Sometimes, however, those wiggles don't really go anywhere. When the electromagnetic field wiggles, we get a photon. That’s what we call a "particle." When the electron field wiggles, we get an electron. Sometimes the fields start wiggling, and those wiggles travel from one place to another. You can think of particles as simply excitations - or "vibrations" or "pinched-off bits," depending on your mood - of the underlying field. In fact, they're more important than particles themselves. These fields aren't just simple bookkeeping devices. In quantum field theory - our modern conception of the way particles and forces work - every kind of particle is associated with a field that permeates all of space-time. The way of the fieldįirst things first: "Virtual particles" are neither virtual nor particles. It's not necessarily wrong, just…incomplete. For one, it has absolutely nothing to do with Hawking's original 1974 paper, and for another, it's just a bunch of jargon words that fill up a couple of paragraphs but don't really go a long way to explaining this behavior. Here's the thing: I don't find that answer especially satisfying, either. Subtly, slowly, over the eons, black holes dissolve. ![]() Voila: The black hole appears to glow, and in doing so - in doing the work to separate a virtual particle pair and promote one of them into normal status - the black hole gives up some of its own mass. Unable to collide and evaporate, the escapee goes on its merry way as a normal non-virtual particle. ![]() It’s a little unsatisfying to respond to "How?" with "A bunch of math," so here’s the standard explanation: the vacuum of space is filled with virtual particles, little effervescent pairs of particles that pop into and out of existence, stealing some energy from the vacuum to exist for the briefest of moments, only to collide with each other and return to nothingness.Įvery once in a while, a pair of these particles pops into existence near an event horizon, with one partner falling in and the other free to escape. Quantum mechanics is just as complicated. Well, general relativity is a super-complicated mathematical theory. Wow! Fantastic news! The monster can be slain! But how? How does this so-called Hawking Radiation work?
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