Measurements without Probabilities in the Final State Proposal

Abstract

The black hole final state proposal reconciles the infalling vacuum with the unitarity of the Hawking radiation, but only for some experiments. We study experiments that first verify the exterior, then the interior purification of the same Hawking particle. (This is the same protocol that renders the firewall paradox operationally meaningful in standard quantum mechanics.) We show that the decoherence functional fails to be diagonal, even upon inclusion of external "pointer" systems. Hence, probabilities for outcomes of these measurements are not defined. We conclude that the final state proposal does not offer a consistent alternative to the firewall hypothesis.