Fire a black-hole laser to put Hawking to the test

摘要

In a laboratory in Edinburgh, UK, a revolutionary laser is taking shape -the first to be built from an artificial black hole. It is all part of an effort to confirm Stephen Hawking's startling prediction that black holes emit light. So-called Hawking radiation, dreamed up in the 1970s, is a consequence of quantum theory, which says that a vacuum is not empty but fizzes with fleeting pairs of particles and their antimatter counterparts.