Observation of thermal Hawking radiation and its entanglement in an analogue black hole
Jeff Steinhauer
Department of Physics, Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, Technion City, Haifa 32000, Israel
Any comments by physicists here? His “black hole analogue” is a Bose-Einstein condensate, and of course he cites other experimental setups around the world.
Any confirmation of Hawking to come from an academic in Israel would be just too delicious.
Why is the academic’s country relevant?
I don’t get it. Why would it be “delicious” for an Israeli academic to confirm Hawking’s work?
I do wonder if his popular fame works against an objective appraisal of his contributions as a scientist, to his detriment.
I assume it is because Hawking was/is a supporter of an academic boycott of Israel.
Stephen Hawking joins academic boycott of Israel
Experiments on analogues to black holes might be interesting at some level, but they don’t do anything at all to confirm or refute Hawking’s theoretical work on actual black holes. Work like Hawking’s starts with the premise that black holes obey certain laws, and then concludes as a mathematical consequence of those laws that they’ll produce certain effects. An analogue to a black hole is something that obeys laws that are very similar mathematically to those which are assumed to govern black holes, and so it is no surprise that mathematical analysis of those similar laws would predict similar effects, nor is it a surprise when experiments confirm those predictions. But this does not mean that black holes themselves will necessarily produce those effects, because the real question is whether they actually follow the laws we think they do in the first place.
Is his work experimentally or empirically provable at all for X generations to come of astronomical technology we don’t yet have?
Or, worse, is it empirically non-provable, as some other cosmo theories are?
Well, for starters, it is certainly testable in principle. It’s not like the various interpretations of quantum mechanics, all of which make the same predictions, or even like the String Model, which has a combinatorically-large number of variants which would all need to be ruled out.
How easy it is to test, and thus what level of technology would be needed to test it, is as yet unknown. If we ever found a sufficiently low-mass black hole, it would be easy to test, even with current technology. But we don’t know how many such low-mass black holes exist, if indeed there are any. If we only have available black holes of stellar mass or greater, such as all of the ones which we currently know of, then it would be very difficult indeed.
Chronos, parts of this paper were able to penetrate whisper-thin depths into my brain:
Analogue models of and for gravity
Matt Visser, Carlos Barcelo and Stefano Liberati
26 November 2001; LATEX-ed December 4, 2001
Leaving aside the fact that all cats look black at night, is this a good overview of the bounds of interpretation and experiment?
https://cds.cern.ch/record/528946/files/0111111.pdf
There’s a tiny Wiki jump-off here: Analog models of gravity