Re: paragraph-2, I don’t believe that unconfined TeV energy cosmic rays hitting comparatively stationary atmospheric targets can in any way be likened to confined TeV energy collisions occuring at a rate of 40 million collisions per second in LHC. I view this as an apples and oranges comparison. Why did it come as a surprise that Quark Gluon Plasmas are more liquid_like than plasma_like ? The answer is that professional understanding of these high energy regimes is not as complete as some would like to believe.

Re: paragraph-3, I defer to your recounting of the history behind the concept of the Dirac Sea but I cited that only to point out that spacetime is full of latent energy ( zero point, vacuum energy, compactified dimensions, whatever) and that therefore Hawking’s simplistic assumption from 1975 that the energy of Hawking Radiation MUST be coming from the black hole is hasty and unwarranted as our curent understanding of the possible nature of the spacetime manifold leaves plenty of room to imagine that this HR energy could be originating from elsewhere than the black hole itself. So, just to be clear, i have no trouble with the assertion that HR occurs but simply do not believe that BH Evaporation follows as a consequence of HR.

The thrust of my post was that I never see anyone questioning Hawking’s assumption regarding any alternative locus of origin of this HR energy.
Thanks again.

As John already mentioned, very high energy cosmic rays hit our atmosphere and all astronomical objects constantly. These cosmic rays have much more energy than we are capable of producing at the LHC. If it were possible for TeV scale energies to produce a micro black hole capable of devouring the earth, it would have happened already.

I’m not sure what the Dirac sea has to do with anything at all. The Dirac sea is kind of a superfluous concept. Dirac came up with it to explain why electrons, as described by his equation, don’t radiate infinitely as they drop into negative energy states. However, a modern view of the vacuum does not require the Dirac sea to keep electrons from dropping into negative energy states. In addition, the Dirac sea is not a useful concept to explain boson pair production. It’s also not terribly clear why you would need to invoke the Dirac sea to understand virtual particles. Virtual particles, unlike the Dirac sea, are actually real in a definable way. Although virtual particles were thought of originally as just a necessary mathematical tool, it became clear through the Casimir effect and the Lamb shift that the pair produced virtual particles that pop out of the vacuum actually have measurable, physical effects.

Or you could call it “fuel efficiency”! As in “How many per-acres does your car get?” Think about it.

Are you referring to Hawking Radiation(HR) pairs ? If so, then you are saying that 10 TeV is enough to support HR which implies that a BH must exist if HR represents energy loss (evaporation) from a BH right ? I ask this only because “extra dimensions” are cited as a necessary pre-condition for BH creation in LHC.

I expect you are likely referring simply to created pairs which would not have a blackbody spectrum (no previous interaction history) right ? Can you confirm there is no (at all likely) BH creation at 10 TeV even if given the presence of extra dimensions ?

In passing, like other_John (probably), I have been a little disturbed by the “Don’t worry your pretty little heads ….” attitude that professional Science has taken over this question of BH creation at the LHC. Reminds me of Lord Kelvin’s (was it ?) pontifications about everything “…nothing left to be discovered (paraphrasing) …” in the years just prior to the discovery of QM.

Anyway other_John, what are the chances Hawking ( whose reasoning about these Quantum Gravity issues) comes to us from 1975, is wrong ? After all, Hawking’s reasoning seems unassailable depending as it does( in my understanding of the issue) on the sacred cow of Conservation of Energy(CE)and no one is going to get anywhere in Physics questioning that right ?

So don’t worry your pretty head about it. Hawking Radiation simply MUST be coming from inside the BH since there is nowhere else it could be coming from you see. Hawking’s (apparent) newtonian view of SpaceTime as an empty container interprets HR energy as the appearance of energy ex nihilo which violates CE so that can’t be right. Matter Creation of this sort went out with Hoyle,Bondi,Gold Steady State Theory of the mid ’60s when the Hot Big Bang model rose to prominence.

So at first, he argued ( if i’m not mistaken) that this violation had to be “compensated” for by the BH preferentially swallowing the antimatter partners of HR and these anti particles would “cancel” some of the matter within the BH thus “reducing the BH mass” ( but not its energy meThinks). Clearly, that flaky reasoning had to be abandoned. No Thought Experiment can begin by blatantly violating CE. It wouldn’t be a “Principle” if exceptions could happen and after the fact compensation is not a remedy to this fatal error of reasoning.

So, now, in abject violation of the very definition of BH’s that “nothing escapes”, we see the argument that HR itself represents energy tunneling out of the BH SINCE THERE IS NOWHERE ELSE this energy could be coming from -assumes Hawking. Black Hole Evaporation depends on this assumption being correct however, I believe the emperor is worse than naked in this regard.

What about if one of the compactified dimensions we know and love is the source of this energy ? Namely, what about the Dirac Sea ? You know, that null energy well consisting of particle-antiparticle pairs that we invoke to explain those failed tunneling events called Virtual Particles ?

What if the energy of HR is simply the now succesful tunneling of energy from the Dirac Sea induced by the extreme curvature of the SpaceTime manifold near the event horizon of a BH ? In that instance, HR does not violate CE and the energy is coming from somewhere other that the BH. Thus Evaporation does NOT occur and the BH can only grow which, it seems to me, preserves consistency with that pesky Hawking-Penrose Theorem about BHs never shrinking.

Nor should you even worry, other_John, about those sticky open issues called The Information Loss problem and the Baryon Asymmetry (missing antimatter) problem or the Evaporation Remnant question after all, what possible bearing could these open questions have on any of this compared to all the professional reassurances you are getting on this question. You should remain especially unworried about the fact that since HR became a tunneling_from_BH phenomenon, the question of Evaporation has become synonymous with HR rather than being a conjecture separate from HR.

You certainly shouldn’t listen to me about all this. I might have no credentials at all you see and am perhaps incapable of seeing these things with Forrest Gump_like clarity.

Given that the Dirac Sea is everywhere present and that it is (likely) not unreasonable to think of it as a compactified “dimension” beyond the scope of direct measurement thus fitting with the notion of “extra” dimensions, I ask: why can’t the origin of HR energy be the Dirac Sea ? Anyone … ?
Can anyone provide a link to where this idea has been refuted ?
Thanks in advance-