Slashdot Mirror
Hawking Radiation Mimicked In the Lab
Annanag writes *Nothing* escapes a black hole, right? Except 40 years ago Stephen Hawking threw a spanner in the works by suggesting that, courtesy of quantum mechanics, some light particles can actually break free of a black hole's massive pull. Then you have the tantalizing question of whether information can also escape, encoded in that so-called 'Hawking radiation'. The only problem being that no one has ever been able to detect Hawking radiation being emitted from a black hole. BUT a physicist has now come closer than ever before to creating an imitation of a black hole event horizon in the lab, opening up a potential avenue for investigating Hawking radiation and exploring how quantum mechanics and general relativity might be brought together.
I never did get this... Hawking radiation doesn't "Escape" a black hole. In empty space, there is a constant seething foam of particle-antiparticle pairs that get created all the time. Normally these pairs immediately collide with one another, or their neighbors, and obliterate each other so they are mostly undetectable. With a blackhole you have an event horizon. One side of which is inescapable, the other side is escapable. It stands to reason, that along this line these particle-antiparticle pairs would get created with one inside the horizon and the other outside of it. Resulting in a net increase in the number of particles created. Nothing "Escaped" at all.