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arXiv:2604.17839

What Do Black Holes Teach Us About Wigner's Friend?

Emily Adlam

quant-phgr-qcphysics.hist-phSubmitted Apr 20, 2026• Announced Apr 21, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

Recently, Hausmann and Renner have pointed out that several famous paradoxes relating to black holes have a similar character to various Extended Wigner's Friend paradoxes. In this paper I consider what the connection between these things could teach us about the Wigner's Friend scenarios. I argue that if we take the analogy between these cases seriously, the black hole paradoxes appear to favour a certain class of response to the Wigner's Friend scenario - specifically, those which posit intrinsic relationality, rather than effective and emergent relationality, and also those which posit some kind of retrocausality.

Comments
Forthcoming in European Journal for Philosophy of Science

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Recently, Hausmann and Renner have pointed out that several famous paradoxes relating to black holes have a similar character to various Extended Wigner's Friend paradoxes. In this paper I consider what the connection between these things could teach us about the Wigner's Friend scenarios. I argue that if we take the analogy between these cases seriously, the black hole paradoxes appear to favour a certain class of response to the Wigner's Friend scenario - specifically, those which posit intrinsic relationality, rather than effective and emergent relationality, and also those which posit some kind of retrocausality.
Recently, Hausmann and Renner have pointed out that several famous paradoxes relating to black holes have a similar character to various Extended Wigner’s Friend paradoxes. In this paper I consider what the connection between these things could teach us about the Wigner’s Friend scenarios. I argue that if we take the analogy between these cases seriously, the black hole paradoxes appear to favour a certain class of response to the Wigner’s Friend scenario - specifically, those which posit intrinsic relationality, rather than effective and emergent relationality, and also those which posit some kind of retrocausality.
Despite its remarkable empirical success and predictive power, quantum theory is riddled with mysteries. One such conceptual puzzle is the measurement problem: why do quantum systems in superposition collapse to a single-valued outcome upon being measured? The scenario of Wigner's friend illustrates this tension, with recent extensions deriving strong no-go results for the nature of reality. Another fundamental puzzle arises at the interface of quantum theory and general relativity---the black hole information paradox. This thesis further explores these two foundational paradoxes. Part I of this thesis focuses on extensions of the Wigner's friend scenario. We introduce several novel extended Wigner's friend arguments, and establish connections with notions of nonclassicality, i.e. the study of quantum phenomena that evade classical explanation. Key results are a refined version of the Frauchiger--Renner paradox, new extended Wigner's friend scenarios based on contextuality, and an argument against the absoluteness of free choices based on the Pusey--Barrett--Rudolph theorem. The latter result complements the Local Friendliness no-go theorem, which challenged the absoluteness of experimentally obtained measurement outcomes. In Part II of this thesis, we turn to black hole puzzles and the interplay of quantum theory and gravity. We present a paradox that unifies extended Wigner's friend arguments with black hole puzzles, strengthening the cloning and firewall paradoxes. After discussing subtleties in these paradoxes, we next present an analysis combining elements of quantum theory with gravity, analyzing the detector response near a superposed black hole using elements of quantum reference frames.
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:2504.03835] 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 black hole cloning paradox, which leaves room for a theory to consistently describe the physics of black holes satisfying the assumptions of this paradox but without operational contradictions concerning quantum theory's predictions. We close this loophole, showing that no such theory exists, conditional on standard assumptions of black hole puzzles. We moreover show how the firewall argument can be used to derive a violation of no-signalling. We conclude by briefly highlighting important subtleties in assumptions commonly used in black hole puzzles, questioning the validity of these assumptions.
There has been a surge of recent interest in the Wigner's Friend paradox, sparking several novel thought experiments and no-go theorems. The main narrative has been that Wigner's Friend highlights a counterintuitive feature that is unique to quantum theory, and which is closely related to the quantum measurement problem. Here, we challenge this view. We argue that the gist of the Wigner's Friend paradox can be reproduced without assuming quantum physics, and that it underlies a much broader class of enigmas in the foundations of physics and philosophy. To show this, we first consider several recently proposed Extended Wigner's Friend scenarios, and demonstrate that some of their implications for the absoluteness of observations can be reproduced by classical thought experiments that involve the duplication of agents. Crucially, some of these classical scenarios are technologically much easier to implement than their quantum counterparts. Then, we argue that the essential structural ingredient of all these scenarios is a feature that we call "Restriction A": that a physical theory cannot give us a probabilistic description of the observations of all agents. Finally, we argue that this difficulty is at the core of other puzzles in the foundations of physics and philosophy, and demonstrate this explicitly for cosmology's Boltzmann brain problem. Our analysis suggests that Wigner's Friend should be studied in a larger context, addressing a frontier of human knowledge beyond quantum foundations: to obtain reliable predictions for experiments in which these predictions can be privately but not intersubjectively verified.
The Wigner's friend paradox, like the Schrödinger's cat paradox, challenges our understanding of the foundations of quantum theory. The paradox is best illustrated by a brief scenario featuring two observers who draw different conclusions. We describe the Wigner's friend scenario as told by E. P. Wigner, and then an earlier version as told by Hugh Everett. Wigner and Everett offer different resolutions of essentially the same paradox. Decoherence theory provides a third resolution. Despite different interpretations (or their absence), these three stories fit together to form a consistent picture without a paradox.