Possible Hawking Radiation Solution?
Hello Technothriller Fans,
We continue our discussion of Hawking Radiation and its importance in possible wormhole travel. As we noted last time, matter will loop, and blue shift, around the event horizon of a black hole, and create a virtual particle that will annihilate any opposite charged matter that tries to approach it. Thus making it quite difficult to pass anything through the black hole (or input end of a wormhole).
But let’s back up a bit and look at some classical theory on black holes and the phonenmon of Hawking Radiation. In, The Ninth Cube, Dr. Daniel Lamb’s phD thesis at Cambridge was a mathematical solution to Hawking Radiation and led to the creation of artificial black holes in his laboratory. We will cover the technology of the CLA (Casimer Laser Accelerator ) in a later posting, and how this miniature device can be used to create black holes. (so stay tuned)
But how about some text-a-pedia background on BH’s and Hawking Radiation:
Black holes are sites of immense gravitational attraction into which surrounding matter is drawn by gravitational forces. Classically, the gravitation is so powerful that nothing, not even radiation can escape from the black hole. It is yet unknown how gravity can be incorporated into quantum mechanics, but nevertheless far from the black hole the gravitational effects can be weak enough that calculations can be reliably performed in the framework of quantum field theory in curved spacetime. Hawking showed that quantum effects allow black holes to emit exact black body radiation, which is the average thermal radiation emitted by an idealized thermal source known as a black body. The radiation is as if it is emitted by a black body with a temperature that is inversely proportional to the black hole’s mass.
Physical insight on the process may be gained by imagining that particle-antiparticle radiation is emitted from just beyond the event horizon. This radiation does not come directly from the black hole itself, but rather is a result of virtual particles being “boosted” by the black hole’s gravitation into becoming real particles.
A more precise, but still much simplified view of the process is that vacuum fluctuations cause a particle-antiparticle pair to appear close to the event horizon of a black hole. One of the pair falls into the black hole whilst the other escapes. In order to preserve total energy, the particle that fell into the black hole must have had a negative energy (with respect to an observer far away from the black hole). By this process the black hole loses mass, and to an outside observer it would appear that the black hole has just emitted a particle.
In, The Ninth Cube, Daniel and his team take advantage of vacuum flucuations to elicit a boost in negative energy needed to sustain the black hole horizon. Later they realize it can also be used to “steer” the direction of the resulting wormhole, and use it to navigate where the white hole end of the wormhole is located. It’s like controlling the worm as it digs its hole.
I don’t want to give too much away, at this point, but it’s some really cool technology they use in the book.
