Vasudev Shyam got Geoff Penington and me to be part of a podcast discussion today morning. We discussed whether islands and the Page curve are relevant for realistic black holes.
As Geoff pointed out at the end, it is good to broaden and democratize these discussions as much as possible, so you can see for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCIho8geEfI
The video itself is pretty long so here is, I believe, a reasonable summary of what we agreed and disagreed on:
We agree that information is always outside the black hole for a physical observer. Therefore, in a standard theory of gravity, information doesn’t “emerge” the way that Page argued that it does. I feel that this suggests that deriving a Page curve is not crucial for understanding the information problem. Geoff’s disagrees with this perspective.
We agree that it is possible to find a Page curve if one looks for it. One possibility is to modify the theory by coupling it to a nongravitational bath. In these theories the graviton is massive and information does emerge according to a Page curve.
Alternately, we agree that it is also possible to simply disallow the observer outside the black hole from measuring the components of the metric that correspond to the energy. Such an observer sees a Page curve even in standard gravity.
My perspective was that this Page curve reflects our voluntary choice of disregarding some information that is available at all times. Geoff argued that this was physically natural.