How Hawking's Name was Born

As we discussed in the last post, we know black holes are some of the most elusive, yet most popular objects in the universe. They are the largest and smallest things in the universe all at the same time, and because of this they are a possible impossibility.

Some of the greatest and most popular scientists in recent history have made their name researching black holes. One that jumps out is Stephen Hawking, who is now one of the most recognizable physicists in science. Hawking's work gave birth to the idea of Hawking Radiation. Hawking Radiation comes from a similar aspect as we previously talked about, where objects crossing the event horizon appear to be annihilated.

Around the surface of a black hole, called its event horizon, the force of gravity is very strong. As a result, particles surrounding the event horizon are experiencing a lot of force. When particles are under this much force, quantum mechanics has some weird effects called quantum jitters. What this means is this; when particles are moving around they do so based on quantum probabilities, which is basically just a map of where a particle could be. These probabilities always jump around, so the motion of individual particles can seem quite random, or jittery. When the particles are under a lot of force, the jitters increase, so the particle has basically no pattern, and even jumps in and out of existence. When this happens, an antimatter particle is simultaneously created out of the energy surrounding the particle, to counteract the existence of the normal matter particle. This is the basic cause of quantum jitters around a black holes event horizon.

This might seem a little weird, but the cause of this effect is even more mystical. When matter and antimatter particles interact, things don't go well. What happens is they annihilate each other, since they are exact copies of each other, but exactly opposite. A mirror image if you will. And since they are both created to cancel each other out, this is exactly what happens. They both cease to exist as particles and release a proportional amount of energy to the matter they both contained. This is really a not a lot of energy when you look at just an individual particle, so black holes can be pretty dim. As you can see, black holes are not really black at all.

So Hawking, who now everyone knows as one of the smartest people alive, showed that "black hole" is really quite a poorly chosen name.