English

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

Quantum Physics 2026-04-21 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology History and Philosophy of Physics

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.17839,
  title  = {What Do Black Holes Teach Us About Wigner's Friend?},
  author = {Emily Adlam},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.17839},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Forthcoming in European Journal for Philosophy of Science