Operational Unitarity: Resolving the Black Hole Information Paradox via the Operational Coherence Bound
Jason Gabriel Davis
The black hole information paradox presents a fundamental tension between the global unitarity of quantum mechanics and the apparent thermal, mixed-state nature of Hawking radiation. We propose a resolution grounded strictly in the Operational Coherence Bound (OCB), a covariant entropy constraint asserting that while formal (global) information may be unbounded, the operationally accessible and distinguishable information available to any single observer must be finite. By defining operational entropy via vacuum-subtracted relative entropy to ensure finiteness in continuum quantum field theory, we prove the Operational Unitarity Theorem: in a black hole spacetime satisfying the OCB, no single observer can operationally distinguish between unitary and non-unitary evolution of the global state. This framework resolves the Hawking information loss claim, the Page curve verification problem, and the AMPS firewall paradox by demonstrating that the causal geometry of black holes dynamically enforces an observer-indexed cap on cumulative information access. Global unitarity is preserved, but its operational verification is strictly forbidden by the geometric constraints of the observer’s causal diamond.This paper was originally integrated into the Unified Framework for Yang-Mills Mass Gap, QCD Confinement, and Black Hole Information paper uploaded in March 2026 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18829529 Version 3 updates a duplication error I made in the last version.
•Jun 9, 2026•0 citations