I’m listening to an audiobook of A Brief History of Time, bopping along, and when I get to the chapter on black holes I’m suddenly “hold up, whaaa? . . .” And then I learn that “virtual particles” can somehow become “real particles” through “negative energy” and I’m thinking it sounds like a comic book where Batman saved the day by “reversing the polarity.”
In: 5
Virtual particles are a small perturbation in the quantum field. You would see a particle as a wave packet in this field.
It is possible to use a squid, which in this case is like a tiny mirror that oscillates back and forth at about 1/3 speed of light. When placing the squid in a vacuum it can transfer its kinetic energy to virtual particle and a detectable photon will be born.
Using it as an analog to Hawking radiation the black hole creates a condition that imparts some of its mass/energy into a photon that zooms away.
It is fundamentally a condition that within a quantum field there is no such thing as static zero energy state when there are no particles around. The perturbations in field are constant and they interact with matter and energy. In the case of a black hole it is the result of redshifted light and a slight amplification of that light. How does a wave get amplified? By another wave, of course. It is that amplifying wave that is able to extract some of the black hole mass and impart it into the photon that speeds away, thus Hawking radiation.
Latest Answers