If you can electromagnetically trap enough antimatter to use it as fuel you could as well trap a miniature charged black hole that can be fed regular matter to produce power, which skips the whole inefficient part of making antimatter.
It's a pretty fundamental prediction though, and it's been derived in many different ways, all of which give the same prediction.
It's closely related to the Unruh effect, which is a direct consequence of pure QFT. The Unruh effect describes how an accelerated observer sees a different vacuum from an inertial observer - they see radiation that the inertial observer doesn't.
Hawking radiation is essentially this same effect, except that "acceleration" is replaced by "gravity" (Einstein's equivalence principle.) There's a bit more to it, but that's the basic intuition.
For Hawking radiation to be wrong would require some fundamental changes to GR, QFT, or both.
A lot of great science progress followed after some "fundamental prediction" turned out to be wrong :). Wouldnt it be awesome to learn that blackholes, in fact, do not evaporate at all? That would be exciting
> A lot of great science progress followed after some "fundamental prediction" turned out to be wrong
For example? What I mean by “fundamental” is that we have very strong reasons to believe in the correctness of a prediction, because e.g. it follows mathematically from more than one model (in this case), and doesn’t involve dependence on uncertain physics.
> Wouldnt it be awesome to learn that blackholes, in fact, do not evaporate at all? That would be exciting
These kinds of attitudes don’t seem to me to involve an interest in science. You don’t appear to actually have much understanding or knowledge of what we’re discussing. You’re just looking for a fix.
That's the point, evaporation turns matter into energy. You can tune power by chosing mass of the black hole and then feed it regular matter at a steady rate.
It's much easier to make a fission reactor than a fission bomb, and much easier to make a fusion bomb than a fusion reaction. They are not even that similar.
It's way easier to make a fission bomb than a fission reactor. I reactor has to stay in the very narrow window where it's critical but not prompt critical. Even pure fission bombs can be marvels of engineering but the simplest gun-type bomb is easier to build than the simplest nuclear reactor.
Without a precisely timed neutron initiator you'll get a fizzle. Either way, gun-type bombs require highly enriched uranium. A simple reactor can be literally just brickwork of natural uranium and graphite.
Reactors are much much simpler to pull off, which is why US had the first reactor whole 2.5 years before a nuclear bomb.
Something that explodes with the force of 100 tons of TNT is still a bomb, even if it isn't a bomb as impressive as the one you were hoping for. And getting the reactor you're thinking of to the point that it worked without exploding took a lot more effort than you're suggesting.
You can even dissolve the uranium in the water and use the same substance for both fuel and propellant and so capable of reaching far higher temperatures than those that would cause any engine to melt.
There have been several proposals. This paper proposes a feasable mechanism[1]:
-"a SBH could be artificially created by firing a huge number of gamma rays from a spherically converging laser. The idea is to pack so much energy into such a small space that a BH will form."
The biggest problem is that if you're creating it with lasers, you're only going to get the energy out that you put in. You really want to be able to feed it matter, which would effectively make it an anything-to-gamma-radiation converter, which means you have to feed it quite a lot of matter, against the radiation pressure of all that energy coming out. The paper mentioned assumes a worst case of not being able to feed the black hole at all, but doesn't (in my skim) address the fact that this means you have to put in all the energy you'll be using for the lifetime of the black hole at the creation of it, which seems significantly more outrageously infeasible than the bare necessity of creating a black hole at all.
I admit to invoking the phrase “Where we’re going, we won’t need eyes to see” at least once a year when something feels like it’s going horribly wrong.
