As a non-physicist, I've always been hung up on a much simpler paradox: how does radiation escape from a black hole? I thought even light could not escape? Is there an explanation to that?
> A pair of virtual waves/particles arises just beyond the event horizon due to ordinary quantum effects. Very close to the event horizon, these always manifest as a pair of photons. It may happen that one of these photons passes beyond the event horizon, while the other escapes into the wider universe ("to infinity"). A close analysis shows that the exponential redshifting effect of extreme gravity very close to the event horizon almost tears the escaping photon apart, and in addition very slightly amplifies it. The amplification gives rise to a "partner wave", which carries negative energy and passes through the event horizon, where it remains trapped, reducing the total energy of the black hole. The escaping photon adds an equal amount of positive energy to the wider universe outside the black hole. In this way, no matter or energy ever actually leaves the black hole itself. A conservation law exists for the partner wave, which in theory shows that the emissions comprise an exact black body spectrum, bearing no information about the interior conditions.
Does it make sense to worry about paradoxes created by black holes evaporating, if we have no evidence that they actually do evaporate in our physical reality?
Is that the same kind of negative energy that comes up in talk of stabilizing wormholes and building Alcubierre drives?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/11/03/ask-...
Most importantly, he argues that Hawking's own popular explanation (often repeated across the media, about the particle-antiparticle pair) is too simple to be correct:
"It's not right, though, in a number of ways. First off, this visualization is not for real particles, but virtual ones. We are trying to describe the quantum vacuum, but these are not actual particles that you can scoop up or collide with. The particle-antiparticle pairs from quantum field theory are calculational tools only, not physically observable entities. Second, the Hawking radiation that leaves a black hole is almost exclusively photons, not matter or antimatter particles. And third, most of the Hawking radiation doesn't come from the edge of the event horizon, but from a very large region surrounding the black hole."
Additionally, the article also writes enough to explain the whole context and gives enough details for those who are interested to learn more.
So it would seem that a charged black hole would evaporate by Hawking radiation until it reached the point where any further mass loss would put it over the charge limit. Physicists don’t think it is then simply going to stop radiating, and so what happens then is I believe still quite open.
There was an article in Quanta a few months ago on this: https://www.quantamagazine.org/black-hole-paradoxes-reveal-a...
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/490524/evaporati...
Photon pairs form in the vacuum all the time. When a pair forms at the event horizon of a black hole, it rips the pair apart. Half falls in, and half shoots out into space. The half the falls in, through the effect that rips the pair apart, winds up with negative energy, lowering the energy level of the black hole.
At least that's my super-layman recollection, a lot of space to be wrong in that 1 sentence.
Normally, these particles annihilate each other - however if one crosses the threshold and is not able to escape, it can't annihilate the other particle and that escapes as radiation.