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.”
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Virtual particles are particles that appear to existence and then dissapear, they are fluctuations on the quantum field. Since you are talking about hawking radiation, it is probably about the pair of virtual particles that pop to existence near the black hole event horizon. His explanation is that what usually happens is that a virtual particle and antiparticle pair pop up, and then anhilate each other, however at the event horizon if this happens, one particle is sucked to the black hole, and the other goes away, effectively making the black hole evaporate over time.
That being said, this explanation for hawking radiation is wrong. This is S. Hawking way of ELI5 his paper about black holes, because the principle is similar enough.
Negative energy is just a negative value for some quantum field.
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