Chirp, Phase Lock, and the Limits of Gravitational Inference

This record contains two companion manuscripts that recast horizon physics and astrophysical inference using the language of chirp-based IQ demodulation familiar to radio operators. Rather than introducing new observables, the work provides a new interpretive framework: it identifies Hawking radiation and related gravitational signals as fundamentally phase-sensitive processes observed through phase-insensitive channels.

In this vocabulary, the near-horizon signal appears as an exponential chirp, the standard derivation acts as an envelope detector, and the missing ingredient for full state reconstruction is recognised as a phase reference (local oscillator setting). The key point, in radio terms, is that no observer can maintain phase lock across the chirp singularity—so the measurement necessarily drops to power-only detection.

This makes explicit a structural limitation that is usually implicit: many physically distinct states can produce identical observed spectra, just as different signals with different phase structure collapse to the same output when phase lock is lost and only the envelope is measured.

For the amateur radio community, this perspective offers a familiar conceptual toolkit—chirp tracking, phase lock, quadratures, and coherent versus envelope detection—to understand where information is preserved, where it is lost, and what would be required in principle to recover it.