50 years of the black hole information paradox: October 6 – November 21, 2025

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Organized by: Niayesh Afshordi, Emil Martinec and Samir D. Mathur

50 years ago Stephen Hawking published his famous paper arguing that the evaporation of black holes violated quantum unitarity. In the intervening decades, the puzzle, known as the black hole information paradox, has become an intense focus of interest. Yet different parts of the physics community hold very disparate views on the resolution of the paradox. In approaches using canonically quantized Einstein gravity, information is typically lost, stored in baby universes or leaking out slowly in long lived remnants. In string theory, on the other hand, there is considerable evidence that the information should come out in Hawking radiation, just as it does in the radiation from a normal body. The explicit constructions of black hole microstates as fuzzballs have provided a potential resolution of the puzzle. Yet other approaches have argued that wormholes can be relevant to understanding the black hole geometry and dynamics.

In spite of this large interest in the problem, different parts of the community working with black holes have typically not interacted much with each other. Physicists working with canonically quantized Einstein gravity or loop quantum gravity have often not followed all the developments in string theory and vice versa. Even within the string theory community, physicists making fuzzballs constructions have not interacted much with people following wormhole ideas. The goal of this program is to bring together people working on different aspects of the puzzle using diverse tools, so that we may consolidate what we have learnt over the past decades and use the lessons to further our understanding of quantum gravity. The folloing Minicourses will take place during this program:

There will also be a workshop: 50 years of the black hole information paradox: Nov 3-7, 2025 assoicated with this program.