchy slice is also available near the boundary of the slice. This principle can be made precise and established -- under weak assumptions, and using only low-energy techniques -- in asymptotically global AdS and in four dimensional asymptotically flat spacetime. When applied to black holes, this principle tells us that the exterior of the black hole always retains a complete copy of the information in the interior. We show that accounting for this redundancy provides a resolution of the information paradox for evaporating black holes and, conversely, that ignoring this redundancy leads to paradoxes even in the absence of black holes. We relate this perspective to recent computations of the Page curve for holographic CFTs coupled to nongravitational baths. But we argue that such models may provide an inaccurate picture of the rate at which information can be extracted from evaporating black holes in asymptotically flat space. We discuss large black holes dual to typical states in AdS/CFT and the new paradoxes that arise in this setting. These paradoxes also extend to the eternal black hole. They can be resolved by assuming that the map between the boundary CFT and the black-hole interior is state dependent. We discuss the consistency of state-dependent bulk reconstructions. We conclude by examining the viability of arguments for firewalls, fuzzballs and other kinds of structure at the horizon.