I have just done some further research, and found a rather serious criticism of the idea that “quantum extremal surfaces reproduce the Page curve, and that explains everything”. The claim is that entanglement islands only show up in theories with a massive graviton—which is very unlike our world. This claim is being emphasized by the string theorist Suvrat Raju, most recently in section 4.2 of this paper from last year. He actually mentions the article from Quanta Magazine, as an example of a “misleading” “popular description”.
His own position is that everything about real-world quantum black holes is explained by an extra nonlocality of information in quantum gravity (what he calls “holography of information”); that the Page curve is a property of any ordinary quantum system in which entanglement is leaking across a boundary; and it’s because massive gravity doesn’t possess the property of holography of information, that the Page curve shows up in that case.
I have just done some further research, and found a rather serious criticism of the idea that “quantum extremal surfaces reproduce the Page curve, and that explains everything”. The claim is that entanglement islands only show up in theories with a massive graviton—which is very unlike our world. This claim is being emphasized by the string theorist Suvrat Raju, most recently in section 4.2 of this paper from last year. He actually mentions the article from Quanta Magazine, as an example of a “misleading” “popular description”.
His own position is that everything about real-world quantum black holes is explained by an extra nonlocality of information in quantum gravity (what he calls “holography of information”); that the Page curve is a property of any ordinary quantum system in which entanglement is leaking across a boundary; and it’s because massive gravity doesn’t possess the property of holography of information, that the Page curve shows up in that case.