The realization that holes could be small prompted Hawking to consider what quantum effects might come into play, and in 1974 he came to his famous conclusion that black holes do not just swallow particles but also spit them out [see "The Quantum Mechanics of Black Holes," by S. W. Hawking; Scientific American, January 1977]. Hawking predicted that a hole radiates thermally like a hot coal, with a temperature inversely proportional to its mass. For a solar-mass hole, the temperature is around a millionth of a kelvin, which is completely negligible in today's universe. But for a black hole of 1012 kilograms, which is about the mass of a mountain, it is 1012 kelvins--hot enough to emit both massless particles, such as photons, and massive ones, such as electrons and positrons.
Because the emission carries off energy, the mass of the hole tends to decrease. So a black hole is highly unstable. As it shrinks, it gets steadily hotter, emitting increasingly energetic particles and shrinking faster and faster. When the hole shrivels to a mass of about 106 kilograms, the game is up: within a second, it explodes with the energy of a million-megaton nuclear bomb. The total time for a black hole to evaporate away is proportional to the cube of its initial mass. For a solar-mass hole, the lifetime is an unobservably long 1064 years. For a 1012-kilogram one, it is 1010 years--about the present age of the universe. Hence, any primordial black holes of this mass would be completing their evaporation and exploding right now. Any smaller ones would have evaporated at an earlier cosmological epoch.
Hawking's work was a tremendous conceptual advance because it linked three previously disparate areas of physics: general relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. It was also a step toward a full quantum theory of gravity. Even if primordial black holes never actually formed, thinking about them has led to remarkable physical insights. So it can be useful to study something even if it does not exist.
In particular, the discovery opened up a profound paradox that aims at the heart of why general relativity and quantum mechanics are so hard to reconcile. According to relativity theory, information about what falls into a black hole is forever lost. If the hole evaporates, however, what happens to the information contained within?
Hawking suggested that black holes completely evaporate, destroying the information--in contradiction with the tenets of quantum mechanics. Destruction of information conflicts with the law of energy conservation, making this scenario implausible.
One alternative, that black holes leave behind remnants, is equally unpalatable. For these remnants to encode all the information that could have gone into the black hole, they would have to come in an infinite variety of types. The laws of physics predict that the rate of production of a particle is proportional to the number of types of that particle. Therefore, the black hole remnants would be produced at an infinite rate; even such everyday physical processes as turning on a microwave oven would generate them. Nature would be catastrophically unstable. A third possibility is that locality--the notion that events at spatially separated points can influence one another only after light has had time to travel between them--fails. This conundrum challenges theorists to this day [see "Black Hole Computers," by Seth Lloyd and Y. Jack Ng; Scientific American, November 2004].
Bookmarks