There's an issue this highlights and it's not that the original authors were stupid so much as there's clearly a lot of knowledge held in silos.
That's not a good thing if your goal is to advance everyone's knowledge. Whatever is going on in academia is failing relatively closely related fields which is not good.
kurthr · 2m ago
Well, there's another aspect which is that the original authors and pop-sci journalists don't seem to be able to understand where they went wrong or how outrageous their claims are, precisely because their jobs depend on not understanding. The could have corrected it. We could not still be circling this drain 2 years later, but we are.
Kinda classic. Kinda boring.
EA-3167 · 37s ago
It helps that this is a genuinely difficult process to understand and requires an enormous fluency with QFT. Most people who fit that bill have better things to do with their time than write popular science articles or correct them.
gruturo · 20m ago
Without a gravity well whose escape velocity exceeds c, how are they supposing hawking radiation happens in this scenario?
Both virtual particles-antiparticles survive (and promptly disappear because one didn't just cross an event horizon).
EA-3167 · 14m ago
You have to remember the "one particle in the pair fails to escape the event horizon" explanation is a simplification of the alleged reality, which is the scattering of particles (or fields) in the presence of an event horizon. As far as I know there is no intuitive, non-mathematical way to describe this accurately, so science communicators of all stripes tend to approximate it in ways that can mislead the audience.
The man himself (Hawking) said: "One might picture this negative energy flux in the following way. Just outside the event horizon there will be virtual pairs of particles, one with negative energy and one with positive energy. It should be emphasized that these pictures of the mechanism responsible for the thermal emission and area decrease are heuristic only and should not be taken too literally."
Sharlin · 14m ago
That one's a big white lie of how Hawking radiation works. It's not even an approximation, just a far-fetched metaphor that Hawking made up, presumably to satisfy science journalists.
As best I can tell there's no paywall on TFA, so I really don't think there's any reason to go through archive.is, which adds its own advertisements (if you don't block them).
detourdog · 19m ago
I couldn't really make heads or tails of this but if they aren't are emitting are they absorbing instead?
I feel like the only way not to emit is to absorb.
kurthr · 5m ago
Naw, this is Hawking Radiation a "quantum phenomena" that in the original paper doesn't conserve mass/baryons. It's weird that it was originally published (fantastic claims require fantastic evidence). I don't really like the headline of TFA either since it seems conflate all sorts of radiation.
The original paper is 2023 (Phys Review Letters). There was a rebuttal in PRL in 2024. I don't know why this is still a big deal now in 2025 other than Science Alert decided to write (another?) hyperbolic article based on crap. Still boring.
That's not a good thing if your goal is to advance everyone's knowledge. Whatever is going on in academia is failing relatively closely related fields which is not good.
Kinda classic. Kinda boring.
Both virtual particles-antiparticles survive (and promptly disappear because one didn't just cross an event horizon).
The man himself (Hawking) said: "One might picture this negative energy flux in the following way. Just outside the event horizon there will be virtual pairs of particles, one with negative energy and one with positive energy. It should be emphasized that these pictures of the mechanism responsible for the thermal emission and area decrease are heuristic only and should not be taken too literally."
I feel like the only way not to emit is to absorb.
The original paper is 2023 (Phys Review Letters). There was a rebuttal in PRL in 2024. I don't know why this is still a big deal now in 2025 other than Science Alert decided to write (another?) hyperbolic article based on crap. Still boring.