> Coming up with how it actually happens (particle-antiparticle pair) is another story, so it seems a bit unfair to Hawking to say that Feynman got it first. I

> Coming up with how it actually happens (particle-antiparticle pair) is another story, so it seems a bit unfair to Hawking to say that Feynman got it first. It is analogous to evolution of how stimulated and spontaneous emission were explained microscopically in the first place: For the case of general photon behavior, Einstein showed that the statistics of photons phenomenologically demanded that there be a stimulated process; and then (several decades later) QED provided a microscopic description of how stimulated and spontaneous processes work. For the case of black holes, it seemed that Feynman noticed that a stimulated-like process was occurring, which (again, probably because of statistics) phenomenologically demands that there be an associated spontaneous process; and then (merely one year later) Hawking provided a microscopic description of how the spontaneous process works. To be honest, I've never heard anyone talk about stimulated emission from black holes in the context of Hawking radiation, but perhaps it is well-known to those in the field.