This question relates to Hawking radiation. I understand about virtual particles - pairs of positive and negative particles that form - but I can't find out why they form at the event horizon and in general.
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1Hawking radiation is not really due to pairs of virtual particles. See for example Black holes and positive/negative-energy particles and Why doesn't Hawking radiation cancel itself out?. In fact virtual particles don't exist in the sense most people think. See Matt Strassler's article. – John Rennie May 18 '15 at 10:06
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Also related: Are vacuum fluctuations really happening all the time? – John Rennie May 18 '15 at 11:23
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I have some difficulty with the given explanation of Hawking radiation myself. There are no particles being created spontaneously, like worms from mud. And there are no negative-energy particles. Instead there's gravitational time dilation, and at the event horizon, it is infinite. – John Duffield May 18 '15 at 12:32
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That Hawking radiation has to exist, in one form or another, follows from the laws of thermodynamics. I would put all calculations, so far, into the category of semi-classical approximations. We lack a microscopic theory of gravity at this point, so they can't be anything else. The good news is, that at the scale on which Hawking radiation is being generated gravity might very well be a semi-classical phenomenon, in which case the approximations could be fairly correct. What scale would that be, you ask? Any scale of acceleration, the phenomenon was just gaining fame above event horizons. – CuriousOne May 18 '15 at 14:24