The most popular solutions to the black hole information paradox are likely wrong because they require physics to change at a massive scale where it shouldn't.
April 24, 2026
Original Paper
Beyond Small Corrections: The Universal State Bound and the Dynamic Nature of the Black Hole Information Paradox
SSRN · 6548545
The Takeaway
The Universal State Bound implies that standard resolutions to the black hole information paradox require massive departures from local field theory. Theories like AdS/CFT or wormholes between particles assume that the local laws of physics can be ignored across large distances. This paper proves that these fixes create new mathematical problems that might be just as bad as the original paradox. It suggests that physicists have been trying to fix a leak in the ceiling by ignoring the fact that the floor is missing. Solving the paradox may require a much more radical rethink of how space and time function than current theories suggest.
From the abstract
We argue that critiques of Mathur's small corrections theorem based on the Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis (ETH) and quantum gravitational state corrections commit a category error, conflating kinematic corrections to the initial state with dynamic corrections to the evolution operator. The true burden of the information paradox lies in the latter. We complement the theorem with a Universal State Bound : if the entanglement entropy change is bounded by ϵ for every state in the EFT subspace,